Right now, English speakers are spoiled for podcast choice on Spotify, with millions to choose from. But if CEO Daniel Ek’s dream comes true, that number could multiply exponentially.
You might want to clear your schedule.
Ek imagines a world where all 7 million of the platform’s podcasts — now available in languages ranging from Arabic to Albanian — could be efficiently and affordably translated to English, with the help of AI.
“Imagine if you’re a creator and you’re the world expert at something … but you happen to be Indonesian,” Ek explained. “Today, there’s a language barrier and it will be very hard if you don’t know English to be able to get to a world stage. But with AI, it might be possible in the future where you speak in your native language, and the AI will understand it and will actually 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 founded Spotify in 2006 and steered it through the 2018 IPO, sat down with me to discuss how he’s positioning the company amid AI breakthroughs and antitrust battles.
With 678 million users across 183 countries (239 million of whom pay for the service), Spotify is the largest music and podcast streaming platform. Ek believes that the medium will grow even more in the coming year — both in terms of audience and content creators.
“Five years ago, when we started getting into podcasting in a big way, about 20% of Americans knew what podcasting was,” Ek told 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 well.
To that end, Spotify has leaned into video — both with podcasting and music. “We also now started having full-length music videos,” he said. “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 is also adding users at a steady clip, with five million new subscribers last quarter alone.
Funnily enough, Ek’s globalization dream is inspired by how very segmented online culture is.
“What’s really cool about the internet is it also is a place for niches,” he said. But a platform like Spotify “enables something that may seem quite small to actually be very, very big on a global basis.
‘So one of my favorite examples in the US, it’s a very big thing, country music, right? But what is really cool is that … people in Europe are now listening to country music. And people in Southeast Asia are listening to it as well. What may seem quintessentially American is now becoming a global phenomenon.”
Connectivity has always been his MO. Spotify was born after peer-to-peer music-sharing sites like Napster ran afoul of copyright law, as a legal way to instantly stream music while compensating artists.
Over the years, of course, there has been criticism over how much Spotify pays artists per stream. But there is no overselling how important — even necessary — the platform is in terms of reach and raw exposure.
“We are … the single biggest contributor to the music industry,” Ek said. “And in podcasting, this quarter alone paid out over $100 million back to creators.”
That includes the man who sits at the top of the platform’s charts: Joe Rogan who has a $250 million non-exclusive deal with Spotify. When other tech giants, including YouTube, censored Rogan for including guests 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 told 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.”
Providing Rogan, and others like him, a platform to raise questions is incredibly important to Ek.
“We want Spotify to be the place for all voices,” he said — whether that’s podcasters or “punk music in Myanmar … revolting against the regime.”
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He includes himself in that ideal. Ek has spent time facing down tech giants — namely Apple and Google — who he sees as trying to undermine fair competition.
“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 said, referring to everything from Apple requiring the company to provide timing for its annual Spotify Wrapped to imposing an approval process for software updates.
“They also operate Apple music, which is a competitor of ours [yet] we have to share our
plans to them beforehand.”
Ek may finally see courts and regulators create the “level playing field” he has pushed for since founding Spotify. On Wednesday, a judge ruled that Apple had violated an antitrust order in the company’s longstanding legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.
And while he sees blue skies ahead, he admits there is room to grow in his quest for “the perfect Spotify.”
Speaking of the platform’s ever-evolving algorithm, he said, “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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