Proper now, English audio system are spoiled for podcast selection on Spotify, with tens of millions to select from. But when CEO Daniel Ek’s dream comes true, that quantity might multiply exponentially.
You would possibly wish to clear your schedule.
Ek imagines a world the place all 7 million of the platform’s podcasts — now obtainable in languages starting from Arabic to Albanian — could possibly be effectively and affordably translated to English, with the assistance of AI.
“Imagine if you’re a creator and you’re the world expert at something … but you happen to be Indonesian,” Ek defined. “At present, there’s a language barrier and it will likely be very exhausting should you don’t know English to have the ability to get to a world stage. However with AI, it is perhaps potential sooner or later the place you converse in your native language, and the AI will perceive it and can truly real-time translate …
“What will that do for creativity? For knowledge sharing? For entertainment? I think we’re in the very early innings of figuring that out.”
Ek, who based Spotify in 2006 and steered it by the 2018 IPO, sat down with me to debate how he’s positioning the corporate amid AI breakthroughs and antitrust battles.
With 678 million customers throughout 183 international locations (239 million of whom pay for the service), Spotify is the most important music and podcast streaming platform. Ek believes that the medium will develop much more within the coming yr — each when it comes to viewers and content material creators.
“Five years ago, when we started getting into podcasting in a big way, about 20% of Americans knew what podcasting was,” Ek informed me. “Today, about 50% engage with podcasts sometimes. But that means there’s still 50% who don’t.”
Ek expects “more voices from around the world” to emerge as nicely.
To that finish, Spotify has leaned into video — each with podcasting and music. “We also now started having full-length music videos,” he mentioned. “And more and more of the artists are both playing around with the shorter form video format we have and now uploading more and music videos onto the platform too.”
Tuesday’s earnings report suggests Spotify can be including customers at a gentle clip, with 5 million new subscribers final quarter alone.
Funnily sufficient, Ek’s globalization dream is impressed by how very segmented on-line tradition is.
“What’s really cool about the internet is it also is a place for niches,” he mentioned. However a platform like Spotify “allows one thing which will appear fairly small to really be very, very large on a worldwide foundation.
‘So one of my favorite examples in the US, it’s a really large factor, nation music, proper? However what is de facto cool is that … individuals in Europe at the moment are listening to nation music. And other people in Southeast Asia are listening to it as nicely. What could appear quintessentially American is now changing into a worldwide phenomenon.”
Connectivity has at all times been his MO. Spotify was born after peer-to-peer music-sharing websites like Napster ran afoul of copyright legislation, as a authorized method to immediately stream music whereas compensating artists.
Through the years, in fact, there was criticism over how a lot Spotify pays artists per stream. However there isn’t any overselling how vital — even essential — the platform is when it comes to attain and uncooked publicity.
“We are … the single biggest contributor to the music industry,” Ek mentioned. “And in podcasting, this quarter alone paid out over $100 million back to creators.”
That features the person who sits on the prime of the platform’s charts: Joe Rogan who has a $250 million non-exclusive take care of Spotify. When different tech giants, together with YouTube, censored Rogan for together with visitors who questioned Covid’s origins and vaccine efficacy, Spotify stood by him.
“It was actually kind of obvious… this wasn’t as black and white as some people try to make the issue,” Ek informed me. “The whole debate in America was, there’s one answer and this is the science … but actually, what I knew from my home country was that what Sweden believed was the right thing was totally different.”
Offering Rogan, and others like him, a platform to boost questions is extremely vital to Ek.
“We want Spotify to be the place for all voices,” he mentioned — whether or not that’s podcasters or “punk music in Myanmar … revolting against the regime.”
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He contains himself in that excellent. Ek has hung out dealing with down tech giants — particularly Apple and Google — who he sees as making an attempt to undermine honest competitors.
“In the case of Apple, they, frankly, have decided to take an approach where they’re… insisting on pretty draconian rules [for app-store vendors],” Ek mentioned, referring to all the things from Apple requiring the corporate to offer timing for its annual Spotify Wrapped to imposing an approval course of for software program updates.
“In addition they function Apple music, which is a competitor of ours [yet] we’ve got to share our
plans to them beforehand.”
Ek might lastly see courts and regulators create the “level playing field” he has pushed for since founding Spotify. On Wednesday, a decide dominated that Apple had violated an antitrust order within the firm’s longstanding authorized battle with Fortnite maker Epic Video games.
And whereas he sees blue skies forward, he admits there’s room to develop in his quest for “the perfect Spotify.”
Talking of the platform’s ever-evolving algorithm, he mentioned, “We still have some ways to go before we’re at that point where we can just serve you that magical thing that you didn’t even know that you liked — better than you can do yourself.”
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