Spotify

“LeBron famously, like he doesn't turn on roaming when they go play the Raptors in Canada. He's like, no, I'm good. Like I'll, if I got wifi, I got it. If not, and I, and he's got like Spotify with ads still.”

“And I think that's going to happen in music. I think the music companies, Are going to be more involved, and AI is the opening to do it. AI is the road to, that doesn't mean Spotify is not, but Spotify is going to have the morph as well.”

“Like, most people never even listen to the content. They're just looking for an excuse because your podcast gave them so much value. That will always work. It worked today. It worked a hundred years ago, and it will work a hundred years from now.”

“Like, the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy. Like, you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people just wind up just paying five dollars, two dollars for a song, or 10 dollars a month f…”

“I just spent time and recorded an episode with Gustaf, who's the co-CEO of Spotify right now. And he did something very similar because he tries to avoid any kind of feeds. The whole thesis behind, like, the organizing principle of Spotify is, like, time well …”

“Spotify last year sent something like 12 billion dollars Out to music creators. That's more than the entire music industry's market cap was. 22 years ago, which is extraordinary.”

“The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage, because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist.”

“So already about three years ago, He asked me and Alex Nordstrom to step up and become co-presidents and sort of start to run the day to day of Spotify for him. He was still the CEO. And so he's been gradually like giving us more and more rope to run the busin…”

“We actually changed completely how we run the company from the way Daniel runs it.”

“We chose to say, we're not going to have our own leadership meetings. We have a single one with all of our SVPs. So we have a single meeting every Tuesday called the E-Team for three hours. With all the SVPs of all the internal functions, like, you know, marke…”

“Because we have a single experience strategy, our strategy is literally a super app. We try to build first music, then podcasts, and books, and more things into a single product. I think our biggest risk is to ship the org chart. So if we divide it and say, ev…”

“The only answer I've come to as I've spoken to people there is that it actually has to do with tenure of leadership, which is one of the principles I've also tried to internalize Spotify. So they have very long tenure at the senior leadership, which means that…”

“And so one thing we chose to optimize for was the single experience. We're really good at building a single experience that actually does a billion different things, and most people don't even realize that On the back end, it's even more complicated because yo…”

“And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent.”

“So we chose to take the pain of doing a single app with all the complexity that comes with that for the benefit of reaching what was then already 300 something million users, maybe. But it was much harder. We chose like pain and cost somewhere to get benefits …”

“We were actually the lowest regret content sort of on the internet in terms of the platforms we asked for, or if you flip it around some of the time most well spent on the internet with, you know, Gen Z saying that they value almost almost 90% of the time they…”

“Without naming which ones on many of the big platforms, people, people regretted almost 60% of the time they spent or more.”

“And so when we look at something, you know, we're talking about fitness now, for example. Why? Because we think very few people regret doing a workout.”

“Almost 70% of people on Spotify work out with Spotify.”

“So we made the decision. Sort of the anti-engagement decision to allow people, anyone, to turn off video if they want to, and just listen.”

“Most of our revenue is from subscribers paying for their experience, you know, like almost 90% of the revenue.”

“When I came to Spotify, We already had one of these large data sets of music playlists, and so there were some very talented people there, specifically a guy named Erik Bernadsson, who at the time, this is 2009, was doing machine learning something called coll…”

“We bought this company called Sonantic to be able to produce voice. I mean, you can buy voice anywhere on the internet today, but it's quite expensive per minute. So if you want to serve seven hundred million users with like a few minutes of voice per day, You…”

“I believe that technology is a necessary ingredient for change. But not sufficient. I think you can cause havoc with technology, like piracy, but when things really change is when you take a new technology and marry it with a new, often contrarian business mod…”

“This is the Spotify story of access versus, versus ownership, for example, which is, by the way, why I would also love Steve Jobs to be around, but also not because, you know, he tried to kill us many times.”

“That's what they literally said in their internal meetings. They gave us six months.”

“When we created our strategy, we bet on three things, and they were all basically counter positions to Apple deliberately. One was freemium. We believe that Apple would, if they even did a product, a free product, they would struggle to do advertising. They tr…”

“So this is something I'm working on at Spotify, and we released this just a few weeks ago, something called Save to Spotify. When you sit in your code code or codex or something, you can just, you know, you can ask these agents to go out and look at informatio…”

“Premeditated media. Is something that, that I think everyone should at least have access to if they want to. It works for me and I think it will work for a lot of people. And I think it's, I think that need is not going to get less. I think it's going to get, …”

“So one benefit of tenure is the trust. People keep you honest, unless you know, you become too full of yourself, which is always a risk with success. But the other benefit is this efficiency. Of like, people know. You don't have to give as much context.”

“So if you're optimized for tenure, you have to mitigate for the risk that you don't get fresh blood, that your career ladder is slow. So maybe people who are talented feel like, well, that's going to take 10 years to get up the career ladder. So then you have …”

“When AI started happening, or what was called machine learning back then, I felt that we just weren't strong enough in deep learning specifically. We knew the old school matrix factorization stuff. So we did an acquisition of a company called the Econest in Bo…”

“When things are stable, market share stays stable. You don't eat market share. So when there's change, there's risk. You can lose market share, but that is also when you have the most opportunity to eat market share. If you adopt the change.”

“The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience, and not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented, and many companies did die in it. Most. There's only two companies that…”

“Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify and I are working on this project to try to outline all the different founder archetypes. We might even like commission a book on this because it's so important.”

“And to me, you know, I still listen to Pandora, I also listen to Spotify, but when I want something just to put something on, And let it play. I'll go to Pandora because I think those algorithms still outperform.”

“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”

“Daniel might well get there with one of his companies, you know, Spotify, Helsing. I think those are two good options.”

“One podcast hit the top 30 trending on Spotify. That was entirely AI. Created about the Epstein files, an 80 four-part series, taking those documents and turning it into a show.”

“Spotify's market cap should be resistant to this because it's a tool for creating music and music will be distributed on Spotify.”

“The music on Spotify is no different than Apple music or Amazon music, right? It's, theoretically, it's a pure commodity. What makes Spotify have pricing power? What makes it differentiated? Why would people, you know, be incredibly upset if you said, like, yo…”

“And so then like in the first two weeks, it was like trending across all of GitHub top 10 repo across every language and Spotify and Oracle and Reddit and X and these like large companies were starting to deploy it and start the repo.”

“Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of like actual minutes watched and is, is low.”

“Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, did, should Spotify have, like, released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like, no, because people will pick whatever tool is available, and then they wil…”

“Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically. On a percentage basis, like the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of, like, actual minutes watched is low.”

“Daniel Eck, founder of Spotify, told me this, Kareem, founder of Ramp, told me this, that they hire for spikes.”

“One of the best designers that Spotify ever had, and this is the early days of Spotify, it's, like, he was bipolar and also an alcoholic, but also the world's best designer, and if the CEO and the founder didn't sit next to him while he designed, if Daniel got…”

“And what Daniel's realizing, and it's been very helpful cause he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things. Is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach or excuse me, better coach than player. And Steve's a player. Elon's a player. He says,…”

“We have been trying to compete with Stripe and Adyen for five years, and we were like losing it. Like they were just, you know, crushing us. And we were like, this is it. And Adyen had just signed with Daniel X, Spotify, my neighbor. And I was like, this is ov…”

“Media is now a barbell. You're going to do great if you're a platform, a Spotify, a YouTube Netflix, et cetera. And you're going to do great if you're a personality individual, low, low, you're just like Joe Rogan, you're creating content. But if you're in the…”

“Spotify is arguably the best bundle on the internet, but the reason why they were able to assemble the bundle is because they only needed to negotiate with like four, For entities.”

“Peter Thiel was debating Spotify whether or not it was a buy at five billion in 2014.”

“Of course, Spotify is worth a hundred and fifty billion, and the entire record industry is worth half that together.”

“The problem with all these live formats on the internet is that synchronous content is really, really hard because the beauty of the internet is that everything is actually asynchronous, so you can consume it On your own schedule, right? Like this podcast or a…”

“And I think Spotify in general is a very, very strategic company. They take a long time to make decisions. I don't mean that in a bad way. I think I know every company wants to be fast, but you know, they're thinking about the future five, 10 years in advance.”

“We were, like, heavily dependent on, like, Spotify's API, so, like, Without that, we couldn't have built the product. It's how we got the short form snippets of the songs, et cetera which is also why it would have never been like a long-term business”

“So I've created Lessons Lessons for Kids. It's on Spotify. I've created episodes like The Man in the Arena, Theodore Roosevelt, Conqueror of Worlds, Alexander the Great, The Man Who Questioned Everything, Socrates, and I basically have built, like, a little pr…”

“All the other music startups based in the U.S. Got strangled at birth by lawyers, right, because it was all about IP property rights, and little old Spotify got going in a bunch of European countries that, let's be frank, your average Big Five record label did…”

“I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.”

“The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.”