Spotify, every mention
39 scenes (said by Daniel Ek), the whole family · ← back to Spotify
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 95David Rosenthal 63Daniel Ek 39Jason Calacanis 5Mitch Lasky 3John Bathgate 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Spotify comes up
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:40 Daniel Ek Yeah, I mean, it, it's pretty remarkable, and on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours, and it tripled in the last year.
- ▶ 14:06 Daniel Ek Um, added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year too, so it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone, now on The Quiet Show, which again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.
- ▶ 16:04 Daniel Ek And by way of context, just to put, put it, put this in perspective, in 2019, um, you know, when we got into podcasts, uh, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people, uh, listening to this.
- ▶ 16:23 Daniel Ek And today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify.
- ▶ 18:10 Daniel Ek So, one of the things you obviously have done is, um, you know, added video to the format, and, uh, this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well, but, um, what do you think is next for the show, uh,…
- ▶ 21:23 Daniel Ek So you talked about video and, and, you know, on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing.
- ▶ 24:20 Daniel Ek I said, in the beginning, it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.
- ▶ 25:08 Daniel Ek Uh, so this sort of secret of Spotify was, uh, we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it.
- ▶ 25:31 Daniel Ek For quite a few years before we launched, where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't, um, and, um, anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this, um, status update, like Spotify is so…
- ▶ 26:13 Daniel Ek And we kind of got to work together, built that product, uh, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.
- ▶ 26:32 Daniel Ek It, it actually still exists in Spotify product, um, on desktop, so you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time.
- ▶ 27:28 Daniel Ek And for instance, we have, um, we have a product now called jam, which allows you to, uh, be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time.
- ▶ 28:08 Daniel Ek So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and
- ▶ 28:20 Daniel Ek But what we saw during the pandemic, and that's like where Jam sort of started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, um, you know, consistent music listening where we're…
- ▶ 33:14 Daniel Ek So the internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap.
- ▶ 33:47 Daniel Ek And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point.
- ▶ 38:05 Daniel Ek Um, surely thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying, and it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 4:01 Daniel Ek I like to say that there was probably this genius insight at some point in moment, but that's certainly not in the case of Spotify true.
- ▶ 4:31 Daniel Ek And there, there's some part that's true with that, but then, uh, more and more what I've, I've realized, uh, is also that actually internally, we probably have the best sounding board of a quite representative Spotify user and what they…
- ▶ 5:27 Daniel Ek And then I and others at Spotify, we were big podcast listeners ourselves.
- ▶ 34:23 Daniel Ek That one hook that gets me in, how many people, you know, in marketing you usually had, and in early Spotify we had eight people needed to have heard about Spotify before we were able to sign someone up.
- ▶ 36:00 Daniel Ek I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we
- ▶ 41:02 Daniel Ek But if you, if you were inside of Spotify at that moment, um, there was no one who thought that that was sort of the defining moment.
- ▶ 41:23 Daniel Ek Um, and, and then, you know, I spoke to a lot of artists, but, um, I think, uh, there were certainly a lot of skepticism about Spotify at the time, but, but generally speaking, there had been enough things in Europe where people really saw,
- ▶ 41:54 Daniel Ek The sort of, uh, way it's been portrayed oftentimes with Spotify in particular has been like this sort of dogmatic, it has to be, uh, all in with me or not.
- ▶ 45:00 Daniel Ek I mean, Spotify at that time was like shy of three years in the US.
- ▶ 54:34 Daniel Ek Um, he's on, on our board and, um, this was a number of months ago, but like, if you think about filmmaking, it's still, as you said, uh, one of the things about a Nintendo is you have to have the resources enabled to build a game and…
- ▶ 56:48 Daniel Ek But there's also more competition, which is, I think when, when people are, are talking about Spotify and criticizing it, that's the part I think is the biggest misconception.
- ▶ 1:03:28 Daniel Ek And so, probably a little bit embarrassing to admit, but the barrier to entry or re-entry, uh, for me was so high with all, uh, you know, node, all of these different frameworks, uh, even setting up my own workflow for me to be able to do…
- ▶ 1:27:01 Daniel Ek Um, but actually it's been many different things that's driven the success of Spotify.
- ▶ 1:28:23 Daniel Ek Um, so that's where, where, where the early innings of Spotify's culture was like, I'm sure almost every Silicon Valley company of that era.
- ▶ 1:29:10 Daniel Ek Diligent about the culture you create, and we certainly were victims of that at Spotify, because we had taken all these different things.
- ▶ 1:29:18 Daniel Ek There were certainly things that were Spotify.
- ▶ 1:30:07 Daniel Ek And the mental model may be, hey, your music app is so amazing.
- ▶ 1:30:54 Daniel Ek But then the flip side of that, uh, would be something like AIDJ, where, um, actually, I think it is really high quality, and unlike a lot of other products, um, that are AI, where it's really kind of wonky, we've made something that's…
- ▶ 1:32:44 Daniel Ek And I would say that probably other thing that's been hugely important and that I wish more people talked about it is there are not many of us, but there's a few of our few companies like Spotify, which in a way has been heavily influenced…
- ▶ 1:33:04 Daniel Ek So that sort of notion of being on the side and watching, um, and sort of iterating in a corner, Spotify's definitely sort of not the overnight success.
- ▶ 1:34:39 Daniel Ek But, um, I, I think it's been hugely important for Spotify's journey.
- ▶ 1:34:51 Daniel Ek In a very unique way that it's probably the most exciting thing for me at the moment, still being here at Spotify, 17 years.