EP 67: Daniel Ek (CEO, Spotify) on the Creation of Wrapped, How Apple Blocks Innovation & Growing Up in the Projects

Daniel Ek is the CEO and Co-Founder of Spotify and an overall legendary entrepreneur. Daniel grew up in Sweden and after selling a few businesses went on to found Spotify and disrupt the music industry against all odds. On this episode Daniel shares his entrepreneurial journey, stories from the earliest days of founding Spotify, his beef with Apple's app store policies, his views on enabling free speech, and more. (0:00) Intro (0:50) Welcome Daniel Ek (4:05) The Entrepreneurial Journey to Spotify (10:05) Making millions but feeling aimless (19:12) The roots of Spotify (21:17) Constraints as a benefit (25:34) Defining your market narrowly (27:33) Sleeping outside record label offices (35:39) Being Vilified in the music industry (45:16) Taking elements from iconic CEOs to mode (50:59) Natural Biases (55:35) Reevaluating what you need for your mission (1:02:14) Being outspoken against Apple (1:07:10) Responsibility as a platform in free speech and censorship Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I had with Daniel Eck. Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, the world's largest music streaming service. Daniel has a really interesting entrepreneurial journey from growing up in Sweden to selling a few companies and making a couple million dollars to ultimately combining two of his biggest passions in the world, both technology and music. And he tells us the stories of how he got the music labels to actually work with him, as well as how the first few million dollars he made did not bring him happiness. This is an amazing conversation with a legendary entrepreneur. And as a reminder, if you're enjoying these episodes, please do share with your friends so that we can continue to grow and have great guests on in the future. Now, here's Daniel.

• 0:50Logan Bartlett?

  All right, Daniel, thanks for coming on. I think first, the most important question, and I got this from a bunch of my friends, is who came up with Spotify Wrapped? And how did that come to be?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03Logan Bartlett?

  And should that person be the CEO of Spotify? Because that is one of the stickiest products I've found out there. Hopefully, it was you.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, no, it probably wasn't me. And the truth is, you know, this is one where I have a lot of problem with the lore of Silicon Valley, because I think what often happens is these CEOs are portrayed as sort of demigods that can do nothing wrong, and they're larger-than-life personalities. And some of them are, by the way, in terms of their personalities. But I often find that usually great ideas are the product of a lot of back and forth by a lot of number of people. And you're kind of constantly honing that idea and evolving it from what may have started out in one concept and actually

• 1:55Speaker 01

  ended up with something entirely different in the end. So, Wrapped been around, I believe, since 2015. I don't know who came up with it. I think it probably started somewhere in our marketing team as an idea, and it's kind of evolved. Since that point, quite a lot of times. So the first iteration of it was outside of the product as a one-time standalone campaign, and then it became a recurring thing. Then it became a social shareable product, then became integrated into the app. It has kind of evolved over the years, and I don't think, I'm relatively certain if we would have kept to the original idea,

• 2:36Speaker 01

  it wouldn't have been as successful. But it's been more kind of a concept evolution that made the product as successful. And that's certainly been true almost,

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I think, in the entire Spotify journey. Like, if you really ask me, sure, did I come up with the original idea? That's true. But is Spotify today my idea? And the answer is no. It's probably the product of thousands of people's input. And by the way, I have talked about this publicly before. But another one of our hit products, Discovery Weekly, that a lot of people love, I actually hated it. And I tried to cancel it multiple times, but it kept coming up in our internal hack weeks because people were really excited about it. And it wasn't in the end exactly what we shipped. We adjusted it. So Discovery Weekly wasn't Discovery Weekly. It started off as just this Discover playlist,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  and then it became Discovery Weekly, and this whole format of weekly updates became a thing that people started resonating with. And I think all of those details ended up making the product that successful. And I think that's just a great example of how products happen at Spotify. It's not the product of me. It's not a product of a single individual, but usually it's it's sort of the back and forth between the entire team, myself included, many times.

• 4:05Logan Bartlett?

  I do want to talk through the entrepreneurial journey of like what led to Spotify. And so I guess in preparing for this, I heard that You almost went bankrupt and had to, and were staring down, laying off a large sum of your employees before at the last minute, it sounded like there was, what was the acquisition? Was it the acquisition of Skype that kind of unlocked the market and then you sold the company to eBay? Can you talk through like your initial entrepreneurial endeavors at that point? I know as a kid, you, you had a bunch of different side hustles in that project. But what was that story of, of how, you know, what you were working on and what ultimately came to be?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I don't come from sort of an entrepreneurial family or even a community where being an entrepreneur was something you, anyone I knew did. So it wasn't a big dream of mine to become an entrepreneur. In fact, it probably was the anti of what everyone around me was talking about. So I sort of accidentally ran into becoming an entrepreneur and it took me probably 10 years of being an entrepreneur before I started identifying myself as one as well. I just considered it as I was starting things and I had no intention of actually running

• 5:33Speaker 01

  them or building these companies myself. I always envisioned someone else being the front person and someone else running these projects and not me. So I considered myself being the tech guy who, who was almost like an inventor, but definitely not an entrepreneur. And, and it was really through a series of kind of accidents that I ended up starting businesses, but I didn't think of them as businesses, which probably, you know, ended up becoming the reason why I had to lay people off and not understanding, you know, how to manage a business as well. And, and that later on, obviously led me to actually take it more serious, the business side.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  But I was doing projects that was fun and.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  I remember I was fourteen at the time when I was like the one kid in the community that I was in that knew anything about computers. And so naturally, people started gravitating towards me, and this is probably around nineteen ninety seven now. And the World Wide Web became a thing. And just to set the scene, the World Wide Web at that time was everyone needed to have a webpage. That was kind of the norm that was created, and certainly here in Sweden. But creating a webpage usually involved having like this very expensive consultancy firm. That consultancy firm would charge you like fifty thousand dollars to make a webpage. So there was all of these small businesses that heard that they needed to create a web.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Web page because otherwise they would be irrelevant as businesses, but they obviously couldn't pay fifty thousand dollars to do it. So what happened was, there was a local business guy who came up to me one day and said, hey, I heard you know about computers. I was wondering if you'd be interested in helping me build a webpage. And I was kind of into coding and a bunch of that stuff. And I thought HTML was kind of simplistic and I wasn't that interested and didn't know how to design a webpage either. So it was just not something that I was very interested in. So I kind of turned him down. And he kept coming back and he's like, well, I really want you to help me with this. And eventually I I.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  I figured that the way to get rid of him, and I didn't want to be rude, so I figured I'd just quote him a very high price. So that he realized that, you know, I didn't want to do this and hopefully that would get him to to eventually stop asking me. So I said, sure, okay, well, I'll make the webpage for you. And I want five thousand dollars. And that was for me an outrageous amount of money. That was more than my parents probably had in life savings at that point. And he said, done. I was like, oh shit, now we actually have to learn how to how to create this webpage and design it. And so I did, and he was very happy. And then, you know, a few weeks after completing that project.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Someone else knocked on my door and said, hey, I heard you helped my friend here with a webpage. I was wondering if you could do the same and. Fast forward to that, I was basically running an illegal sweatshop in my high school where I had all my friends who were really good at math. I taught HTML and all my friends that were really good in arts, I taught Photoshop. And we had this new computers in school ironically donated by Bill Gates. Early on, he had this thing where he took like, you know, schools that were in particularly rough neighborhoods, which mine was, and donated new computer equipment.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And so these are all new computers, all sort of 100 megabits internet connection. And so that was like the perfect first office for my, my thing. So that, that's kind of how I started my entrepreneurial journey, but even then, even as I was doing all these things, I didn't think about it as business. I thought about it more as like, wow, we're building projects here and we're making money doing it. And that money we can reinvest in buying servers and doing other cool projects. And it was only until I almost went bankrupt, until I realized that, you know, hey, I'm actually running a real business here where real people's livelihood are dependent on what I do. And I need to learn how to do this and I need to be serious about it.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Because sort of just being the tech guy who builds stuff and don't bother about anything else just didn't scale anymore.

• 10:05Logan Bartlett?

  So you sold some companies or you had like a handful of different projects and they sold and you made a couple million bucks. And I think what was, what was interesting for me to hear, and I would love to hear your perspective on this, is everyone thinks they're working to some end, right? Of which they have millions of dollars in the bank account and therefore they're successful. They have this exit, their friends that they've hired make money and all of that. But I heard you say that that was actually more depressing than potentially having to lay off your friends. Or like going through the whole entrepreneurial journey with your first company because you were a little aimless in now what do I do, right? And I have this money.

• 10:48Logan Bartlett?

  And I've been working to this end, but it wasn't as fulfilling as maybe you thought it was going to be. And that I think ultimately led to Spotify, right? Combining two interests that you had together. So can you talk about or tell that story of like what it felt like to have made millions of dollars? And actually be even more depressed than you were before?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And so just to tie the two stories together. So what happened obviously is my businesses that I thought of as projects kind of grew and grew and grew from 1997 onwards to 2000 and 2001. And then the bubble burst and almost everything froze overnight. And that's when I had to lay off a bunch of friends and hunker down. And we kind of took whatever projects or whatever thing anyone needed help with. So we basically became consultants overnight, doing whatever anyone needed help with, just to survive with whoever I had left as employees. And then through a series of luck, really what ended up happening, and this shows how little I knew about business.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Sometimes people couldn't pay me because they ran into financial difficulties. And they gave me something called equity, which I didn't realize what it was. I thought it was literally that people would pay me back once they had the money. So I thought it was like kind of a debt note or something like that. And so they gave me equity in their firms. And so I didn't really understand, you know, what it meant. And I never assumed anyone could pay me back. So I kept accumulating that and I became disappointed every time someone couldn't pay me and got equity. And I got very lucky because one of the firms I got equity in.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  You know, and I remember it very clearly. So the market kind of turned around the eBay acquisition of Skype. So that's 2004, I believe, 2005, around that timeframe. Where between 2000 and 2004 and 2005, if you were in the internet era, we forgot about it long since, but it was like the worst of the worst. There was no money available, no one wanted to do anything. And everyone looked at you like you were pariah. I can imagine might be a little bit like if you're in the crypto community at the present moment. That's kind of what it felt like. No one wanted to touch you.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  And

• 13:11Speaker 01

  So it was really rough and then everything kind of turned from one night to to the other. There was new optimism. Companies were like, holy shit, this internet thing might be real. We got to step up our game. And one of the businesses um um that I had been involved in gave me some equity. And they called me up one day and said, hey, um, um, we're gonna get acquired. And this is really great news. And I said, well, you know, that's great. Congrats. And the guy was kind of confounded and we're like, well, aren't you happy? And I said, yeah, sure. I'm very happy for you. This is great.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  He probably didn't really, you know, he was still confounded by why I didn't wasn't more happy and why I didn't understand it. And honestly, I I didn't even realize he would pay me back. I thought it was just like he called me up and and was just a happy person. And so I didn't think much more about it until like, you know, a week or two later, someone from my bank called me up and said, hey, what do you want us to do with the money? And I had no idea. So I was like, well, and and I figured then that maybe the guy had just paid back the debt. And I was like, well, that's great. You can just leave it in the account, I said.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  And the the person then from from the bank was like, well, we we would advise against that. This is like a large sum and you really should invest it and so on. And I was like, well, you know, really, what what are we talking about here? And I said, well, it's a few million dollars here. And I was like, what? There must be something wrong. And and literally, you know, no, it was all right. And and that was the equity and and that was great. And then within a series of events, I actually sold two other businesses in the next six months and not for great sums of money, but I own a hundred percent of them. So it ended up accumulating.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And actually, one of these companies I sold, I sold to my co-founder of Spotify, his company. And Yeah, so I literally went from kind of having no money at all, basically just trying to survive to six months later, having more money than I knew what to do with. And actually, I'd read somewhere that if you had five million dollars, you were economically independent for the rest of your life. And I, by that time accumulated more than that.

• 15:47Logan Bartlett?

  And you're 22, right, at the time?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I was exactly 22.

• 15:52Logan Bartlett?

  This is the, this is the dream, right? You've made it.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:54Logan Bartlett?

  You should be as happy as, as anyone. This is what everyone aspires to.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right. And, and, and, and for me, it was like even more so because I, I literally came from the projects in Sweden. Like, I had no money at all. I, I was growing up with my single mom. And on top of that, I had this winter where I, I sort of between 2000 and 2004 and five, where things were really rough. Like, you were basically just trying to survive paycheck to paycheck and doing whatever jobs you could to pay your rent, basically. And so, obviously, I had this kind of dream of one day, maybe I can get to this level. And I thought, maybe if I work really hard, I can get there if, you know, if I'm lucky, 50, and then I'm going to retire, and so on and so forth. And obviously,

• 16:38Speaker 01

  here I was 22, and I, I reached that milestone. And, um, and, and it sounds perhaps a little bit sort of obnoxious to say it, but as a society, we're, we're fighting to get to that limit, limit of economic independence. Uh, but no one actually talks about what happens when you get there. Um, instead, you're just hearing from these rich people how like money doesn't mean that much, uh, and so on. Well, it certainly does if you have none. I can tell you that. Um, and, and they don't really teach you what to do and what, what actually matters. So it feels like a very foreign concept, uh, where you're like, um, you know, you're, you're thinking that they say that out of, out of a sort

• 17:21Speaker 01

  of false humility when, when in fact, you know, They're probably very happy about having it and they probably are to a certain extent. But to a certain extent, they were right, but no one taught you that. And and for me, um, you know, a funny sort of side note, I actually learned how to speak English through watching MTV. And um, and and my favorite program at that time was like Yo MTV, just the rap part. Um, and so you watch MTV Cribs and you watch kind of all of these like great places that that these rappers are living in and rock stars are living in. And and it's always these kind of well filled fridges with like all the drinks in different colors and like all that stuff.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Um, and and so I was like, you know, I made it, this this is the life. So now I'm finally gonna be able to get to the really cool nightclubs. I'm gonna get all the girls that could never get beforehand and I'm gonna be one of the cool people. And I I thought literally for a while that that would make me happy. And so I spent a bunch of time doing that, spraying champagne on people um in central Stockholm. I um, uh, you know, uh, tried to hook up with the girls I could never get before, somewhat embarrassingly. And some of them, um, you could actually succeed with. Um, but I realized um, that, you know, they didn't want me for me.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Um, they wanted me for the status that it provided and because I probably uh offered them free champagne and and uh hung around the cool people. And I realized many of these people probably wouldn't be there unless I had money. And um, that got me to be pretty depressed because again, I didn't get into tech to get rich in the first place. Um, and and I, um, you know, it wasn't one of the things that made me happy um either. So tech in itself made me happy, music made me happy. And so I I went on a number of months of soul searching of what I really wanted to do. And I realized uh up until that point in my life, there'd basically been two interests in my life. One was music and one was technology.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  And um, I um. I was thinking about that and during the same time I met my co-founder and we started spending more time because he had just left the company that acquired my other company. And we started hanging out together and he had made an IPO and he made even more money than I made by an order of magnitude more. And he too was quite depressed because he too didn't have anything really that tied him up. And so we talked about maybe we should do something new. Maybe we should do something that, you know, is different. And what we centered around was really this three core concepts. You know, we wanted to do something that we

• 20:10Speaker 01

  thought, you know, we could get passionate by. We wanted to do it with people we could learn from. And three, we wanted to have fun while doing it and have a positive impact in the world. Those were the kind of three things. And he said, what are you really passionate about? And I said, well, really, I'm passionate about music and technology. That's, that's my two kind of main passions. And he said, well, why don't we do that? And I said, well, that's a really dumb idea. Because, you know, music piracy, it's really hard and so on. And then he kept asking why, you know, okay, well, why is it hard? Why is piracy such a

• 20:53Speaker 01

  big problem? And basically, through these series of why, we eventually said, well, maybe if you did this, you could sort it out. Well, why isn't someone doing it that like that way? And I said, well, probably labels are going to be very hard. Okay, well, why is that if they're losing so much money as it is? Shouldn't they be interested in doing it? And eventually, we centered on the idea Spotify for all of those reasons.

• 21:17Logan Bartlett?

  And I know constraints, you're a big believer in constraints breeding like excellence and opportunity and all of that. And so the constraint for you all was actually the geographic constraint, right? You had to start in a narrow market and there was a ton of piracy. And so the music labels were willing to say, hey, fuck it. Like, this market's broken anyway. It's a small market. Let's let them, let them try. Can you talk a little bit about constraints as a benefit to you and Spotify?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And perhaps this wasn't as obvious from the beginning for me. Yeah, you were like, I don't want to be in a $20 million TAM or whatever. I don't know what the market would have been, but yeah. Yeah. And so we tried to launch Spotify actually globally, everywhere, because that's what we thought an internet company should look like. And it's ironic because we only realized that portion 15 years later, two years ago, when we locked the rest of the markets. So, but we stumbled upon a very important insight, which is that

• 22:25Speaker 01

  growing in concentric circles is incredibly powerful. And in my opinion, when I look at startups today, I would say almost every single successful startup has followed that formula where they've started off self-constraining themselves, focusing and honing on developing their craft and being really, really precise, because it's really hard to make a product for 500 million people, because 500 million people have a lot of different opinions about things and what makes a great product. But you have to start with sort of a core set of customers and solving a critical problem for them, basically reducing the time it takes from point A to

• 23:05Speaker 01

  point B in a pretty material way. And so we started in Sweden, and as you said, for a number of reasons, it was sort of the perfect market, because you had broadband penetration, which back in 2008, 2006, actually, when we started, wasn't a very normal thing. And by 2008, still wasn't very normal. And because people had access to very fast broadband connections, they used a lot of piracy services to get their content.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It also was a place where iTunes was late to launch in, because again, it wasn't a very large market, so they they prioritized other markets before them. So there really wasn't much other solutions that was there. And then from a business model standpoint, there was a lot more willingness from labels that we were dependent on to launch this, to innovate, because frankly, they didn't have much else of options, other than, you know, the continuous decline of their

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Their business. So, so we stumbled upon that, but it is actually something that I've been ever since, whenever we do something, it's something that I've been constantly pushing on the teams that I work with, whether it's at Spotify or my other ventures at this point. It's just always kind of staying very, very consistent and close and self-constraining our growth, so to speak. And just as an analogy, I just recently launched a healthcare business called Nico and, and we launched it here in Sweden too. And, and the way we did that was we kind of controlled everything, but we self-constrained it to one physical location.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  And that meant that literally unless you're in central Stockholm, there's no way to try the product. And many may say, well, you know, wouldn't have been better to launch it in the US because it's a much larger market and so on. And, and actually for a number of reasons, I, I believe Sweden might be even better because you have a situation where no one pays for healthcare today. So it's an even harder problem to solve. But the, the benefit is in Stockholm, it's a very large concentration of people at a relatively small surface. So it helps from that sort of Venn diagram of opportunity and constraints in terms of TAM as well, to be just very concise.

• 25:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of the things I actually give advice about when people are starting podcasts. And I made this mistake, everyone makes this mistake is you want to get the biggest guests initially and you want to be broad and copy, you know, so that as many people will listen to it as possible. And one, you suck when you initially start, like a hundred percent. You're just shitty at asking questions, your, your audio is going to be off, whatever it is. And two, you're wasting your bullets on great people early on. And three, your interests aren't going to be aligned with a target market, right? If I, if I just interviewed everyone I wanted to talk to, it's not, no one else has the exact same interests I do. And so I have a ton of respect and this was a mistake I made.

• 26:15Logan Bartlett?

  But all the podcasts that started very narrow, be it the acquired guys or Lex Freeman or Patrick O'Shaughnessy or all them, you get the right to expand after you have some success in the middle, right? And like, so define your market very narrowly. Lenny does a great job with his product podcast, which I know your co-founder went on, where it's like, start really narrow, make sure you appeal to that narrow group, and then you can deviate to the areas to the left and right. And I think it's true of companies, it's true of, you know, media, it's true, whatever, right? It's an interesting, interesting lesson for sure.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's, you know, you can even apply it to investing, right? Like, your circle of competence is usually a lot more narrow than you think it is, right? And by narrowing yourself, you're going to get higher signal, you're going to learn faster and better, and you can expand over time. But, but trying to, you know, go for everything probably means you're going to be pretty average.

• 27:14Logan Bartlett?

  And you can always deviate, right? I tell people I only do Series B, mostly B2B investments. And is that all I do? No, that's not all I do. But like, people have to think of you for something. And so, better to narrow what they think of you for, and then you can, by exception, go elsewhere, right? It's just a much easier framework by which to operate. Hey, one question in the early days of Spotify I had from you, and I'm not sure how much this is like a metaphorical story versus a real one, but I've heard about you sleeping outside of record labels' offices. And I'm wondering, like, quite literally, were you inside their building and, and in front of their doors? Is this like one of

• 27:55Logan Bartlett?

  those stories that gets retold? And it's, it's like, maybe an allegory, but was it actually like, how did that, how did that actually come to be?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  No, I didn't actually sleep outside of, outside of their offices. It's more of a sort of expression and a sort of mental analogy, as you said, or allegory. But, but...

• 28:20Speaker 01

  The, the, just to paint the picture, I literally slept in hotels where the, the wallpaper fell down on me and I had cockroaches everywhere. Like not one of these finer five-star hotels or even four-stars. I think I had minus one-star hotels.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  So, and, and there's funny stories in the beginning where I and the guy who helped negotiate the licenses, we even shared bed. Um, and, and bed covers, cause literally, and he was snoring horribly, so we didn't sleep very much. So, so that's sort of painting the picture, but what was true is I literally sat outside of the office, waiting for opportunities to arrive where I could come in and pitch. Because they, they wouldn't take the meetings. Um, and so I took whatever slots I could get. And the best way was to sit, uh, they had a Starbucks just outside of, of, of, uh, Broadway in this case,

• 29:21Speaker 01

  uh, in New York and I literally sat, uh, outside of that, uh, Starbucks, uh, which was right on the border. And, uh, I befriended, uh, the assistants to the point by giving them enough free coffee and, and, uh, free, uh, gifts and, and other things that I, whatever I could do to bribe them basically. Uh, so that they would tell me when, when the CEO was about to leave or about to enter, or if they had sort of a spare moment where I sort of just by accident would be next to the coffee machine as they were getting the coffee. So, um, there, it was directionally true, although it wasn't technically true that I slept outside of the office.

• 30:00Logan Bartlett?

  What kept you going through that period of time? Cause I know there was like two and a half years of, of chewing glass essentially. And was it just that you were uniquely passionate? You knew that your life's work would ideally combine music and technology. And so, hey, uh, I'm going to keep going ahead on this or, or what, what really kept you motivated through that period?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I think a combination of, of really several things, but, but the, the most important thing is, it was totally logical to me that whether I succeeded or someone else succeeded, people would want to access music. Um, and, uh, they would want a better experience than piracy. And if there was a better experience than piracy, people would start paying for music again. That was just so obvious to me. Um. And this whole idea of like people wanting to own music uh that the whole world believed to be true just felt to me like no, it's kind of obvious that the better products should be access uh to music. And and so I believe that at the core of my bones. And if we weren't going to succeed doing it, someone else would. Uh. That was clear to me. And that gave me a

• 31:06Speaker 01

  lot of uh of just mental fortitude um to go on because I believed it to be true. And um it was a lot of uh ups and downs. And and the truth is, I believe every startup journey is a mental roller coaster. And um I believe now perhaps more than ever before that the what really sets apart the great entrepreneurs from from uh the average ones uh are how is really how you handle that mental roller coaster. And I believe so much more now that most people just don't want to do what's necessary um to succeed at that level. It

• 31:48Speaker 01

  is really hard. And I I I don't blame them, but it's like you have to give up um birthdays, friendships, uh family relationships, uh all of the above um oftentimes are required. And it's very hard. People talk about balance. I don't I don't believe that to be true. Uh you should absolutely strive to have healthy relationships because you'll perform better and you you'll strive should strive to obviously having love in your life because I believe you you'll be a better person. But to have balance of like equal uh you know, time on on on everything, I I that's not been my experience. In in fact, I oftentimes even today feel awful

• 32:31Speaker 01

  because I'm down prioritizing something in my life because I'm pretty extreme. Um. Sometimes that's my health. Sometimes that's a friendship relationship. Sometimes that's work because I'm prioritizing a personal part of myself. But I always feel almost inadequate because I'm constantly putting so much effort into uh so many parts um in a pretty extreme way. And and um. That's two or two and a half years of my life, I gained probably forty five pounds in weight. So I really wasn't feeling very well. I lost a lot of hair, still haven't been able to grow it back. It was just an awful, awful, awful time. And I wanted to give up several

• 33:15Speaker 01

  times, but I also had my team. And my team was fighting and they were making the product more and more amazing. And I was able to try it out. And I was like, wow, we really have something special on our hand. And I didn't want to fail or disappoint them. And it so happened to be that, again, I retrenched from those US offices back to Sweden and kind of managed to find the wedge, my one foot in the door, where we basically guaranteed the entire profits of the entire Swedish recording music industry with our own money for a year. And so you really don't have anything to lose. At best case, you double

• 33:59Speaker 01

  your money in one year and we fail. And by the way, on top of that, we have something that's ongoing. At the worst case, you double your money for this year, and you have at least a little bit more time to figure out what the right solution is.

• 34:15Logan Bartlett?

  I didn't realize that. So piracy was such, and the original deal you made with the labels was, hey, because Sweden was so upside down with piracy and people just stealing music, you said to the labels, hey, we're going to guarantee for the first year, the revenue for you all to make back. And worst case, it doesn't work. Best case, we have a new business.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Pretty much. Pretty much. I think it wasn't one to one, but it was like eighty cents on the dollar or something. So it was basically totally no downside for them. And

• 34:50Speaker 01

  And so they eventually kind of like, I don't know whether they actually believed in it, or whether they were just cynical and realized that, you know, heads I win, tail I win. Both are kind of fine. And, and, but we succeeded. And what I do know is we succeeded way more than anyone thought, including ourselves. And really through, through that period of time, we then kind of quickly expanded in another eight markets and started growing really rapidly from there on too. And then it took another sort of two, three years to unlock the US, because it was the number one market in the world and they had still a lot to lose and a lot to win. And that's why it took so much time to, for the same behavior and for the same sort of

• 35:33Speaker 01

  model to be proven out so much in the rest of the world that they were willing to take the same risk in the US.

• 35:39Logan Bartlett?

  Speaking of success, so you've paid out close to $40 billion to the music industry, is that right? And you're the, you're the biggest driver of monetization in the industry and you've almost single-handedly pulled the industry towards a model that works. And now, at least on a dollars, dollars basis, maybe not inflation adjusted, but dollars to dollars, you've, the industry is now past the peak of what it was in 99, 2000 from, from those days, the good old days. But does it bother you? You're still kind of vilified at times from people that don't understand how, like what all you've done? Does that, does that get under your skin?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Um, it, it, it does and it doesn't, to be very candid. So I, I, I think on the one hand, obviously, you know, I did this not because I thought we could make a ton of money doing this. We've actually widely surpassed what I thought in, in that regard, but.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I did this because I cared about the problem, right? I cared about music and I cared about compensating artists fairly. And I cared about giving consumers what they wanted. And so obviously it hurts when you have artists who I deeply respect and admire for doing what they're doing, say that they think that I somehow, or that we somehow want to cause harm to them because it's just not the truth at all. And we're doing that. But, you know, I also have, you know, in this process, I mentioned that earlier, but I think a lot about the mental game these days.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And oftentimes, whenever I see someone who's lashing out to another person, I try to have empathy with what they're going through. And, you know, there's always someone who's hurting. You know, there's always someone whose story exists on the other side. And you don't know that. You don't know what they've gone through. You don't know what their reality may look like. And so I try to have empathy with that. And the reality is of the music industry, it's a very complex narrative. And the narrative is, as you rightly said, the music industry overall is doing well. It's doing better than it's probably ever done before. Certainly the recorded music industry.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And it's at its all time high and it's all time profits from these record companies, et cetera. And more artists than ever are being invested in. So that's the good news. But we're also dealing in a reality where if you look at 1999 or year 2000, which probably arguably the two of them was the peak of the recorded music industry in terms of the last peak.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  You had probably 10,000 or so albums being released in the US that year.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  I don't know the exact numbers, but order of magnitude, that's probably right. And then if you contrast that today, Spotify has about 10 million artists

• 38:53Speaker 01

  on our platform. And, and so the best way to put it is there's more success now than ever before, but there's also more people than ever trying to make it in music. And so both of these two things can be true at the same time. There could also be more people being successful, but there could be in relative terms, more people failing also. And so, or in absolute terms and even in relative terms. So I, I think that there's a lot of people who may have in the past made it in music, but are no longer, you know, doing as well. And they obviously feel bad about that situation. And there's also, also a lot of people that wanna make it in music that for whatever reason may not be successful in music.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And because we're the number one player in music, obviously a lot of responsibility falls on us, rightly or unrightly, for the role that we play in the music industry for them to succeed. And, and these are people who may have spent 10, 20, 30 years perfecting their crafts. And many of them, by the way, are great at that. And it's really hard when, when, uh, but it, but it's a very hard game to succeed in, right? I, I sometimes make the analogy to another one of my favorite sports, soccer. You know, it's, it's, it's a very popular sport. Several hundred million people around the world are playing soccer in one shape or

• 40:22Speaker 01

  form, but there's probably only tens of thousands of them that are professional, right? So it's, so, you know, on the one hand, uh, we have a lot of artists here that are trying to make it in music, more so probably than ever before in the history of time. There are more that's succeeding, but there's still a lot of people that are not. And so those are usually the ones that, you know, uh, are unhappy and I get it and I understand it. And many of them are also very talented, by the way. And so it's, it's really tough. When, when, when they feel like they can't make it and obviously we become a big part of that debate because we're so big.

• 41:02Logan Bartlett?

  And there's two components, I guess, just to give people a quick primer on why these complaints maybe come out is one, back in 99, 2000, it was a lump sum payment from a CD, right? Versus you guys are paying out like an annuity over time. And so your, your long tail, that's why you're seeing people sell back catalogs is because they want to monetize it upfront, but investors willing to wait for the next 20 years to monetize that. So one is the cash flow cycle. The other one is you have, you pay out a percentage of your revenue to the, to the labels, which is mostly the three majors. And then they, and that's based on the number, number of streams and the, your business model, right? And that's

• 41:47Logan Bartlett?

  a percentage of your revenue. And then the labels pay out whatever their deals they cut with their artists are, they pay out that to the artists. And so you've negotiated this thing with the labels, the complaint is ultimately, to some extent, it's with the labels, right? Of like the deals that they cut with the artists individually, you cut the deals with the labels. And so it's like, there's this middle man in the middle that people are pointing at you. When in truth, this is the deal that the artists have often cut with the labels themselves. Is that fair?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's sometimes part of the story. And it's very complex, right? Because there, there's all sorts of other things too. With songwriters, it's even more complicated because you may be signed to a publishing company, or there may be a collecting society in a certain market. And some collecting societies takes 18 months before they pay it out. So you may think you have a certain amount of streams, but in actuality, and you see no revenue, but the revenue comes 18 months later, as you said. So, so there's all sorts of very complicated dynamics from an industry that for legacy reasons been built up over many decades. And that's hard. And that's a hard part of the story. The other one is pure optics, right? Oftentimes,

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Even though, exactly as you said, we don't pay out per stream, we pay out on a percentage basis. But quite oftentimes, what people do is in order to figure out, well, you know, how much was I getting? Was they take the number of streams, take the revenue and divide it on a per stream basis? And then the number seems very low because it's point something, something, you know, cents per stream. But I think the failure there is like, this is the equivalent of CPM. The, and this is probably where we could have done better from an optical point of view. You know, originally you were probably getting paid for every single impression.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  But we, we don't in the ad world, you know, measure it based on what you're getting paid for every impression. But we, we bottle it up to a CPM and that CPM could be variable. So it's thousand impression that sort of adds it up. And so we still optically screw it up in the sense that we make the number seem lower than what it perhaps is.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And so there's all the, all of those things that kind of add up to it. But I would still say the, the number one problem that's the most confusing to people is, you know, there, there, there are more people successful than ever before in music, but there's also more people trying. So therefore there's also more people failing at becoming successful in music. And so both of these things are true at the same time. And that's what people are having such a hard time. Because they see these anecdotal things of on Twitter and artists saying, well, I only get paid X for what seems like a large amount, a million streams. But a million streams is actually a very, very low amount of streams.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Like the most successful artists on Spotify are literally, you know, Amile Cyrus that can get a billion streams in, in, in the matter of weeks, right? So. A million streams over the course of a year is just not a big number in the case of Spotify. And so that's also, you know, seemingly seems a big number, but it just isn't. So that's the optics and those two things are why it's such a difficult problem to explain to people.

• 45:16Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I've heard you say you spent time trying to copy different elements of iconic CEOs, Gates or Jobs or Musk or whoever it was. But ultimately you realized you needed to be yourself and that that it didn't really work internalizing elements of other people. How do you think about taking elements that you've heard from how someone that's super successful has operated? While also following your own North Star or what is authentic to Daniel Ek as a leader, as a CEO?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think about quite often this quote by, I believe he's a philosopher, Quan Mepia. And he, he says, you know, most people are spending time figuring out to basically,

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's basically trying to learn the rules of the game instead of figuring out which game they're playing. And that was the most important realization for me. You know, we all obviously take impression from the, the Gates, the Musks, the Bezos, the Zuckerbergs of the world of tech. And they've been remarkably successful and they're very, very good at what they do. But they're also in many instances, playing a very different game than the one you're playing, right? And that's what I, I realized is you can't just copy someone's tactics without understanding what game they're playing and what game you're playing.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And, and trying to go to sort of first principle of just understanding. Who do I wanna be and what's important to me? Back to that sort of mental side of things. And who am I at the core of an individual? You talked about sort of social media. One of the big things for me that I see time and time again is that

• 47:18Speaker 01

  at the end of the day, people see right through when you're not authentic. Because you can't stay consistent in whatever game you're playing on social media if you're not authentic to who you are as an individual. And that's really hard because people obviously game you in the sense that they'll give you feedback of what they think works. And we wanna be liked as individuals. So we try to amplify those behaviors. And social media does that even more. And at the core of it, I think it's a very easy way for young people and honestly, all people to get very unhappy about life is because you keep seeing these rewarding pictures of the perfect life that everyone else is leading

• 48:03Speaker 01

  without actually understanding that the authentic story probably isn't that. The authentic story is probably that they have a bad hair day sometimes. They have argued with their significant others. They have kids that are screaming and refusing to go to bed. All the normal stuff. But what we see is this perfect thing. And that's what people are reacting to. And more and more, I think that authenticity is the only thing that will allow you to persevere for not just a year or two, but a decade or two. And so the big realization for me was just working with myself, my own mentality, my own psychology, my own being.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Back to that point about me believing I wanted to be popular, me believing I wanted affirmation from these girls that could never get to pay attention to me before. I realized that that just wasn't who I was as an individual. I'm a nerd. I like reading. I don't like spending time with lots of people. I like a few. Friends that I have intimate relationships to, um, you know, in large crowds, I, I get inwardly focused or drains me of energy. Not that I don't think it could be fun, but I have to lie down and rest after doing it.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Um, and there are other people, obviously, that get energy from being in crowds, um, and love meeting other people. And, um, I think those are the realizations that you have to work with. And so of course I take elements and I learn from all the greats, not just in technology, but more and more uh, from all over, all, all over the map and in other fields, um, as well. But, um, I, I tried to, um, most of the time, uh, think from first principles about what it is I want to achieve and then turn whatever,

• 50:04Speaker 01

  don't copy them exactly, but kind of take the spirit of, of, um, what it is that you're trying to do and adjust it to my game. And, and that's how I think about it.

• 50:13Logan Bartlett?

  The remix, the Daniel Ek remix, yeah. What, what are the more, um, uh, poignant things I heard you talk about is being very self-aware of, uh, your role within a company and as a leader and within meetings and being cognizant that if someone's presenting to you, it might be the one time a year that they get to meet you, or maybe their entire tenure of Spotify. This could be the only time they get in front of you. And your role in meetings and also in social gatherings that you used to maybe gravitate to a handful of people that you knew just because it, it, you were comfortable there.

• 50:53Logan Bartlett?

  But realizing that you actually had to go talk to the people you didn't know because that was your, your role. How do you, how do you think about your natural bias to do some of the things that come naturally to you versus your role either in meetings or leading and doing the unnatural? Because it's going to be very impactful to the individuals in, in that specific meeting or in that room or at that party or whatever it is.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, uh, I I think the the important part again is uh on the one hand, as I said, staying true to yourself. And the polarity of that obviously is in what way can you be the most impactful? Um and constantly kind of uh um sort of peddling between those two extremes. Um but but it it it actually started when I was really unhealthy. And and um I was lucky enough that uh one of my neighbors became uh or is at this point still a very famous uh hockey player. Uh his name is Matt Sundin. He's he was a an all-star NHL American uh team captain of Toronto Maple Leaf for thirteen sec- seasons, uh play always playing in the All-Star game.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  And um uh we were talking one one night over dinner and um he talked to me about sort of training and um you know uh and and it got me to change my perspective because he talked about the reason why he trained so much and and why he could keep at the level of where he was for thirteen seasons wasn't to get better. It was to make sure that his his worst was consistently better than everyone else. And um so it was like basically raising the average bar rather than sort of raising the bar of the extreme. And I I thought about that a lot. Um and so for me, what I realized was uh that there was times when I had a lot of energy.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Uh when I I was great in meetings, um but there was also times when I was completely drained and and I wasn't adding anything to the meeting and and I probably I was grumpy or or all of those different things. And I started taking my own um well-being, um not just mental health, but physical health, eating, uh exercising, all those things for uh learning from Matt's basically.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Just making sure my my worst day, I would still be better than most. And showing up in that meeting with more energy, being able to make people feel good. Um. Because so much of what it is that I do, I have many thousands of employees here at Spotify. Um. It is them that's doing the works. It's not me. And and and my my job quite often is um to get to the positions where all the good options are are out the window and we only have uh decisions where huge trade offs uh are needed in. And to bring that a um team mentality out of people in that moment by getting their best ideas,

• 53:58Speaker 01

  getting them to be there, but feel seen, feel heard, um and feel like they can participate. And I'm not always succeeding with that, by the way, I'm I'm failing quite a lot of the time. But I realized, you know, it's it's I'm I'm I'm not the smartest person in the room. Um. I'm definitely not. And uh I realized my my goal is to bring the smartness out of other people in in those meetings. And um um that means um creating an environment where people can be uh direct, where people feel seen, where they feel validated. And so I've learned so much about leadership um from that. And I just referenced again from the world of sports.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Uh. So it's not always from people in business. Um. But I think it's it's it's my game. And I know other leaders, by the way, uh in business people, that the sole goal is is for them to be the driving force and lightning rod uh in a meeting. Um. And and most of the time they're having in a group meeting with ten people. It's actually them interacting with one people at a time and the meeting is really for them, not for for other people around them. And I I I don't say that that's uh wrong. I'm saying that could work for them and their individual. But in my case, I I look at myself as the bottom of the pyramid, helping everyone else get things done, not at the very top of the pyramid.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Even though obviously from a hierarchical sense, I am obviously at the top. But I'm trying to enable other people to do their best work. And it's through that that I think we'll achieve amazing results.

• 55:35Logan Bartlett?

  I know as a CEO and a leader, you have a philosophy around missions, both for yourself and also for your executives. And that people might be the right people for a certain point in time, but that they may not be the long term person. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about that for yourself and reevaluating what you need to be for the mission that you're on at that moment in time? And also how you have that conversation with executives or direct reports saying, hey, this could be the job for you for the next two years. But after that, we might need to bring in someone else.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And maybe just a level set. I'm not saying this is necessarily true for all companies, but I certainly think it's been true here for Spotify. So I believe one of the very unique things about startups is the rate that you have to learn, basically. So a startup founder, CEO, in many instances are trying to learn on the job things. And maybe sometimes they have six months to learn what other people learn in two or three years at a time. And because of the nature of growth in their business, the challenges that get thrown at their table happens much faster than it would take like a business that's growing at five or 10% a year.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  You know, they may have plenty of more time to accumulate those experiences and learn on the job than a startup CEO does. And I shamelessly stole this concept from Reid Hoffman, where he at LinkedIn supposedly had this concept called tour of duties. You know, based on the US military. I didn't really like the military reference or call it missions instead. But my belief was that if you really think about it, as a CEO, as a CFO, as a VP of product, certainly in a startup. But it's very rare that whatever requirements you have for your jobs are going to last for more than two or three years.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And the problem you end up having is by not being clear that it's not the person's fault. You know, and and this can go both ways. You could, the person can develop and the job develops in a different direction. And obviously, the job can develop and the person wants to keep doing the same thing. Both in a a world of startup is actually a big problem. Because if you have the expectancy that my, the job is mine for all eternity, no matter what the job spec actually requires, even though the title's the same. That just feels wrong. And it is not in in this instance that you as a CEO, if you have an employee where you have to have that tough conversation.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  That you're necessarily forcing that on them. It could be the startup in itself that just requires something very different from you as a leader. So I think that's been a helpful mental framework to explain to people why that is and why the job changes, but the titles remain the same. And and the harder thing, though, is culturally really enacting that because it's so unusual. And I think the best way to do that is obviously by role modeling that yourself. And so in my case, what I often say is I've had the same title for now, close to seventeen years. It's pretty crazy. But I'm on my probably eighth job at the moment.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And and actually, my newest job started in January.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  So I handed off the reins from much of my day to day responsibility to to my core people. Gustav, who runs product and technology, and Alex, who now runs the business side. And so my role is vastly different than it's been. And I'm actually still trying to learn on the job what what I'm supposed to do and what I'm not supposed to do. In my new role, role description. And it has two benefits, I think. It it's. It means that new opportunities will be created. So in Alex and Gustav, they've been with me twelve and fourteen years, respectively. So they've been with me for a very long period of time. I am a hundred percent certain that if they were really doing the same jobs. Like they were when they got to the company, they wouldn't have stayed.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  So so this creates growth opportunities for them, but it also creates a very clear path where you can have very honest conversations with people.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  And talk about what they want to do in their career and whether or not that matches what that next evolution of that role looks like at your company. Or perhaps there might be other roles at the company that's always beneficial. So I like to think about, let's see if we can create the job internally first. And then only if that doesn't work, then you start looking at, maybe it's time to look sort of externally for the same job. And the harshest way to do it would be almost asking people to reapply to the same job again. I I don't formally do that, but but I like checking in with people to kind of say, do you really still want this job? And and does that make sense?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  And and yeah, I mean, I think it's a huge part of why I'm here 17 years later, because my job keeps changing. And yes, it's been the same title for quite a while. But my day to day responsibilities today is very different. My first job was kind of being the janitor, you know, screwing together tables and and chairs and all that stuff. There's a whole team at Spotify that does that now, so I'm lucky enough to just show up and the whole space looks beautiful. And I sit down in in furniture and IT equipment that just works. But my job today is like engaging with regulators, external with all the different stakeholders, dealing with very complex

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  stakeholder problems, whether they are employees and unions and all all what it requires, dealing with very complex. You know, how to what does it take to run a platform with 500 million consumers and tens of millions of creators? Very different challenges where even a small change in that platform, you can't make that thing when you have an entire music industry that's totally dependent on every single tweak that you make. So you can't sort of move fast and breaking things in that regard where obviously when you were a startup. That was kind of what you needed to do. So very different job, very intriguing and intellectually challenging. And I probably wouldn't have been ready for the job I'm having now seventeen years ago.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  But it's kept it interesting and I've been able to grow with the company.

• 1:02:14Logan Bartlett?

  Now, you've been fairly outspoken about Apple and the App Store practices in the last couple of months. I know it's been an ongoing thing for you all. How much has that been something that you feel for your own business, you have to speak out about what they're doing and favoring their own products and all the maybe monopolistic tactics they're doing? And those are my words, not yours. I don't want to put words in your mouth. That's my perspective. Versus you're in a unique position to be able to speak out for all the companies that can't because they're so beholden to Apple.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I think it's both, right? So obviously we believe that our business would have done tremendously much better if we would have fought on a level playing field. And it feels like we are instead having to innovate and fight for our business with our hands tied behind the back. Now, we're still winning and we're still kicking their ass and I feel good about that, but we could have succeeded. And we could have benefited the music industry and creators a lot more. And there's still lots of innovation that we're constantly being, you know, hampered by. So a great example is when we wanted to innovate on behalf of authors in the audiobook industry.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  And truthfully, what we had in mind was something that was a lot better than what we ended up launching in the end, because Apple kept blocking us. So that's on, on one end, we're constantly, we're succeeding in music anyway, but we're all the future innovation is being hamstrung by, by this. But more importantly, as you said, not just for the entire ecosystem, but coming back to my fourteen year old self and. The principles and values that attracted me to the internet and wanting to build things on the internet was that it was this completely open place. It was this place where this kid from, um, you know,

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  basically the projects in Sawcombe was able to compete on similar um terms that everyone else uh was able to do. And I truly believed that because of things like net neutrality and all those things that we fought fought for in the late nineties. Um, I believe the best ideas won't. Um, and it was very hard for someone to use their size as an advantage. We saw it all the time. Startups was constantly beating the bigger companies. Um, it happened all the time. It doesn't happen as often anymore. Um, and that's, I think, really problematic. And part of that reason is um because of the situation that we're in.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Um, basically, uh, in this case, we have most of the internet now is being accessed through smartphones, which is two different platforms by two different companies. And one of these companies have decided to basically tax that entire uh ecosystem with thirty percent. And in our case, that happens to be more than what we're currently making. So we would, uh, if we really followed what they would like to, we we would have two options. We would either be loss-making business in perpetuity with a negative unit economics, uh, which means we would be bankrupt, or we would have to raise prices. And if we raise prices, uh, they would take more than we would from that price increase.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  But more importantly than that, um, they also have a compete competitive product, which they obviously don't have to pay the same price points, so they would be able to bleed us dry. And so I look at it and I think I'm not just fighting for for Spotify's case, but I'm I'm fighting for what type of future of the internet we want. And I want one where the best ideas win. I want one where everyone's competing on equal terms. And to be clear, I don't um mind that Apple has an app store. And by the way, they can charge whatever fees they wanted to if it was a possibility to not be on the app store and still have an app. Um, right? So they can charge thirty percent or fifty percent. If there was another store,

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I would be like, great, we're just not going to be on your store. Um, then we'll be another one. But maybe for some developers or something else, that price is worth paying um to be on Apple Store. But that's not a possibility, right? And that's uh what we're fighting for. And imagine now all the innovation. Like, we wanted to sell NFTs on behalf of artists today, we would have to use Apple's IP and pay thirty percent towards that just one innovation that just honestly makes it almost not worth trying even because of all the cumbersome and all the problems. And there's so much uh many more examples of this,

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  what we could do, but it'd be really hard because we'd run afoul of of uh Apple's draconian rules.

• 1:07:10Logan Bartlett?

  I have one last one for you, and hopefully we can get it in under the wire here. But speech, uh, I I don't want to talk about specifically Rogan or R. Kelly or anything like that. But how do you think about speech? Just a- as a platform that can host these different uh for uh conversations on like, where do you think your responsibility is in all of this? Uh, and how do you approach it?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, again, I come back to it. We talked about the internet, right? Um, and and for me, the the amazing things is um, we want to enable as many voices as we can. Because uh, again, Spotify is a global company with uh creators in more than a hundred and eighty markets. What's acceptable in some markets may not uh be in others culturally. Uh, doesn't mean it's illegal, but just in in terms of socially acceptable things. Um, our view is uh, we want to enable more of these amazing creative people. Uh, if you look at something like hip hop, they use foul language to talk about things, but it's a cultural expression. Um, I don't always personally understand everything, um, the cultural references that they do.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  But um, I I think uh hip hop culture is so important for um, you know, development in our society. It's been such an important cultural uh thing for us. So imagine if we started censoring hip hop based on the lyrics it's been um. That's just unthinkable to me. And so our, our, our, our view is we want to enable more voices, not less. And obviously with that size, with that said, we do care about safety. Right? So we, we do try to keep the balance by enabling more voices. By obviously creating a safe platform as well. And that's a hard balance to follow and it's not a clear answer.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  And it's really based on the situation. But I think speech is really important. I felt like we, as a society, went from having sort of no rules in place for a long period of time. And then as more and more people got on the internet, we realized we needed some rules. My personal view is we went too far in the other direction and limited very important voices and speech on, on topics that's super important. And that's why in our case, we take the approach of enabling more creative voices. But obviously take our responsibility of keeping our platform safe as well, very high.

• 1:09:39Logan Bartlett?

  Daniel, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Really appreciate it.