The Ledger, every show

“I've seen Spotify have negative growth, actually losing users and contracting at least twice.”

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

“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.”

“And I think if you fast forward five to 10 years, almost all big consumer products are going to be a conversation to some extent, rather than this service that you use.”

“But then the really interesting side is these other seven hours, what a developer does, which is a lot of communication, planning, working with designers, prototyping meetings. Those things I think will actually have as big or even more impact than the coding …”

“This year, Is sort of the first year of profitability for Spotify since its founding. People say that, you know, there's a lot of talk about Spotify sharing enough of the revenue. You know, we share about 70%, but the truth is the other 30% we haven't kept. We…”

“We've learned from the labels that we have twice the engagement and half the churn of competing services. So that's sort of a curse where the per stream model, just the better we are as a product, the lower the per stream is going to look.”

“And if you just look at the numbers, you just have to keep going and it's going to get to billions of users paying and then several billions. Then the music industry is absolutely massive. I just think the music industry It's like undervalued. Terminally is go…”

“But the truth is that much of music being made per day made today is a combination. I think many of the big artists are using AI for parts of their songs or parts of the track or the drums, et cetera.”

“I do think the human need for having someone to believe in an actual artist that you care about, I don't think Taylor Swift will be Replace by an AI, not because the music couldn't sound similar, but because the whole point is Taylor Swift and belonging to som…”

“I also think you're going to see the same thing as we see in music. The superstars will actually also get bigger.”

“My hunch would be though that In the longer term, you're going to be able to do most of what you want with reasonable size models and like having a much bigger model doesn't have that much. So I would still bet that having lots of user data and lots of high fi…”

“I actually think that in general, you know, we've seen the first wave of AI now where the technology is very impressive. It's starting to do useful things. But we still, usually the big changes come when that technology enables a new business model somehow. An…”

“But I also agree with Scott that I think it's going to go much faster than moving to cloud. It wasn't really possible. I know we actually were on-prem companies that old. It wasn't possible to just also be on the cloud and try a little bit. It was incredibly h…”

“What would actually happen after piracy is that the music industry got bigger than ever, not, not just as big, but bigger than ever. And I think that could happen with this technology as well, but we're right in the beginning.”

“We had to wait all until, all up until we had stopped growing and actually started losing users before they agreed to give us the licenses we wanted.”

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

“Spotify could never do that because we could go bankrupt overnight. So we always had to worry about monetization and the balance between free tier and pay tier conversion and free term monetization.”

“It's very likely that some consumers are going to want tons and tons of inference. And because that's a marginal cost, you're probably going to have to pay somehow for that as a consumer. So I think you're going to see more tiering of consumer products based o…”

“I think from a financial point of view when the cost of something drops, the demand usually increases more than the cost, than the drop. And I think that's, Bound to happen with intelligence.”

“So we went with this shuffle tier and this is what made growth explode. And to this day, that's our differentiation against the other services.”

“We didn't know before we started. If podcasting and later audio books would be cannibalistic to the other media types or not, but it turns out it's not.”

“We price raised a few times, Which is part of why we're profitable now. But that's because we had such user surplus in value.”

“We're going to have enormous amounts of content around niches where it didn't make sense to produce a podcast. So one way to think about it is just like the cost went to zero. So I do think that the catalog is going to explode.”

“Well, for the people that use it, it's actually their biggest set. It's bigger than their Discover Weekly usage.”

“These deep learning based systems, they had flattened out in terms of if you added more user data or more parameters, they did not get better like the LLMs. There were no scaling laws. It's just like, it is what it is, and you could move at .2%. There's someth…”

“So that's why, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with them for us because we don't even have the same goal. So we're trying to build exactly the things that we don't think they will build. And we would buy the things that they will build or someo…”

“I think for Spotify, for example, when we started, it was the business model of streaming. That was the disruptive thing. The technology was you know, a bit of peer to peer and stuff, but it was a business model that took Apple eight years of collateral damage…”

“And I think what we're entering now is we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation. And I suspect it will be as big of a shift that you will eventually have to rethink your products.”

“Because people now have shorter attention spans. You can see the chorus moving closer and closer to the beginning of the song, right? Everyone is trying to optimize for the first few seconds”

“I think it is at least as large as social networking, you know, two, three billion plus. The way I think about it is I think music and actually podcasting is a Sort of a core human behavior like communication. And that means that the sort of time in, in, you k…”

“So we actually made a bet on the shift from curation to recommendation or social media to recommendation media. Four or five years ago and rebuilt the application quite drastically. And today we, I would say we are a recommendations based company much more tha…”

“I have a feeling that just like AI and other things, it will take quite a long while, but it's going to be, there is a chance that it becomes a fundamental part of the infrastructure just further down that it actually powers a lot of things and is very valuabl…”

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

“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…”

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

“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 I think you're going to see many more people using Cursor than just developers.”

“So I both subscribe to the product overhang idea that there's a huge product overhang. And if we froze, I think we would see Product ship that look amazing for several years before we exhausted what we have.”

“You know, this year we paid out over ten billion, and that's, you know, up from one billion, I think, in You know almost 10 years ago, it's like just steadily increased.”

“The music industry is bigger than it ever was. People still talk about the heyday of the CD era. The truth is the music business is bigger than it was back then. So this is the best it's ever been. It is better than ever, more money than ever.”

“And we built this. It was called moments. The UI we used edit editors on the backend, which is did not work at all. So the idea was like far, far ahead of where the technology was and it costed a lot of money. We actually announced it. There's a video of like …”

“So I think there's actually a scale between zero AI and a hundred percent AI. And I think we're on this progression where it's actually going to be very difficult to say what is an AI song.”

“For certain things, maybe you could create better white noise, maybe you could create better you know, always varying ambient music for your studying, maybe for gaming, maybe that music should automatically adjust what's happening on the screen. So I think we'…”

“And I think what is going to happen with these LLMs is at least for some brands, you will start having literal relationships with them.”

“So what we've done since then is we've invested quite a lot in this is quite recent that is rolling out in LLMs that actually tell interesting stories about the music. And we see very strong effects on this, on the retention of the application.”