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- The following is a conversation with Gustav Sonastrom.
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- He's the chief research and development officer at Spotify,
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- leading their product design, data, technology, and engineering teams.
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- As I've said before, in my research and in life in general,
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- I love music, listening to it and creating it.
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- And using technology, especially personalization through machine learning
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- to enrich the music discovery and listening experience.
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- That is what Spotify has been doing for years, continually innovating,
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- defining how we experience music as a society in a digital age.
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- That's what Gustav and I talk about among many other topics,
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- including our shared appreciation of the movie True Romance,
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- in my view, one of the great movies of all time.
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- This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast.
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- If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give five stars on iTunes,
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- support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman,
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- spelled F R I D M A N.
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- And now here's my conversation with Gustav Sonastrom.
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- Spotify has over 50 million songs in its catalog.
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- So let me ask the all important question.
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- I feel like you're the right person to ask.
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- What is the definitive greatest song of all time?
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- It varies for me, personally.
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- So you can't speak definitively for everyone?
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- I wouldn't believe very much in machine learning if I did,
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- right? Because everyone had the same taste.
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- So for you, what is you have to pick? What is the song?
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- All right. So it's it's pretty easy for me.
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- There is this song called You're So Cool,
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- Hans Zimmer, a soundtrack to True Romance.
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- It was a movie that made a big impression on me,
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- and it's kind of been following me through my life.
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- Actually, had to play at my wedding.
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- I sat with the organist and helped him play it on an organ,
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- which was a pretty pretty interesting experience.
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- That is probably my I would say top three movie of all time.
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- Yeah, this is an incredible movie.
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- Yeah. And it came out during my formative years.
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- And as I've discovered in music,
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- you shape your music taste during those years.
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- So it definitely affected me quite a bit.
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- Did it affect you in any other kind of way?
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- Well, the movie itself affected me back then.
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- It was a big part of culture.
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- I didn't really adopt any characters from the movie,
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- but it was it was a great story of love.
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- It's fantastic actors.
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- And and really, I didn't even know who Hans Zimmer was at the time,
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- but fantastic music.
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- And so that song has followed me.
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- And the movie actually has followed me throughout my life.
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- That was Quentin Tarantino, actually,
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- I think directed or produced that.
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- So it's not Stairway to Heaven or Bohemian Rhapsody.
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- It's those are those are great.
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- They're not my personal favorites,
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- but I've realized that people have different tastes.
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- And that's that's a big part of what we do.
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- Well, for me, I don't have to stick with Stairway to Heaven.
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- So 35,000 years ago, I looked this up on Wikipedia,
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- flute like instruments started being used in caves
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- as part of hunting rituals and primitive cultural gatherings,
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- things like that.
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- This is the birth of music.
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- Since then, we had a few folks, Beethoven, Elvis, Beatles,
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- Justin Bieber, of course, Drake.
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- So in your view, let's start like high level philosophical.
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- What is the purpose of music on this planet of ours?
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- I think music has many different purposes.
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- I think there's there's certainly a big purpose,
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- which is the same as much of entertainment,
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- which is escapism and to be able to live in some sort of
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- other mental state for a while.
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- But I also think you have the the opposite of escaping,
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- which is to help you focus on something you are actually doing.
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- As I think people use music as a tool to to tune the brain
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- to the activities that they are actually doing.
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- And it's kind of like in one sense,
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- maybe it's the rawest signal.
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- If you if you think about the brain as neural networks,
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- it's maybe the most efficient hack we can do
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- to actually actively tune it into some state that you want to be.
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- You can do it in other ways.
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- You can tell stories to put people in a certain mood,
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- but music is probably very effective
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- to get to a certain mood very fast.
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- You know, there's a there's a social component historically
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- to music where people listen to music together.
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- I was just thinking about this,
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- that to me, and you mentioned machine learning,
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- but to me personally, music is a really private thing.
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- Like I'm speaking for myself.
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- I listen to music like almost nobody knows
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- the kind of things I have in my library,
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- except people who are really close to me
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- and they really only know a certain percentage.
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- There's like some weird stuff
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- that I'm almost probably embarrassed by, right?
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- It's called the guilty pleasures, right?
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- Everyone has the guilty pleasures, yeah.
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- Hopefully they're not too bad.
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- For me, it's personal.
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- Do you think of music as something that's social
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- or as something that's personal?
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- Or does it vary?
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- So I think it's the same answer that you use it for both.
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- We've thought a lot about this
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- during these 10 years at Spotify, obviously.
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- In one sense, as you said, music is incredibly social.
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- You go to concerts and so forth.
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- On the other hand, it is your escape
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- and everyone has these things that are very personal to them.
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- So what we've found is that when it comes to,
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- to most people claim that they have a friend or two
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- that they are heavily inspired by and that they listen to.
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- So I actually think music is very social,
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- but in a smaller group setting,
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- it's an intimate form of, it's an intimate relationship.
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- It's not something that you necessarily share broadly.
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- Now at concerts, you can argue you do,
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- but then you've gathered a lot of people
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- that you have something in common with.
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- I think this broadcast sharing of music
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- is something we tried on social networks and so forth,
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- but it turns out that people aren't super interested in
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- what their friends listen to.
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- They're interested in understanding
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- if they have something in common perhaps with a friend,
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- but not just as information.
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- Right, that's really interesting.
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- I was just thinking that this morning listening to Spotify,
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- I really have a pretty intimate relationship with Spotify,
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- with my playlists.
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- I've had them for many years now
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- and they've grown with me together.
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- There's an intimate relationship you have
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- with a library of music that you've developed.
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- And we'll talk about different ways we can play with that.
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- Can you do the impossible task
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- and try to give a history of music listening
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- from your perspective, from before the internet
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- and after the internet?
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- And just kind of everything leading up to streaming
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- with Spotify and so on.
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- I'll try, it could be a 100 year podcast.
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- Yeah.
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- I'll try to do a brief version.
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- There are some things that I think are very interesting
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- during the history of music,
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- which is that before recorded music,
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- to be able to enjoy music,
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- you actually had to be where the music was produced
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- because you couldn't record it and time shift it, right?
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- Creation and consumption had to happen at the same time,
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- basically concerts.
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- And so you either had to get to the nearest village
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- to listen to music.
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- And while that was cumbersome
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- and it severely limited the distribution of music,
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- it also had some different qualities,
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- which was that the creator could always interact
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- with the audience.
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- It was always live.
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- And also there was no time cap on the music.
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- So I think it's not a coincidence
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- that these early classical works,
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- they're much longer than the three minutes.
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- The three minutes came in as a restriction
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- of the first wax disc that could only contain
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- a three minute song on one side, right?
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- So actually the recorded music severely limited the,
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- or put constraints.
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- I won't say limit.
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- I mean, constraints are often good,
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- but it put very hard constraints on the music format.
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- So you kind of said, like instead of doing this opus
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- of like many, you know, tens of minutes or something,
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- now you get three and a half minutes
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- because then you're out of wax on this disc.
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- But in return, you get an amazing distribution.
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- Your reach will widen, right?
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- Just on that point real quick,
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- without the mass scale distribution,
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- there's a scarcity component where you kind of look forward to it.
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- We had that, it's like the Netflix versus HBO Game of Thrones.
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- You like wait for the event because you can't really listen to it.
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- So you like look forward to it and then it's,
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- you derive perhaps more pleasure
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- because it's more rare for you to listen to particular piece.
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- You think there's value to that scarcity?
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- Yeah, I think that that is definitely a thing.
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- And there's always this component of
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- if you have something in infinite amount,
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- so will you value it as much?
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- Probably not.
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- Humanity is always seeking some, is relative.
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- So you're always seeking something you didn't have
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- and when you have it, you don't appreciate it as much.
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- So I think that's probably true.
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- But I think that's why concerts exist.
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- So you can actually have both.
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- But I think net, if you couldn't listen to music
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- in your car driving, that'd be worse.
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- That cost will be bigger than the benefit of the anticipation,
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- I think, that you would have.
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- So, yeah, it started with live concerts.
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- Then it's being able to, you know, the photograph invented, right?
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- You start to be able to record music.
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- Exactly.
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- So then you got this massive distribution
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- that made it possible to create two things.
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- I think, first of all, cultural phenomenons.
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- They probably need distribution.
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- Distribution to be able to happen.
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- But it also opened access to, you know, for a new kind of artist.
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- So you started to have these phenomenons,
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- like Beatles and Elvis and so forth,
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- that would really a function of distribution, I think.
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- Obviously, of talent and innovation,
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- but there was also taking a component.
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- And of course, the next big innovation to come along
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- was radio, broadcast radio.
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- And I think radio is interesting
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- because it started not as a music medium.
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- It started as an information medium for news.
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- And then radio needed to find something to fill the time with
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- so that they could honestly play more ads and make more money.
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- And music was free.
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- So then you had this massive distribution
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- where you could program to people.
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- I think those things, that ecosystem,
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- is what created the ability for hits.
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- But it was also a very broadcast medium.
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- So you would tend to get these massive, massive hits,
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- but maybe not such a long tail.
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- In terms of choice of everybody listening to the same stuff.
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- Yeah. And as you said, I think there are some social benefits to that.
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- I think, for example, there is a high statistical chance
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- that if I talk about the latest episode of Game of Thrones,
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- we have something to talk about just statistically.
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- In the age of individual choice, maybe some of that goes away.
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- So I do see the value of shared cultural components.
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- But I also obviously love personalization.
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-11:37.440 --> 11:40.080
- And so let's catch this up to the internet.
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- So maybe Napster.
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- Well, first of all, there's like MP3s.
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- Exactly. There's tape, CDs.
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- There was a digitalization of music with a CD, really.
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- It was physical distribution, but the music became digital.
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- And so they were files, but basically boxed software,
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- to use a software analogy.
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- And then you could start downloading these files.
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- And I think there are two interesting things that happened
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- back to music used to be longer
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- before it was constrained by the distribution medium.
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- I don't think that was a coincidence.
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- And then really the only music genre to have developed mostly after
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- music was a file again on the internet is EDM.
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- And EDM is often much longer than the traditional music.
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- I think it's interesting to think about the fact that
-
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- music is no longer constrained in minutes per song or something.
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- It's a legacy of an old distribution technology.
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- And you see some of this new music that breaks the format,
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- not so much as I would have expected actually by now,
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- but it still happens.
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- So first of all, I don't really know what EDM is.
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- Electronic dance music, you could say.
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- Avicii was one of the biggest in this genre.
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- So the main constraint is of time,
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- something like three, four, five minutes song.
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- So you could have songs that were eight minutes,
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- 10 minutes, and so forth.
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- Because it started as a digital product
-
-13:00.320 --> 13:03.920
- that you downloaded, so you didn't have this constraint anymore.
-
-13:04.800 --> 13:06.720
- So I think it's something really interesting
-
-13:06.720 --> 13:08.480
- that I don't think has fully happened yet.
-
-13:09.280 --> 13:11.440
- We're kind of jumping ahead a little bit to where we are,
-
-13:11.440 --> 13:14.960
- but I think there's tons of formal innovation in music
-
-13:15.760 --> 13:19.040
- that should happen now, that couldn't happen
-
-13:19.040 --> 13:22.000
- when you needed to really adhere to the distribution constraints.
-
-13:22.000 --> 13:25.280
- If you didn't adhere to that, you would get no distribution.
-
-13:25.280 --> 13:28.640
- So Björk, for example, an Icelandic artist,
-
-13:28.640 --> 13:30.880
- she made a full iPad app as an album.
-
-13:30.880 --> 13:34.960
- That was very expensive, even though the App Store
-
-13:34.960 --> 13:38.080
- has great distribution, she gets nowhere near the distribution
-
-13:38.080 --> 13:40.240
- versus staying within the three minute format.
-
-13:41.120 --> 13:43.840
- So I think now that music is fully digital
-
-13:43.840 --> 13:45.840
- inside these streaming services,
-
-13:45.840 --> 13:48.320
- there is the opportunity to change the format again
-
-13:48.320 --> 13:51.360
- and allow creators to be much more creative
-
-13:51.360 --> 13:54.400
- without limiting their distribution ability.
-
-13:54.400 --> 13:56.320
- That's interesting that you're right.
-
-13:56.320 --> 13:59.680
- You're right, it's surprising that we don't see
-
-13:59.680 --> 14:01.680
- that taking advantage more often.
-
-14:01.680 --> 14:05.040
- It's almost like the constraints of the distribution
-
-14:05.040 --> 14:08.720
- from the 50s and 60s have molded the culture
-
-14:08.720 --> 14:12.000
- to where we want the three to five minute song,
-
-14:12.800 --> 14:14.800
- that anything else, not just...
-
-14:14.800 --> 14:17.840
- So we want the song as consumers and as artists,
-
-14:18.640 --> 14:20.400
- like, because I write a lot of music
-
-14:20.400 --> 14:22.720
- and I never even thought about writing something
-
-14:22.720 --> 14:25.680
- longer than 10 minutes.
-
-14:26.960 --> 14:28.720
- It's really interesting that those constraints...
-
-14:28.720 --> 14:30.160
- Because all your training data
-
-14:30.160 --> 14:31.920
- has been three and a half minutes long, right?
-
-14:31.920 --> 14:32.400
- It's right.
-
-14:32.960 --> 14:38.400
- Okay, so yeah, digitization of data led to then MP3s.
-
-14:38.400 --> 14:40.400
- Yeah, so I think you had this file then
-
-14:41.440 --> 14:43.120
- that was distributed physically,
-
-14:43.680 --> 14:46.400
- but then you had the components of digital distribution
-
-14:46.400 --> 14:49.680
- and then the internet happened and there was this vacuum
-
-14:49.680 --> 14:52.560
- where you had a format that could be digitally shipped
-
-14:52.560 --> 14:53.760
- but there was no business model.
-
-14:54.320 --> 14:58.000
- And then all these pirate networks happened.
-
-14:59.040 --> 15:01.600
- Napster and in Sweden, Pirate Bay,
-
-15:01.600 --> 15:02.960
- which was one of the biggest.
-
-15:02.960 --> 15:07.120
- And I think from a consumer point of view,
-
-15:07.120 --> 15:10.560
- which leads up to the inception of Spotify
-
-15:10.560 --> 15:11.680
- from a consumer point of view,
-
-15:13.200 --> 15:16.240
- consumers for the first time had this access model to music
-
-15:17.040 --> 15:21.200
- where they could, without any marginal cost,
-
-15:21.200 --> 15:24.400
- they could try different tracks.
-
-15:25.040 --> 15:26.720
- You could use music in new ways.
-
-15:26.720 --> 15:27.840
- There was no marginal cost.
-
-15:28.240 --> 15:30.080
- And that was a fantastic consumer experience.
-
-15:30.080 --> 15:31.840
- They have access to all the music ever made.
-
-15:31.840 --> 15:33.280
- I think it was fantastic.
-
-15:33.840 --> 15:35.600
- But it was also horrible for artists
-
-15:35.600 --> 15:37.280
- because there was no business model around it.
-
-15:37.280 --> 15:38.640
- So they didn't make any money.
-
-15:38.640 --> 15:43.840
- So the user need almost drove the user interface
-
-15:43.840 --> 15:45.280
- before there was a business model.
-
-15:45.760 --> 15:47.440
- And then there were these download stores
-
-15:48.640 --> 15:50.400
- that allowed you to download files.
-
-15:50.400 --> 15:51.920
- Which was a solution,
-
-15:51.920 --> 15:53.920
- but it didn't solve the access problem.
-
-15:53.920 --> 15:55.760
- There was still a marginal cost of 99 cents
-
-15:55.760 --> 15:57.040
- to try one more track.
-
-15:57.040 --> 16:00.400
- And I think that heavily limits how you listen to music.
-
-16:00.400 --> 16:04.480
- The example I always give is in Spotify,
-
-16:04.480 --> 16:07.440
- a huge amount of people listen to music while they sleep,
-
-16:07.440 --> 16:09.120
- while they go to sleep and while they sleep.
-
-16:10.000 --> 16:12.160
- If that costed you 99 cents per three minutes,
-
-16:12.160 --> 16:13.760
- you probably wouldn't do that.
-
-16:13.760 --> 16:15.760
- And you would be much less adventurous
-
-16:15.760 --> 16:17.920
- if there was a real dollar cost to explore music.
-
-16:17.920 --> 16:20.880
- So the access model is interesting in that
-
-16:20.880 --> 16:22.320
- it changes your music behavior.
-
-16:22.880 --> 16:25.600
- You can take much more risk
-
-16:25.600 --> 16:27.120
- because there's no marginal cost to it.
-
-16:28.240 --> 16:30.480
- Maybe let me linger on piracy for a second.
-
-16:30.480 --> 16:32.880
- Because I find, especially coming from Russia,
-
-16:33.840 --> 16:36.080
- piracy is something that's very interesting.
-
-16:36.640 --> 16:41.520
- To me, not me of course ever,
-
-16:41.520 --> 16:47.040
- but I have friends who've partook in piracy
-
-16:47.040 --> 16:52.960
- of music, software, TV shows, sporting events.
-
-16:53.680 --> 16:55.760
- And usually, to me, what that shows
-
-16:55.760 --> 16:59.040
- is not that they can actually pay the money
-
-16:59.600 --> 17:01.040
- and they're not trying to save money.
-
-17:01.920 --> 17:04.000
- They're choosing the best experience.
-
-17:05.120 --> 17:07.520
- So what to me, piracy shows
-
-17:07.520 --> 17:09.920
- is a business opportunity in all these domains.
-
-17:09.920 --> 17:12.480
- And that's where I think you're right.
-
-17:12.480 --> 17:14.880
- Spotify stepped in is basically,
-
-17:14.880 --> 17:17.120
- piracy is an experience.
-
-17:17.120 --> 17:19.600
- You can explore, find music you like.
-
-17:20.240 --> 17:24.320
- And actually, the interface of piracy is horrible.
-
-17:24.960 --> 17:26.800
- Because it's, I mean...
-
-17:26.800 --> 17:30.960
- Bad metadata, long download times, all kinds of stuff.
-
-17:30.960 --> 17:33.040
- And what Spotify does is basically
-
-17:34.880 --> 17:36.160
- first, rewards artists,
-
-17:36.160 --> 17:38.560
- and second, makes the experience
-
-17:38.560 --> 17:40.080
- of exploring music much better.
-
-17:40.080 --> 17:43.920
- I mean, the same is true, I think, for movies and so on.
-
-17:43.920 --> 17:46.960
- Piracy reveals, in the software space, for example,
-
-17:46.960 --> 17:49.760
- I'm a huge user and fan of Adobe products.
-
-17:50.480 --> 17:53.600
- And there was much more incentive
-
-17:53.600 --> 17:55.360
- to pirate Adobe products
-
-17:55.360 --> 17:57.680
- before they went to a monthly subscription plan.
-
-17:58.320 --> 18:01.040
- And now, all of the said friends
-
-18:01.600 --> 18:05.040
- that used to pirate Adobe products that I know,
-
-18:05.040 --> 18:08.000
- now actually pay, gladly, for the monthly subscription.
-
-18:08.000 --> 18:09.280
- Yeah, I think you're right.
-
-18:09.280 --> 18:11.520
- I think it's a sign of an opportunity
-
-18:11.520 --> 18:12.960
- for product development.
-
-18:12.960 --> 18:17.760
- And that sometimes there's a product market fit
-
-18:17.760 --> 18:21.360
- before there's a business model fit in product development.
-
-18:21.360 --> 18:23.200
- I think that's a sign of it.
-
-18:23.200 --> 18:25.760
- In Sweden, I think it was a bit of both.
-
-18:25.760 --> 18:29.680
- There was a culture where we even had
-
-18:29.680 --> 18:32.000
- a political party called the Pirate Party.
-
-18:32.000 --> 18:35.120
- And this was during the time when people said that
-
-18:35.120 --> 18:36.640
- information should be free.
-
-18:36.640 --> 18:39.360
- It was somehow wrong to charge for ones and zeros.
-
-18:39.360 --> 18:42.480
- So I think people felt that artists
-
-18:42.480 --> 18:44.720
- should probably make some money somehow else
-
-18:44.720 --> 18:46.240
- in concerts or something.
-
-18:46.240 --> 18:49.280
- So at least in Sweden, it was part really social acceptance
-
-18:49.280 --> 18:51.120
- even at the political level.
-
-18:51.120 --> 18:55.120
- But that also forced Spotify to compete with free,
-
-18:57.120 --> 18:58.800
- which I don't think could have happened
-
-18:58.800 --> 19:00.080
- anywhere else in the world.
-
-19:00.080 --> 19:02.960
- The music industry needed to be doing bad enough
-
-19:02.960 --> 19:04.400
- to take that risk.
-
-19:04.400 --> 19:06.240
- And Sweden was like the perfect testing ground.
-
-19:06.240 --> 19:10.960
- It had government funded high bandwidth, low latency broadband,
-
-19:10.960 --> 19:12.880
- which meant that the product would work.
-
-19:12.880 --> 19:15.520
- And it was also, there was no music revenue anyway.
-
-19:15.520 --> 19:16.800
- So they were kind of like,
-
-19:16.800 --> 19:19.040
- I don't think this is going to work, but why not?
-
-19:20.320 --> 19:22.640
- So this product is one that I don't think could have happened
-
-19:22.640 --> 19:24.800
- in America, the world's largest music market, for example.
-
-19:24.800 --> 19:27.040
- So how do you compete with free?
-
-19:27.040 --> 19:29.840
- Because that's an interesting world of the internet
-
-19:29.840 --> 19:32.960
- where most people don't like to pay for things.
-
-19:32.960 --> 19:37.120
- So Spotify steps in and tries to, yes, compete with free.
-
-19:37.120 --> 19:38.320
- How do you do it?
-
-19:38.320 --> 19:39.760
- So I think two things.
-
-19:39.760 --> 19:43.360
- One is people are starting to pay for things on the internet.
-
-19:43.360 --> 19:46.560
- I think one way to think about it was that advertising
-
-19:46.560 --> 19:48.560
- was the first business model
-
-19:48.560 --> 19:50.560
- because no one would put the credit card on the internet.
-
-19:50.560 --> 19:52.720
- Transactional with Amazon was the second.
-
-19:52.720 --> 19:54.320
- And maybe subscription is the third.
-
-19:54.320 --> 19:57.520
- And if you look offline, subscription is the biggest of those.
-
-19:57.520 --> 19:59.120
- So that may still happen.
-
-19:59.120 --> 20:00.320
- I think people are starting to pay.
-
-20:00.320 --> 20:03.120
- But definitely back then, we needed to compete with free.
-
-20:03.120 --> 20:04.960
- And the first thing you need to do is obviously
-
-20:04.960 --> 20:06.960
- to lower the price to free.
-
-20:06.960 --> 20:10.160
- And then you need to be better somehow.
-
-20:10.160 --> 20:13.760
- And the way that Spotify was better was on the user experience,
-
-20:13.760 --> 20:19.760
- on the actual performance, the latency of, you know,
-
-20:19.760 --> 20:24.560
- even if you had high band with broadband,
-
-20:24.560 --> 20:27.360
- it would still take you 30 seconds to a minute
-
-20:27.360 --> 20:28.960
- to download one of these tracks.
-
-20:28.960 --> 20:31.360
- So the Spotify experience of starting within the
-
-20:31.360 --> 20:34.560
- perceptual limit of immediacy, about 250 milliseconds,
-
-20:34.560 --> 20:37.360
- meant that the whole trick was,
-
-20:37.360 --> 20:39.760
- it felt as if you had downloaded all of Pirate Bay.
-
-20:39.760 --> 20:40.960
- It was on your hard drive.
-
-20:40.960 --> 20:43.360
- It was that fast, even though it wasn't.
-
-20:43.360 --> 20:44.960
- And it was still free.
-
-20:44.960 --> 20:48.960
- But somehow you were actually still being a legal citizen.
-
-20:48.960 --> 20:52.960
- That was the trick that Spotify managed to pull off.
-
-20:52.960 --> 20:56.560
- So I've actually heard you say this or write this.
-
-20:56.560 --> 20:58.960
- And I was surprised that I wasn't aware of it,
-
-20:58.960 --> 21:00.560
- because I just took it for granted.
-
-21:00.560 --> 21:02.560
- You know, whenever an awesome thing comes along,
-
-21:02.560 --> 21:04.560
- you just like, oh, of course it has to be this way.
-
-21:04.560 --> 21:06.560
- That's exactly right.
-
-21:06.560 --> 21:08.560
- That it felt like the entire world's libraries
-
-21:08.560 --> 21:12.560
- at my fingertips because of that latency being reduced.
-
-21:12.560 --> 21:16.560
- What was the technical challenge in reducing the late?
-
-21:16.560 --> 21:20.560
- So there was a group of really, really talented engineers.
-
-21:20.560 --> 21:22.560
- One of them called Ludwig Strigius.
-
-21:22.560 --> 21:26.560
- He wrote the, actually from Gothenburg,
-
-21:26.560 --> 21:30.560
- he wrote the initial, the UTorrent Clients,
-
-21:30.560 --> 21:32.560
- which is kind of an interesting backstory to Spotify,
-
-21:32.560 --> 21:36.560
- you know, that we have one of the top developers
-
-21:36.560 --> 21:38.560
- from BitTorrent Clients as well.
-
-21:38.560 --> 21:42.560
- So he wrote UTorrent, the world's smallest BitTorrent Clients.
-
-21:42.560 --> 21:47.560
- And then he was acquired very early by Daniel and Martin,
-
-21:47.560 --> 21:50.560
- who founded Spotify, and they actually sold the UTorrent Client
-
-21:50.560 --> 21:52.560
- to BitTorrent, but kept Ludwig.
-
-21:52.560 --> 21:58.560
- So Spotify had a lot of experience within peer to peer networking.
-
-21:58.560 --> 22:02.560
- So the original innovation was a distribution innovation,
-
-22:02.560 --> 22:05.560
- where Spotify built an end to end media distribution system.
-
-22:05.560 --> 22:08.560
- Up until only a few years ago, we actually hosted all the music ourselves.
-
-22:08.560 --> 22:10.560
- So we had both the server side and the client,
-
-22:10.560 --> 22:14.560
- and that meant that we could do things such as having a peer to peer solution
-
-22:14.560 --> 22:17.560
- to use local caching on the client side,
-
-22:17.560 --> 22:20.560
- because back then the world was mostly desktop.
-
-22:20.560 --> 22:24.560
- But we could also do things like hack the TCP protocols,
-
-22:24.560 --> 22:28.560
- things like Nagle's algorithm for kind of exponential back off,
-
-22:28.560 --> 22:32.560
- or ramp up and just go full throttle and optimize for latency
-
-22:32.560 --> 22:34.560
- at the cost of bandwidth.
-
-22:34.560 --> 22:38.560
- And all of this end to end control meant that we could do
-
-22:38.560 --> 22:41.560
- an experience that felt like a step change.
-
-22:41.560 --> 22:45.560
- These days, we actually are on on GCP.
-
-22:45.560 --> 22:48.560
- We don't host our own stuff, and everyone is really fast these days.
-
-22:48.560 --> 22:50.560
- So that was the initial competitive advantage,
-
-22:50.560 --> 22:52.560
- but then obviously you have to move on over time.
-
-22:52.560 --> 22:55.560
- And that was over 10 years ago, right?
-
-22:55.560 --> 22:58.560
- That was in 2008, the product was launched in Sweden.
-
-22:58.560 --> 23:00.560
- It was in a beta, I think, 2007.
-
-23:00.560 --> 23:02.560
- And it was on the desktop, right?
-
-23:02.560 --> 23:03.560
- It was desktop only.
-
-23:03.560 --> 23:04.560
- There's no phone.
-
-23:04.560 --> 23:05.560
- There was no phone.
-
-23:05.560 --> 23:08.560
- The iPhone came out in 2008,
-
-23:08.560 --> 23:11.560
- but the App Store came out one year later, I think.
-
-23:11.560 --> 23:14.560
- So the writing was on the wall, but there was no phone yet.
-
-23:14.560 --> 23:19.560
- You've mentioned that people would use Spotify
-
-23:19.560 --> 23:20.560
- to discover the songs they like,
-
-23:20.560 --> 23:23.560
- and then they would torrent those songs
-
-23:23.560 --> 23:26.560
- so they can copy it to their phone.
-
-23:26.560 --> 23:27.560
- Just hilarious.
-
-23:27.560 --> 23:28.560
- Exactly.
-
-23:28.560 --> 23:29.560
- Or not torrent.
-
-23:29.560 --> 23:34.560
- Seriously, piracy does seem to be a good guide
-
-23:34.560 --> 23:36.560
- for business models.
-
-23:36.560 --> 23:37.560
- Video content.
-
-23:37.560 --> 23:40.560
- As far as I know, Spotify doesn't have video content.
-
-23:40.560 --> 23:42.560
- Well, we do have music videos,
-
-23:42.560 --> 23:44.560
- and we do have videos on the service,
-
-23:44.560 --> 23:46.560
- but the way we think about ourselves is that
-
-23:46.560 --> 23:48.560
- we're an audio service,
-
-23:48.560 --> 23:52.560
- and we think that if you look at the amount of time
-
-23:52.560 --> 23:53.560
- that people spend on audio,
-
-23:53.560 --> 23:56.560
- it's actually very similar to the amount of time
-
-23:56.560 --> 23:57.560
- that people spend on video.
-
-23:57.560 --> 24:01.560
- So the opportunity should be equally big,
-
-24:01.560 --> 24:02.560
- but today it's not at all valued.
-
-24:02.560 --> 24:04.560
- Video is valued much higher.
-
-24:04.560 --> 24:07.560
- So we think it's basically completely undervalued.
-
-24:07.560 --> 24:09.560
- We think of ourselves as an audio service,
-
-24:09.560 --> 24:12.560
- but within that audio service, I think video
-
-24:12.560 --> 24:13.560
- can make a lot of sense.
-
-24:13.560 --> 24:16.560
- I think when you're discovering an artist,
-
-24:16.560 --> 24:17.560
- you probably do want to see them
-
-24:17.560 --> 24:18.560
- and understand who they are,
-
-24:18.560 --> 24:20.560
- to understand their identity.
-
-24:20.560 --> 24:21.560
- Do you want to see that video every time?
-
-24:21.560 --> 24:22.560
- No.
-
-24:22.560 --> 24:24.560
- 90% of the time the phone is going to be in your pocket.
-
-24:24.560 --> 24:26.560
- For podcasters, you use video.
-
-24:26.560 --> 24:28.560
- I think that can make a ton of sense.
-
-24:28.560 --> 24:29.560
- So we do have video,
-
-24:29.560 --> 24:31.560
- but we're an audio service where,
-
-24:31.560 --> 24:33.560
- think of it as we call it internally,
-
-24:33.560 --> 24:34.560
- backgroundable video.
-
-24:34.560 --> 24:35.560
- Video that is helpful,
-
-24:35.560 --> 24:38.560
- but isn't the driver of the narrative.
-
-24:38.560 --> 24:42.560
- I think also if you look at YouTube,
-
-24:42.560 --> 24:43.560
- the way people,
-
-24:43.560 --> 24:47.560
- there's quite a few folks who listen to music on YouTube.
-
-24:47.560 --> 24:48.560
- So in some sense,
-
-24:48.560 --> 24:52.560
- YouTube is a bit of a competitor to Spotify,
-
-24:52.560 --> 24:55.560
- which is very strange to me that people use YouTube
-
-24:55.560 --> 24:56.560
- to listen to music.
-
-24:56.560 --> 24:59.560
- They play essentially the music videos, right?
-
-24:59.560 --> 25:02.560
- But don't watch the videos and put it in their pocket.
-
-25:02.560 --> 25:07.560
- Well, I think it's similar to what
-
-25:07.560 --> 25:11.560
- strangely maybe it's similar to what we were
-
-25:11.560 --> 25:13.560
- for the Piracy Networks,
-
-25:13.560 --> 25:17.560
- where YouTube for historical reasons
-
-25:17.560 --> 25:20.560
- have a lot of music videos.
-
-25:20.560 --> 25:21.560
- So you use,
-
-25:21.560 --> 25:23.560
- people use YouTube for a lot of the discovery part
-
-25:23.560 --> 25:24.560
- of the process, I think.
-
-25:24.560 --> 25:26.560
- But then it's not a really good
-
-25:26.560 --> 25:28.560
- sort of quote unquote MP3 player,
-
-25:28.560 --> 25:29.560
- because it doesn't even background.
-
-25:29.560 --> 25:31.560
- Then you have to keep the app in the foreground.
-
-25:31.560 --> 25:32.560
- So the consumption,
-
-25:32.560 --> 25:34.560
- it's not a good consumption tool,
-
-25:34.560 --> 25:35.560
- but it's a decently good discovery.
-
-25:35.560 --> 25:37.560
- I mean, I think YouTube is fantastic products.
-
-25:37.560 --> 25:39.560
- And I use it for all kinds of purposes.
-
-25:39.560 --> 25:40.560
- That's true.
-
-25:40.560 --> 25:42.560
- If I were to admit something,
-
-25:42.560 --> 25:44.560
- I do use YouTube a little bit for the discovery,
-
-25:44.560 --> 25:46.560
- to assist in the discovery process of songs.
-
-25:46.560 --> 25:48.560
- And then if I like it,
-
-25:48.560 --> 25:50.560
- I'll add it to Spotify.
-
-25:50.560 --> 25:51.560
- But that's okay.
-
-25:51.560 --> 25:52.560
- That's okay with us.
-
-25:52.560 --> 25:53.560
- Okay.
-
-25:53.560 --> 25:55.560
- So sorry, we're jumping around a little bit.
-
-25:55.560 --> 25:58.560
- So this kind of incredible,
-
-25:58.560 --> 25:59.560
- you look at Napster,
-
-25:59.560 --> 26:01.560
- you look at the early days of Spotify.
-
-26:01.560 --> 26:02.560
- How do you,
-
-26:02.560 --> 26:04.560
- one fascinating point is how do you grow
-
-26:04.560 --> 26:05.560
- a user base?
-
-26:05.560 --> 26:07.560
- So you're there in Sweden.
-
-26:07.560 --> 26:09.560
- You have an idea.
-
-26:09.560 --> 26:12.560
- I saw the initial sketches that looked terrible.
-
-26:12.560 --> 26:14.560
- How do you grow a user base
-
-26:14.560 --> 26:18.560
- from a few folks to millions?
-
-26:18.560 --> 26:21.560
- I think there are a bunch of tactical answers.
-
-26:21.560 --> 26:22.560
- So first of all,
-
-26:22.560 --> 26:23.560
- I think you need a great product.
-
-26:23.560 --> 26:25.560
- I don't think you take a bad product
-
-26:25.560 --> 26:29.560
- and market it to be successful.
-
-26:29.560 --> 26:30.560
- So you need a great product.
-
-26:30.560 --> 26:31.560
- Sorry to interrupt,
-
-26:31.560 --> 26:33.560
- but it's a totally new way to listen to music.
-
-26:33.560 --> 26:34.560
- So it's not just,
-
-26:34.560 --> 26:38.560
- did people realize immediately that Spotify is a great product?
-
-26:38.560 --> 26:39.560
- I think they did.
-
-26:39.560 --> 26:41.560
- So back to the point of piracy,
-
-26:41.560 --> 26:44.560
- it was a totally new way to listen to music legally,
-
-26:44.560 --> 26:47.560
- but people had been used to the access model in Sweden
-
-26:47.560 --> 26:49.560
- and the rest of the world for a long time through piracy.
-
-26:49.560 --> 26:51.560
- So one way to think about Spotify,
-
-26:51.560 --> 26:53.560
- it was just legal and fast piracy.
-
-26:53.560 --> 26:55.560
- And so people have been using it for a long time.
-
-26:55.560 --> 26:57.560
- So they weren't alien to it.
-
-26:57.560 --> 27:00.560
- They didn't really understand how it could be legal
-
-27:00.560 --> 27:03.560
- because it seemed too fast and too good to be true,
-
-27:03.560 --> 27:05.560
- which I think is a great product proposition
-
-27:05.560 --> 27:07.560
- if you can be too good to be true.
-
-27:07.560 --> 27:09.560
- But what I saw again and again
-
-27:09.560 --> 27:10.560
- was people showing each other,
-
-27:10.560 --> 27:12.560
- clicking the song, showing how fast it started
-
-27:12.560 --> 27:14.560
- and say, can you believe this?
-
-27:14.560 --> 27:17.560
- So I really think it was about speed.
-
-27:17.560 --> 27:20.560
- Then we also had an invite program
-
-27:20.560 --> 27:22.560
- that was really meant for scaling
-
-27:22.560 --> 27:24.560
- because we hosted our own servers.
-
-27:24.560 --> 27:26.560
- We needed to control scaling,
-
-27:26.560 --> 27:28.560
- but that built a lot of expectation
-
-27:28.560 --> 27:30.560
- and I don't want to say hype
-
-27:30.560 --> 27:34.560
- because hype implies that it wasn't true.
-
-27:34.560 --> 27:37.560
- Expectations, excitement around the product.
-
-27:37.560 --> 27:40.560
- And we replicated that when we launched in the US.
-
-27:40.560 --> 27:42.560
- We also built up an invite only program first.
-
-27:42.560 --> 27:44.560
- There are lots of tactics,
-
-27:44.560 --> 27:46.560
- but I think you need a great product
-
-27:46.560 --> 27:48.560
- to solve some problem.
-
-27:48.560 --> 27:51.560
- And basically the key innovation,
-
-27:51.560 --> 27:54.560
- there was technology, but on a meta level,
-
-27:54.560 --> 27:56.560
- the innovation was really the access model
-
-27:56.560 --> 27:58.560
- versus the ownership model.
-
-27:58.560 --> 28:00.560
- And that was tricky.
-
-28:00.560 --> 28:04.560
- A lot of people said that they wanted to own their music.
-
-28:04.560 --> 28:07.560
- They would never kind of rent it or borrow it.
-
-28:07.560 --> 28:09.560
- But I think the fact that we had a free tier
-
-28:09.560 --> 28:12.560
- which meant that you get to keep this music for life as well
-
-28:12.560 --> 28:14.560
- helped quite a lot.
-
-28:14.560 --> 28:17.560
- So this is an interesting psychological point
-
-28:17.560 --> 28:19.560
- that maybe you can speak to.
-
-28:19.560 --> 28:21.560
- It was a big shift for me.
-
-28:21.560 --> 28:25.560
- It's almost like to go to therapy for this.
-
-28:25.560 --> 28:29.560
- I think I would describe my early listening experience
-
-28:29.560 --> 28:31.560
- and I think a lot of my friends do,
-
-28:31.560 --> 28:33.560
- is basically hoarding music.
-
-28:33.560 --> 28:36.560
- As you're slowly one song by one song,
-
-28:36.560 --> 28:37.560
- or maybe albums,
-
-28:37.560 --> 28:40.560
- gathering a collection of music that you love.
-
-28:40.560 --> 28:42.560
- And you own it.
-
-28:42.560 --> 28:44.560
- Especially with CDs or tape,
-
-28:44.560 --> 28:46.560
- you physically had it.
-
-28:46.560 --> 28:48.560
- And what Spotify,
-
-28:48.560 --> 28:50.560
- what I had to come to grips with,
-
-28:50.560 --> 28:52.560
- and it was kind of liberating actually,
-
-28:52.560 --> 28:55.560
- is to throw away all the music.
-
-28:55.560 --> 28:58.560
- I've had this therapy session with lots of people.
-
-28:58.560 --> 29:00.560
- And I think the mental trick is,
-
-29:00.560 --> 29:02.560
- so actually we've seen the user data.
-
-29:02.560 --> 29:03.560
- When Spotify started,
-
-29:03.560 --> 29:05.560
- a lot of people did the exact same thing.
-
-29:05.560 --> 29:06.560
- They started hoarding,
-
-29:06.560 --> 29:09.560
- as if the music would disappear.
-
-29:09.560 --> 29:11.560
- Almost the equivalent of downloading.
-
-29:11.560 --> 29:14.560
- And so we had these playlists that had limits
-
-29:14.560 --> 29:16.560
- of a few hundred thousand tracks
-
-29:16.560 --> 29:18.560
- and we figured no one would ever.
-
-29:18.560 --> 29:19.560
- Well, they do.
-
-29:19.560 --> 29:21.560
- It's in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tracks.
-
-29:21.560 --> 29:23.560
- And to this day,
-
-29:23.560 --> 29:25.560
- some people want to actually save,
-
-29:25.560 --> 29:26.560
- quote unquote,
-
-29:26.560 --> 29:27.560
- and play the entire catalog.
-
-29:27.560 --> 29:29.560
- But I think that the therapy session
-
-29:29.560 --> 29:31.560
- goes something like,
-
-29:31.560 --> 29:34.560
- instead of throwing away your music,
-
-29:34.560 --> 29:36.560
- if you took your files
-
-29:36.560 --> 29:39.560
- and you stored them in a locker at Google,
-
-29:39.560 --> 29:40.560
- it'd be a streaming service.
-
-29:40.560 --> 29:41.560
- It's just that in that locker,
-
-29:41.560 --> 29:43.560
- you have all the world's music now for free.
-
-29:43.560 --> 29:44.560
- So instead of giving away your music,
-
-29:44.560 --> 29:46.560
- you got all the music.
-
-29:46.560 --> 29:47.560
- It's yours.
-
-29:47.560 --> 29:48.560
- You could think of it as having a copy
-
-29:48.560 --> 29:50.560
- of the world's catalog there forever.
-
-29:50.560 --> 29:53.560
- So you actually got more music instead of less.
-
-29:53.560 --> 29:56.560
- It's just that you just took that hard disk
-
-29:56.560 --> 29:59.560
- and you sent it to someone who stored it for you.
-
-29:59.560 --> 30:01.560
- And once you go through that mental journey of,
-
-30:01.560 --> 30:03.560
- like, still my files, they're just over there.
-
-30:03.560 --> 30:06.560
- And I just have 40 million or 50 million or something now.
-
-30:06.560 --> 30:08.560
- Then people are like, okay, that's good.
-
-30:08.560 --> 30:10.560
- The problem is, I think,
-
-30:10.560 --> 30:12.560
- because you paid us a subscription,
-
-30:12.560 --> 30:14.560
- if we hadn't had the free tier,
-
-30:14.560 --> 30:15.560
- where you would feel like,
-
-30:15.560 --> 30:16.560
- even if I don't want to pay anymore,
-
-30:16.560 --> 30:18.560
- I still get to keep them.
-
-30:18.560 --> 30:19.560
- You keep your playlists forever.
-
-30:19.560 --> 30:21.560
- They don't disappear even though you stop paying.
-
-30:21.560 --> 30:23.560
- I think that was really important.
-
-30:23.560 --> 30:25.560
- If we would have started as, you know,
-
-30:25.560 --> 30:27.560
- you can put in all this time,
-
-30:27.560 --> 30:29.560
- but if you stop paying, you lose all your work.
-
-30:29.560 --> 30:31.560
- I think that would have been a big challenge
-
-30:31.560 --> 30:33.560
- and was the big challenge for a lot of our competitors.
-
-30:33.560 --> 30:35.560
- That's another reason why I think the free tier
-
-30:35.560 --> 30:36.560
- is really important,
-
-30:36.560 --> 30:38.560
- that people need to feel the security
-
-30:38.560 --> 30:40.560
- that the work they put in, it will never disappear,
-
-30:40.560 --> 30:42.560
- even if they decide not to pay.
-
-30:42.560 --> 30:44.560
- I like how you put the work you put in.
-
-30:44.560 --> 30:46.560
- I actually stopped even thinking of it that way.
-
-30:46.560 --> 30:49.560
- Spotify taught me to just enjoy music
-
-30:49.560 --> 30:53.560
- as opposed to what I was doing before,
-
-30:53.560 --> 30:57.560
- which is like, in an unhealthy way, hoarding music.
-
-30:57.560 --> 31:00.560
- Which I found that because I was doing that,
-
-31:00.560 --> 31:03.560
- I was listening to a small selection of songs
-
-31:03.560 --> 31:06.560
- way too much to where I was getting sick of them.
-
-31:06.560 --> 31:09.560
- Whereas Spotify, the more liberating kind of approach,
-
-31:09.560 --> 31:11.560
- I was just enjoying, of course,
-
-31:11.560 --> 31:13.560
- I listened to Stairway to Heaven over and over,
-
-31:13.560 --> 31:16.560
- but because of the extra variety,
-
-31:16.560 --> 31:18.560
- I don't get as sick of them.
-
-31:18.560 --> 31:21.560
- There's an interesting statistic I saw,
-
-31:21.560 --> 31:24.560
- so Spotify has, maybe you can correct me,
-
-31:24.560 --> 31:27.560
- but over 50 million songs, tracks,
-
-31:27.560 --> 31:31.560
- and over 3 billion playlists.
-
-31:31.560 --> 31:35.560
- So 50 million songs and 3 billion playlists.
-
-31:35.560 --> 31:38.560
- 60 times more playlists than songs.
-
-31:38.560 --> 31:40.560
- What do you make of that?
-
-31:40.560 --> 31:43.560
- So the way I think about it is that
-
-31:43.560 --> 31:48.560
- from a statistical machine learning point of view,
-
-31:48.560 --> 31:50.560
- you have all these,
-
-31:50.560 --> 31:52.560
- if you want to think about reinforcement learning,
-
-31:52.560 --> 31:54.560
- you have this state space of all the tracks,
-
-31:54.560 --> 31:58.560
- and you can take different journeys through this world.
-
-31:58.560 --> 32:02.560
- And I think of these as like people
-
-32:02.560 --> 32:05.560
- helping themselves and each other,
-
-32:05.560 --> 32:08.560
- creating interesting vectors through this space of tracks.
-
-32:08.560 --> 32:11.560
- And then it's not so surprising that across
-
-32:11.560 --> 32:14.560
- many tens of millions of atomic units,
-
-32:14.560 --> 32:17.560
- there will be billions of paths that make sense.
-
-32:17.560 --> 32:20.560
- And we're probably pretty quite far away from
-
-32:20.560 --> 32:22.560
- having found all of them.
-
-32:22.560 --> 32:25.560
- So kind of our job now is,
-
-32:25.560 --> 32:28.560
- when Spotify started, it was really a search box
-
-32:28.560 --> 32:30.560
- that was for the time pretty powerful,
-
-32:30.560 --> 32:33.560
- and then I like to refer to this programming language
-
-32:33.560 --> 32:35.560
- called playlisting, where if you,
-
-32:35.560 --> 32:37.560
- as you probably were pretty good at music,
-
-32:37.560 --> 32:39.560
- you knew your new releases, you knew your back catalog,
-
-32:39.560 --> 32:41.560
- you knew you're starting with the heaven,
-
-32:41.560 --> 32:43.560
- you could create a soundtrack for yourself
-
-32:43.560 --> 32:45.560
- using this playlisting tool that's like metaprogramming language
-
-32:45.560 --> 32:47.560
- for music to soundtrack your life.
-
-32:47.560 --> 32:49.560
- And people who are good at music,
-
-32:49.560 --> 32:51.560
- it's back to how do you scale the product.
-
-32:51.560 --> 32:53.560
- For people who are good at music,
-
-32:53.560 --> 32:55.560
- that wasn't actually enough.
-
-32:55.560 --> 32:57.560
- If you had the catalog and a good search tool,
-
-32:57.560 --> 32:59.560
- and you can create your own sessions,
-
-32:59.560 --> 33:02.560
- you could create really good a soundtrack for your entire life.
-
-33:02.560 --> 33:05.560
- Probably perfectly personalized because you did it yourself.
-
-33:05.560 --> 33:07.560
- The problem was, many people aren't that good at music.
-
-33:07.560 --> 33:09.560
- They just can't spend the time.
-
-33:09.560 --> 33:11.560
- Even if you're very good at music, it's going to be hard to keep up.
-
-33:11.560 --> 33:14.560
- So what we did to try to scale this
-
-33:14.560 --> 33:17.560
- was to essentially try to build,
-
-33:17.560 --> 33:19.560
- you can think of them as agents,
-
-33:19.560 --> 33:21.560
- this friend that some people had
-
-33:21.560 --> 33:23.560
- that helped them navigate this music catalog.
-
-33:23.560 --> 33:25.560
- That's what we're trying to do for you.
-
-33:25.560 --> 33:30.560
- But also, there is something like
-
-33:30.560 --> 33:34.560
- 200 million active users on Spotify.
-
-33:34.560 --> 33:38.560
- So from the machine learning perspective,
-
-33:38.560 --> 33:42.560
- you have these 200 million people plus.
-
-33:42.560 --> 33:45.560
- They're creating,
-
-33:45.560 --> 33:48.560
- it's really interesting to think of playlists
-
-33:48.560 --> 33:52.560
- as, I don't know if you meant it that way,
-
-33:52.560 --> 33:54.560
- but it's almost like a programming language.
-
-33:54.560 --> 33:59.560
- It's released a trace of exploration
-
-33:59.560 --> 34:03.560
- of those individual agents, the listeners.
-
-34:03.560 --> 34:06.560
- And you have all this new tracks coming in.
-
-34:06.560 --> 34:12.560
- So it's a fascinating space that is ripe for machine learning.
-
-34:12.560 --> 34:18.560
- So how can playlists be used as data
-
-34:18.560 --> 34:21.560
- in terms of machine learning
-
-34:21.560 --> 34:24.560
- to help Spotify organize the music?
-
-34:24.560 --> 34:27.560
- So we found in our data,
-
-34:27.560 --> 34:30.560
- not surprising that people who playlisted lots,
-
-34:30.560 --> 34:32.560
- they retained much better.
-
-34:32.560 --> 34:34.560
- We had a great experience.
-
-34:34.560 --> 34:37.560
- And so our first attempt was to playlist for users.
-
-34:37.560 --> 34:40.560
- And so we acquired this company called Tunigo of editors
-
-34:40.560 --> 34:43.560
- and professional playlisters
-
-34:43.560 --> 34:47.560
- and kind of leveraged the maximum of human intelligence
-
-34:47.560 --> 34:50.560
- to help build kind of these vectors
-
-34:50.560 --> 34:53.560
- through the track space for people.
-
-34:53.560 --> 34:55.560
- And that brought in the product.
-
-34:55.560 --> 34:57.560
- Then the obvious next,
-
-34:57.560 --> 34:59.560
- and we used statistical means
-
-34:59.560 --> 35:02.560
- where they could see when they created a playlist,
-
-35:02.560 --> 35:04.560
- how did that playlist perform?
-
-35:04.560 --> 35:06.560
- They could see skips of the songs,
-
-35:06.560 --> 35:08.560
- they could see how the songs perform,
-
-35:08.560 --> 35:10.560
- and they manually iterated the playlist
-
-35:10.560 --> 35:13.560
- to maximize performance for a large group of people.
-
-35:13.560 --> 35:16.560
- But there were never enough editors to playlists for you personally.
-
-35:16.560 --> 35:18.560
- So the promise of machine learning
-
-35:18.560 --> 35:20.560
- was to go from kind of group personalization,
-
-35:20.560 --> 35:23.560
- using editors and tools and statistics
-
-35:23.560 --> 35:25.560
- to individualization.
-
-35:25.560 --> 35:27.560
- And then what's so interesting
-
-35:27.560 --> 35:29.560
- about three billion playlists we have is,
-
-35:29.560 --> 35:31.560
- the truth is we lucked out.
-
-35:31.560 --> 35:33.560
- This was not a priori strategy,
-
-35:33.560 --> 35:35.560
- as is often the case.
-
-35:35.560 --> 35:37.560
- It looks really smart in hindsight,
-
-35:37.560 --> 35:39.560
- but it was dumb luck.
-
-35:39.560 --> 35:41.560
- We looked at these playlists
-
-35:41.560 --> 35:44.560
- and we had some people in the company,
-
-35:44.560 --> 35:46.560
- a person named Erik Bernhardtson,
-
-35:46.560 --> 35:48.560
- who was really good at machine learning
-
-35:48.560 --> 35:51.560
- already back then, in like 2007, 2008.
-
-35:51.560 --> 35:54.560
- Back then it was mostly collaborative filtering and so forth,
-
-35:54.560 --> 35:57.560
- we realized that what this is,
-
-35:57.560 --> 36:00.560
- is people are grouping tracks for themselves
-
-36:00.560 --> 36:02.560
- that have some semantic meaning to them.
-
-36:02.560 --> 36:04.560
- And then they actually label it
-
-36:04.560 --> 36:06.560
- with a playlist name as well.
-
-36:06.560 --> 36:09.560
- So in a sense, people were grouping tracks
-
-36:09.560 --> 36:11.560
- along semantic dimensions and labeling them.
-
-36:11.560 --> 36:14.560
- And so could you use that information
-
-36:14.560 --> 36:18.560
- to find that latent embedding?
-
-36:18.560 --> 36:21.560
- And so we started playing around
-
-36:21.560 --> 36:23.560
- with collaborative filtering
-
-36:23.560 --> 36:26.560
- and we saw tremendous success with it.
-
-36:26.560 --> 36:30.560
- Basically trying to extract some of these dimensions.
-
-36:30.560 --> 36:33.560
- And if you think about it, it's not surprising at all.
-
-36:33.560 --> 36:35.560
- It would be quite surprising
-
-36:35.560 --> 36:37.560
- if playlists were actually random,
-
-36:37.560 --> 36:39.560
- if they had no semantic meaning.
-
-36:39.560 --> 36:42.560
- For most people, they grouped these tracks for some reason.
-
-36:42.560 --> 36:45.560
- So we just happened across this incredible data set
-
-36:45.560 --> 36:48.560
- where people had taken these tens of millions of tracks
-
-36:48.560 --> 36:52.560
- and grouped them along different semantic vectors.
-
-36:52.560 --> 36:55.560
- And the semantics being outside the individual user,
-
-36:55.560 --> 36:57.560
- so it's some kind of universal.
-
-36:57.560 --> 36:59.560
- There's a universal embedding
-
-36:59.560 --> 37:02.560
- that holds across people on this earth.
-
-37:02.560 --> 37:05.560
- Yes, I do think that the embeddings you find
-
-37:05.560 --> 37:08.560
- are going to be reflective of the people who play listed.
-
-37:08.560 --> 37:11.560
- So if you have a lot of indie lovers who play list
-
-37:11.560 --> 37:14.560
- your embedding is going to perform better there.
-
-37:14.560 --> 37:17.560
- But what we found was that, yes,
-
-37:17.560 --> 37:20.560
- there were these latent similarities.
-
-37:20.560 --> 37:22.560
- They were very powerful.
-
-37:22.560 --> 37:25.560
- And it was interesting because
-
-37:25.560 --> 37:28.560
- I think that the people who play listed the most initially
-
-37:28.560 --> 37:31.560
- were the so called music aficionados
-
-37:31.560 --> 37:33.560
- who were really into music.
-
-37:33.560 --> 37:35.560
- And they often had a certain...
-
-37:35.560 --> 37:39.560
- Their taste was often geared towards a certain type of music.
-
-37:39.560 --> 37:41.560
- And so what surprised us,
-
-37:41.560 --> 37:43.560
- if you look at the problem from the outside,
-
-37:43.560 --> 37:46.560
- you might expect that the algorithms
-
-37:46.560 --> 37:49.560
- would start performing best with mainstreamers first
-
-37:49.560 --> 37:52.560
- and now feels like an easier problem to solve mainstream taste
-
-37:52.560 --> 37:54.560
- than really particular taste.
-
-37:54.560 --> 37:56.560
- It was a complete opposite for us.
-
-37:56.560 --> 37:58.560
- The recommendations performed fantastically
-
-37:58.560 --> 38:01.560
- for people who saw themselves as having very unique taste.
-
-38:01.560 --> 38:04.560
- That's probably because all of them play listed
-
-38:04.560 --> 38:06.560
- and they didn't perform so well for mainstreamers.
-
-38:06.560 --> 38:09.560
- They actually thought they were a bit too particular
-
-38:09.560 --> 38:11.560
- and unorthodox.
-
-38:11.560 --> 38:13.560
- So we had a complete opposite of what we expected.
-
-38:13.560 --> 38:15.560
- Success within the hardest problem first
-
-38:15.560 --> 38:18.560
- and then had to try to scale to more mainstream recommendations.
-
-38:18.560 --> 38:21.560
- So you've also acquired
-
-38:21.560 --> 38:23.560
- Echo Nest
-
-38:23.560 --> 38:25.560
- that analyzes song data.
-
-38:25.560 --> 38:27.560
- So
-
-38:27.560 --> 38:29.560
- in your view, maybe you can talk about
-
-38:29.560 --> 38:31.560
- so what kind of data is there
-
-38:31.560 --> 38:33.560
- from a machine learning perspective?
-
-38:33.560 --> 38:35.560
- There's a huge amount,
-
-38:35.560 --> 38:37.560
- what we're talking about, play listing
-
-38:37.560 --> 38:39.560
- and just user data
-
-38:39.560 --> 38:42.560
- of what people are listening to, the playlist they're constructing
-
-38:42.560 --> 38:44.560
- and so on.
-
-38:44.560 --> 38:47.560
- And then there is the actual data within a song
-
-38:47.560 --> 38:49.560
- what makes a song,
-
-38:49.560 --> 38:52.560
- I don't know, the actual waveforms.
-
-38:52.560 --> 38:55.560
- How do you mix the two?
-
-38:55.560 --> 38:57.560
- How much values are in each?
-
-38:57.560 --> 38:59.560
- To me, it seems like user data
-
-38:59.560 --> 39:02.560
- is a romantic notion
-
-39:02.560 --> 39:05.560
- that the song itself would contain useful information
-
-39:05.560 --> 39:07.560
- but if I were to guess,
-
-39:07.560 --> 39:09.560
- user data would be much more powerful.
-
-39:09.560 --> 39:11.560
- Playlists would be much more powerful.
-
-39:11.560 --> 39:14.560
- Yeah, so we use both.
-
-39:14.560 --> 39:17.560
- Our biggest success initially was with
-
-39:17.560 --> 39:20.560
- playlist data without understanding
-
-39:20.560 --> 39:22.560
- anything about the structure of the song.
-
-39:22.560 --> 39:24.560
- But when we acquired the Echo Nest,
-
-39:24.560 --> 39:26.560
- they had the inverse problem.
-
-39:26.560 --> 39:28.560
- They actually didn't have any play data.
-
-39:28.560 --> 39:30.560
- They were a provider of recommendations
-
-39:30.560 --> 39:32.560
- but they didn't actually have any play data.
-
-39:32.560 --> 39:35.560
- So they looked at the structure of songs
-
-39:35.560 --> 39:37.560
- sonically
-
-39:37.560 --> 39:39.560
- and they looked at Wikipedia for cultural references
-
-39:39.560 --> 39:41.560
- and so forth, right?
-
-39:41.560 --> 39:43.560
- And did a lot of NLU and so forth.
-
-39:43.560 --> 39:45.560
- They had that skill into the company
-
-39:45.560 --> 39:48.560
- and combined our user data
-
-39:48.560 --> 39:52.560
- with their content based.
-
-39:52.560 --> 39:54.560
- So you can think of it as we were user based
-
-39:54.560 --> 39:56.560
- and they were content based in their recommendations.
-
-39:56.560 --> 39:58.560
- And we combined those two.
-
-39:58.560 --> 40:00.560
- And for some cases where you have a new song
-
-40:00.560 --> 40:02.560
- that has no play data,
-
-40:02.560 --> 40:04.560
- obviously you have to try to go by
-
-40:04.560 --> 40:06.560
- either who the artist is
-
-40:06.560 --> 40:09.560
- or the sonic information in the song
-
-40:09.560 --> 40:11.560
- or what it's similar to.
-
-40:11.560 --> 40:13.560
- And we do a lot in both.
-
-40:13.560 --> 40:15.560
- But I would say yes.
-
-40:15.560 --> 40:17.560
- The user data captures things that
-
-40:17.560 --> 40:19.560
- have to do with culture in the greater society
-
-40:19.560 --> 40:21.560
- that you would never see
-
-40:21.560 --> 40:23.560
- in the content itself.
-
-40:23.560 --> 40:25.560
- But that said, we have seen
-
-40:25.560 --> 40:27.560
- we have a research lab in Paris
-
-40:27.560 --> 40:29.560
- when we can talk about
-
-40:29.560 --> 40:31.560
- more about that on
-
-40:31.560 --> 40:33.560
- kind of machine learning on the creator side.
-
-40:33.560 --> 40:35.560
- What it can do for creators, not just for the consumers.
-
-40:35.560 --> 40:37.560
- But where we looked at
-
-40:37.560 --> 40:39.560
- how does the structure of a song actually affect
-
-40:39.560 --> 40:41.560
- the listening behavior.
-
-40:41.560 --> 40:43.560
- And it turns out that
-
-40:43.560 --> 40:45.560
- we can predict things like skips
-
-40:45.560 --> 40:47.560
- based on the song itself.
-
-40:47.560 --> 40:49.560
- We could say that
-
-40:49.560 --> 40:51.560
- maybe you should move that chorus a bit
-
-40:51.560 --> 40:53.560
- because your skip is going to go up here.
-
-40:53.560 --> 40:55.560
- There is a lot of latent structure in the music
-
-40:55.560 --> 40:57.560
- which is not surprising
-
-40:57.560 --> 40:59.560
- because it is some sort of mind hack.
-
-40:59.560 --> 41:01.560
- So there should be structure.
-
-41:01.560 --> 41:03.560
- That's probably what we respond to.
-
-41:03.560 --> 41:05.560
- You just blew my mind actually
-
-41:05.560 --> 41:07.560
- from the creator perspective.
-
-41:07.560 --> 41:09.560
- That probably most creators
-
-41:09.560 --> 41:11.560
- are not taken advantage of.
-
-41:11.560 --> 41:13.560
- So I have recently
-
-41:13.560 --> 41:15.560
- got to interact with a few
-
-41:15.560 --> 41:17.560
- folks, YouTubers
-
-41:17.560 --> 41:19.560
- who are
-
-41:19.560 --> 41:21.560
- obsessed with this idea
-
-41:21.560 --> 41:23.560
- of what do I
-
-41:23.560 --> 41:25.560
- do to make sure people
-
-41:25.560 --> 41:27.560
- keep watching the video.
-
-41:27.560 --> 41:29.560
- And then you look at the analytics
-
-41:29.560 --> 41:31.560
- of which point do people turn it off
-
-41:31.560 --> 41:33.560
- and so on. First of all,
-
-41:33.560 --> 41:35.560
- I don't think that's healthy.
-
-41:35.560 --> 41:37.560
- It's because you can do it a little too much.
-
-41:37.560 --> 41:39.560
- But it is a really
-
-41:39.560 --> 41:41.560
- powerful tool for helping the creative process.
-
-41:41.560 --> 41:43.560
- You just made me
-
-41:43.560 --> 41:45.560
- realize you could do the same thing for
-
-41:45.560 --> 41:47.560
- creation of music.
-
-41:47.560 --> 41:49.560
- So is that something you've looked
-
-41:49.560 --> 41:51.560
- into?
-
-41:51.560 --> 41:53.560
- Can you speak
-
-41:53.560 --> 41:55.560
- to how much opportunity there is for that kind of thing?
-
-41:55.560 --> 41:57.560
- I listened to the podcast
-
-41:57.560 --> 41:59.560
- with Zirash and I thought it was
-
-41:59.560 --> 42:01.560
- fantastic and reacted to the same thing
-
-42:01.560 --> 42:03.560
- where he said he posted something
-
-42:03.560 --> 42:05.560
- in the morning, immediately
-
-42:05.560 --> 42:07.560
- watched the feedback where the drop off was
-
-42:07.560 --> 42:09.560
- and then responded to that in the afternoon.
-
-42:09.560 --> 42:11.560
- Which is quite different
-
-42:11.560 --> 42:13.560
- from how people make podcasts, for example.
-
-42:13.560 --> 42:15.560
- The feedback loop is almost
-
-42:15.560 --> 42:17.560
- non existent. So if we
-
-42:17.560 --> 42:19.560
- back out at one level, I think
-
-42:19.560 --> 42:21.560
- actually both for music
-
-42:21.560 --> 42:23.560
- and podcasts, which we also
-
-42:23.560 --> 42:25.560
- do at Spotify, I think there's
-
-42:25.560 --> 42:27.560
- tremendous opportunity just
-
-42:27.560 --> 42:29.560
- for the creation workflow.
-
-42:29.560 --> 42:31.560
- I think it's really interesting
-
-42:31.560 --> 42:33.560
- speaking to you, because you're
-
-42:33.560 --> 42:35.560
- a musician, a developer and a
-
-42:35.560 --> 42:37.560
- podcaster, if you think about those
-
-42:37.560 --> 42:39.560
- three different roles,
-
-42:39.560 --> 42:41.560
- if you make the leap as a musician,
-
-42:41.560 --> 42:43.560
- if you think about it
-
-42:43.560 --> 42:45.560
- as a software tool chain, really,
-
-42:45.560 --> 42:47.560
- your door with the stems,
-
-42:47.560 --> 42:49.560
- that's the IDE, right?
-
-42:49.560 --> 42:51.560
- That's where you work in source code format
-
-42:51.560 --> 42:53.560
- with what you're creating.
-
-42:53.560 --> 42:55.560
- Then you sit around and you play with that
-
-42:55.560 --> 42:57.560
- and when you're happy you compile that thing into
-
-42:57.560 --> 42:59.560
- some sort of, you know, AAC,
-
-42:59.560 --> 43:01.560
- or something, you do that because
-
-43:01.560 --> 43:03.560
- you get distribution. There are so many run times
-
-43:03.560 --> 43:05.560
- for that MP3 across the world in car stairs and stuff.
-
-43:05.560 --> 43:07.560
- So you kind of compile this executable and you ship it out
-
-43:07.560 --> 43:09.560
- in kind of an old fashioned
-
-43:09.560 --> 43:11.560
- box software analogy.
-
-43:11.560 --> 43:13.560
- And then you hope for the best,
-
-43:13.560 --> 43:15.560
- right? But as
-
-43:15.560 --> 43:17.560
- a software developer,
-
-43:17.560 --> 43:19.560
- you would never do that. First you go
-
-43:19.560 --> 43:21.560
- on GitHub and you collaborate with other creators.
-
-43:21.560 --> 43:23.560
- And then, you know,
-
-43:23.560 --> 43:25.560
- you think it would be crazy to just ship one version
-
-43:25.560 --> 43:27.560
- of your software without doing an A.B. test,
-
-43:27.560 --> 43:29.560
- without any feedback loop.
-
-43:29.560 --> 43:31.560
- And then, issue tracking.
-
-43:31.560 --> 43:33.560
- Exactly. And then you would look at the
-
-43:33.560 --> 43:35.560
- feedback loops and try to optimize that thing, right?
-
-43:35.560 --> 43:37.560
- So I think if you think
-
-43:37.560 --> 43:39.560
- about it as a very specific software tool chain,
-
-43:39.560 --> 43:41.560
- it looks
-
-43:41.560 --> 43:43.560
- quite arcane.
-
-43:43.560 --> 43:45.560
- The tools that a music creator has versus
-
-43:45.560 --> 43:47.560
- what a software developer has.
-
-43:47.560 --> 43:49.560
- So that's kind of how we think about it.
-
-43:49.560 --> 43:51.560
- Why wouldn't
-
-43:51.560 --> 43:53.560
- a music creator
-
-43:53.560 --> 43:55.560
- have something like GitHub where you could collaborate
-
-43:55.560 --> 43:57.560
- much more easily? So we bought
-
-43:57.560 --> 43:59.560
- this company called Soundtrap,
-
-43:59.560 --> 44:01.560
- which has a kind of
-
-44:01.560 --> 44:03.560
- Google Docs for music approach where you can
-
-44:03.560 --> 44:05.560
- collaborate with other people on the kind of
-
-44:05.560 --> 44:07.560
- source code format with Stems.
-
-44:07.560 --> 44:09.560
- And I think introducing things like
-
-44:09.560 --> 44:11.560
- AI tools there to help you
-
-44:11.560 --> 44:13.560
- as you're creating music,
-
-44:13.560 --> 44:15.560
- both in
-
-44:15.560 --> 44:17.560
- helping you
-
-44:19.560 --> 44:21.560
- put a component to your music,
-
-44:21.560 --> 44:23.560
- like drums or something,
-
-44:23.560 --> 44:25.560
- help you
-
-44:25.560 --> 44:27.560
- master and mix automatically,
-
-44:27.560 --> 44:29.560
- help you understand how this track will perform.
-
-44:29.560 --> 44:31.560
- Exactly what you would expect as a software
-
-44:31.560 --> 44:33.560
- developer. I think it makes a lot of sense.
-
-44:33.560 --> 44:35.560
- And I think the same goes for
-
-44:35.560 --> 44:37.560
- a podcaster. I think podcasters will expect
-
-44:37.560 --> 44:39.560
- to have the same kind of feedback loop that Sirosh
-
-44:39.560 --> 44:41.560
- has. Like,
-
-44:41.560 --> 44:43.560
- why wouldn't you? Maybe it's not healthy, but
-
-44:43.560 --> 44:45.560
- Sorry, I wanted to
-
-44:45.560 --> 44:47.560
- criticize the fact because you can overdo it.
-
-44:47.560 --> 44:49.560
- Because a lot of the
-
-44:49.560 --> 44:51.560
- and we're in a new era
-
-44:51.560 --> 44:53.560
- of that.
-
-44:53.560 --> 44:55.560
- So you can become
-
-44:55.560 --> 44:57.560
- addicted to it and
-
-44:57.560 --> 44:59.560
- therefore
-
-44:59.560 --> 45:01.560
- what people say you become a slave to the YouTube
-
-45:01.560 --> 45:03.560
- algorithm.
-
-45:03.560 --> 45:05.560
- It's always a danger
-
-45:05.560 --> 45:07.560
- of a new technology as opposed to
-
-45:07.560 --> 45:09.560
- say if you're creating a song
-
-45:09.560 --> 45:11.560
- becoming too obsessed
-
-45:11.560 --> 45:13.560
- about the
-
-45:13.560 --> 45:15.560
- intro riff to the song
-
-45:15.560 --> 45:17.560
- that keeps people listening versus
-
-45:17.560 --> 45:19.560
- actually the entirety of the creation process. It's a balance.
-
-45:19.560 --> 45:21.560
- But the fact that
-
-45:21.560 --> 45:23.560
- there's zero, I mean you're blowing my mind right now
-
-45:23.560 --> 45:25.560
- because you're
-
-45:25.560 --> 45:27.560
- completely right that there's no
-
-45:27.560 --> 45:29.560
- signal whatsoever. There's no feedback
-
-45:29.560 --> 45:31.560
- whatsoever on the creation process
-
-45:31.560 --> 45:33.560
- and musical podcasting
-
-45:33.560 --> 45:35.560
- almost at all.
-
-45:35.560 --> 45:37.560
- And are you saying
-
-45:37.560 --> 45:39.560
- that Spotify
-
-45:39.560 --> 45:41.560
- is hoping to help create tools
-
-45:41.560 --> 45:43.560
- to, not tools, but
-
-45:43.560 --> 45:45.560
- No, tools actually.
-
-45:45.560 --> 45:47.560
- Actually tools for creators.
-
-45:47.560 --> 45:49.560
- Absolutely.
-
-45:49.560 --> 45:51.560
- So we have
-
-45:51.560 --> 45:53.560
- we've made some acquisitions the last few years around music creation
-
-45:53.560 --> 45:55.560
- this company called Soundtrap
-
-45:55.560 --> 45:57.560
- which is a digital audio workstation
-
-45:57.560 --> 45:59.560
- that is browser based
-
-45:59.560 --> 46:01.560
- and their focus was really the Google Docs approach.
-
-46:01.560 --> 46:03.560
- We can collaborate with people much more easily
-
-46:03.560 --> 46:05.560
- than you could in previous tools.
-
-46:05.560 --> 46:07.560
- So we have some of these tools
-
-46:07.560 --> 46:09.560
- that we're working with that we want to make accessible
-
-46:09.560 --> 46:11.560
- and then we can connect it
-
-46:11.560 --> 46:13.560
- with our consumption data.
-
-46:13.560 --> 46:15.560
- We can create this feedback loop where
-
-46:15.560 --> 46:17.560
- we could help you understand
-
-46:17.560 --> 46:19.560
- we could help you create
-
-46:19.560 --> 46:21.560
- and help you understand how you will perform.
-
-46:21.560 --> 46:23.560
- We also acquired this other company
-
-46:23.560 --> 46:25.560
- with a podcasting called Anchor
-
-46:25.560 --> 46:27.560
- which is one of the biggest podcasting tools
-
-46:27.560 --> 46:29.560
- mobile focused.
-
-46:29.560 --> 46:31.560
- So really focused on simple creation
-
-46:31.560 --> 46:33.560
- or easy access to creation
-
-46:33.560 --> 46:35.560
- but that also gives us this feedback loop
-
-46:35.560 --> 46:37.560
- and even before that
-
-46:37.560 --> 46:39.560
- we invested in something called
-
-46:39.560 --> 46:41.560
- Spotify for Artists
-
-46:41.560 --> 46:43.560
- and Spotify for Podcasters
-
-46:43.560 --> 46:45.560
- which is an app that you can download
-
-46:45.560 --> 46:47.560
- you can verify that you are that creator
-
-46:47.560 --> 46:49.560
- and then you get
-
-46:49.560 --> 46:51.560
- things that
-
-46:51.560 --> 46:53.560
- software developers have had for years.
-
-46:53.560 --> 46:55.560
- You can see where
-
-46:55.560 --> 46:57.560
- if you look at your podcast for example on Spotify
-
-46:57.560 --> 46:59.560
- or a song that you released
-
-46:59.560 --> 47:01.560
- you can see how it's performing
-
-47:01.560 --> 47:03.560
- which citizen it's performing in
-
-47:03.560 --> 47:05.560
- who's listening to it, what's the demographic breakup
-
-47:05.560 --> 47:07.560
- so similar in the sense that
-
-47:07.560 --> 47:09.560
- you can understand how you're actually doing on the platform.
-
-47:09.560 --> 47:11.560
- So we definitely want
-
-47:11.560 --> 47:13.560
- to build tools. I think
-
-47:13.560 --> 47:15.560
- you also interviewed
-
-47:15.560 --> 47:17.560
- the head of research for Adobe
-
-47:17.560 --> 47:19.560
- and I think that's
-
-47:19.560 --> 47:21.560
- back to Photoshop that you like.
-
-47:21.560 --> 47:23.560
- I think that's an interesting analogy as well.
-
-47:23.560 --> 47:25.560
- Photoshop I think has been
-
-47:25.560 --> 47:27.560
- very innovative in helping
-
-47:27.560 --> 47:29.560
- photographers and artists
-
-47:29.560 --> 47:31.560
- and I think there should be
-
-47:31.560 --> 47:33.560
- the same kind of tools for
-
-47:33.560 --> 47:35.560
- music creators where you could get
-
-47:35.560 --> 47:37.560
- AI assistants for example as you're creating music
-
-47:37.560 --> 47:39.560
- as you can do
-
-47:39.560 --> 47:41.560
- with Adobe where you can
-
-47:41.560 --> 47:43.560
- I want a sky over here and you can get help creating that sky.
-
-47:43.560 --> 47:45.560
- The really fascinating thing is
-
-47:45.560 --> 47:47.560
- what Adobe
-
-47:47.560 --> 47:49.560
- doesn't have
-
-47:49.560 --> 47:51.560
- is a distribution for the content
-
-47:51.560 --> 47:53.560
- you create. So you don't have
-
-47:53.560 --> 47:55.560
- the data of if I create
-
-47:55.560 --> 47:57.560
- if I
-
-47:57.560 --> 47:59.560
- you know whatever creation I make
-
-47:59.560 --> 48:01.560
- in Photoshop or Premiere
-
-48:01.560 --> 48:03.560
- I can't get like immediate feedback
-
-48:03.560 --> 48:05.560
- like I can on YouTube for example about
-
-48:05.560 --> 48:07.560
- the way people are responding
-
-48:07.560 --> 48:09.560
- and if Spotify is creating those tools
-
-48:09.560 --> 48:11.560
- that's a really exciting
-
-48:11.560 --> 48:13.560
- actually world
-
-48:13.560 --> 48:15.560
- but
-
-48:15.560 --> 48:17.560
- let's talk a little about podcasts
-
-48:17.560 --> 48:19.560
- so I have trouble
-
-48:19.560 --> 48:21.560
- talking to one person
-
-48:21.560 --> 48:23.560
- so it's a bit terrifying
-
-48:23.560 --> 48:25.560
- and kind of hard to fathom
-
-48:25.560 --> 48:27.560
- but on average
-
-48:27.560 --> 48:29.560
- 60 to 100,000
-
-48:29.560 --> 48:31.560
- people will listen to this episode
-
-48:31.560 --> 48:33.560
- okay so
-
-48:33.560 --> 48:35.560
- it's intimidating
-
-48:35.560 --> 48:37.560
- so I hosted on Blueberry
-
-48:37.560 --> 48:39.560
- I don't know if I'm pronouncing
-
-48:39.560 --> 48:41.560
- that correctly actually
-
-48:41.560 --> 48:43.560
- it looks like most people listen to it on Apple
-
-48:43.560 --> 48:45.560
- Podcast, Cast Box and Pocket
-
-48:45.560 --> 48:47.560
- Cast and only about
-
-48:47.560 --> 48:49.560
- a thousand
-
-48:49.560 --> 48:51.560
- listen on Spotify
-
-48:51.560 --> 48:53.560
- just my podcast right
-
-48:53.560 --> 48:55.560
- so
-
-48:55.560 --> 48:57.560
- where
-
-48:57.560 --> 48:59.560
- do you see a time when Spotify
-
-48:59.560 --> 49:01.560
- will dominate this so Spotify
-
-49:01.560 --> 49:03.560
- is relatively new
-
-49:03.560 --> 49:05.560
- in podcasting
-
-49:05.560 --> 49:07.560
- so yeah in podcasting
-
-49:07.560 --> 49:09.560
- what's the deal with podcasting in Spotify
-
-49:09.560 --> 49:11.560
- how serious
-
-49:11.560 --> 49:13.560
- is Spotify about podcasting
-
-49:13.560 --> 49:15.560
- do you see a time where everybody would listen
-
-49:15.560 --> 49:17.560
- to you know probably
-
-49:17.560 --> 49:19.560
- a huge amount of people, majority perhaps
-
-49:19.560 --> 49:21.560
- listen to music on Spotify
-
-49:21.560 --> 49:23.560
- do you see a time
-
-49:23.560 --> 49:25.560
- when the same is true for
-
-49:25.560 --> 49:27.560
- podcasting
-
-49:27.560 --> 49:29.560
- well I certainly hope so that is our mission
-
-49:29.560 --> 49:31.560
- our mission as a company is actually to
-
-49:31.560 --> 49:33.560
- enable a million creators to live
-
-49:33.560 --> 49:35.560
- off of their art and a billion people inspired
-
-49:35.560 --> 49:37.560
- by it and what I think is interesting about that mission
-
-49:37.560 --> 49:39.560
- is it actually puts the creators
-
-49:39.560 --> 49:41.560
- first even though it started as a
-
-49:41.560 --> 49:43.560
- consumer focused company and it says
-
-49:43.560 --> 49:45.560
- to be able to live off of their art not just
-
-49:45.560 --> 49:47.560
- make some money off of their art as well
-
-49:47.560 --> 49:49.560
- so it's quite an ambitious
-
-49:49.560 --> 49:51.560
- product and
-
-49:51.560 --> 49:53.560
- so we think about creators of all kinds
-
-49:53.560 --> 49:55.560
- and
-
-49:55.560 --> 49:57.560
- we kind of expanded our mission from
-
-49:57.560 --> 49:59.560
- being music to being audio
-
-49:59.560 --> 50:01.560
- a while back
-
-50:01.560 --> 50:03.560
- and that's not
-
-50:03.560 --> 50:05.560
- so much because
-
-50:05.560 --> 50:07.560
- we think we made that decision
-
-50:07.560 --> 50:09.560
- we think that decision
-
-50:09.560 --> 50:11.560
- was made for us
-
-50:11.560 --> 50:13.560
- we think the world made that decision
-
-50:13.560 --> 50:15.560
- whether we like it or not
-
-50:15.560 --> 50:17.560
- when you put in your headphones
-
-50:17.560 --> 50:19.560
- you're going to make a choice between
-
-50:19.560 --> 50:21.560
- music
-
-50:21.560 --> 50:23.560
- and a new episode of
-
-50:23.560 --> 50:25.560
- your podcast or something else
-
-50:25.560 --> 50:27.560
- we're in that world whether we like it or not
-
-50:27.560 --> 50:29.560
- that's how radio work
-
-50:29.560 --> 50:31.560
- so we decided that
-
-50:31.560 --> 50:33.560
- we think it's about audio you can see the
-
-50:33.560 --> 50:35.560
- rights of audio books and so forth
-
-50:35.560 --> 50:37.560
- we think audio is this great opportunity
-
-50:37.560 --> 50:39.560
- so we decided to enter it and obviously
-
-50:39.560 --> 50:41.560
- Apple
-
-50:41.560 --> 50:43.560
- and Apple podcast is absolutely
-
-50:43.560 --> 50:45.560
- dominating in
-
-50:45.560 --> 50:47.560
- podcasting and we didn't have
-
-50:47.560 --> 50:49.560
- a single podcast only like two years ago
-
-50:49.560 --> 50:51.560
- what we did though was
-
-50:51.560 --> 50:53.560
- we
-
-50:53.560 --> 50:55.560
- we looked at this and said
-
-50:55.560 --> 50:57.560
- bring something to this
-
-50:57.560 --> 50:59.560
- we want to do this but back to the original
-
-50:59.560 --> 51:01.560
- Spotify we had to do something that consumers actually value
-
-51:03.560 --> 51:05.560
- to be able to do this and the reason
-
-51:05.560 --> 51:07.560
- we've gone from not existing at all
-
-51:07.560 --> 51:09.560
- to being the
-
-51:09.560 --> 51:11.560
- quite a wide margin the second largest podcast
-
-51:11.560 --> 51:13.560
- consumption
-
-51:13.560 --> 51:15.560
- still wide gap to iTunes but we're growing
-
-51:15.560 --> 51:17.560
- quite fast
-
-51:17.560 --> 51:19.560
- I think it's because when we looked at the consumer
-
-51:19.560 --> 51:21.560
- problem
-
-51:21.560 --> 51:23.560
- people said surprisingly that they wanted their podcasts
-
-51:23.560 --> 51:25.560
- and music in the same
-
-51:25.560 --> 51:27.560
- in the same application
-
-51:27.560 --> 51:29.560
- so what we did was we took a little bit of a different
-
-51:29.560 --> 51:31.560
- approach what we said instead of building a separate podcast
-
-51:31.560 --> 51:33.560
- app
-
-51:33.560 --> 51:35.560
- we thought is there a consumer problem to solve here
-
-51:35.560 --> 51:37.560
- because the others are very successful already
-
-51:37.560 --> 51:39.560
- and we thought there was in making a more
-
-51:39.560 --> 51:41.560
- seamless experience where you can have your podcasts
-
-51:41.560 --> 51:43.560
- and your music
-
-51:43.560 --> 51:45.560
- in the same application
-
-51:45.560 --> 51:47.560
- because we think it's audio to you
-
-51:47.560 --> 51:49.560
- and that has been successful and that meant that
-
-51:49.560 --> 51:51.560
- we actually had 200 million people
-
-51:51.560 --> 51:53.560
- to offer this to instead of starting from zero
-
-51:53.560 --> 51:55.560
- so I think we have a good
-
-51:55.560 --> 51:57.560
- chance because we're taking a different approach
-
-51:57.560 --> 51:59.560
- than the competition and back to the other thing
-
-51:59.560 --> 52:01.560
- I mentioned about
-
-52:01.560 --> 52:03.560
- creators
-
-52:03.560 --> 52:05.560
- because we're looking at the end to end flow
-
-52:05.560 --> 52:07.560
- I think there's a tremendous amount of innovation
-
-52:07.560 --> 52:09.560
- to do around podcast as a format
-
-52:09.560 --> 52:11.560
- when we have creation tools and consumption
-
-52:11.560 --> 52:13.560
- I think we could
-
-52:13.560 --> 52:15.560
- start improving what podcasting is
-
-52:15.560 --> 52:17.560
- I mean podcast is this
-
-52:17.560 --> 52:19.560
- this opaque big like one to
-
-52:19.560 --> 52:21.560
- your file
-
-52:21.560 --> 52:23.560
- that you're streaming
-
-52:23.560 --> 52:25.560
- which it really doesn't make that much sense in 2019
-
-52:25.560 --> 52:27.560
- that it's not interactive
-
-52:27.560 --> 52:29.560
- there's no feedback loops nothing like that
-
-52:29.560 --> 52:31.560
- so I think if we're going to win it's going to have to be
-
-52:31.560 --> 52:33.560
- because we build a better product
-
-52:33.560 --> 52:35.560
- for creators and for consumers
-
-52:35.560 --> 52:37.560
- so we'll see but it's certainly our goal
-
-52:37.560 --> 52:39.560
- we have a long way to go
-
-52:39.560 --> 52:41.560
- well the creators part is really exciting
-
-52:41.560 --> 52:43.560
- you got me hooked there
-
-52:43.560 --> 52:45.560
- it's the only stats I have
-
-52:45.560 --> 52:47.560
- Blueberry just recently added the stats of
-
-52:47.560 --> 52:49.560
- it's listen to the end
-
-52:49.560 --> 52:51.560
- or not
-
-52:51.560 --> 52:53.560
- and that's like a huge improvement
-
-52:53.560 --> 52:55.560
- but that's still
-
-52:55.560 --> 52:57.560
- nowhere to where you could possibly
-
-52:57.560 --> 52:59.560
- go into statistics
-
-52:59.560 --> 53:01.560
- just download the Spotify podcasters up and verify
-
-53:01.560 --> 53:03.560
- and then you'll know where people dropped out in this episode
-
-53:03.560 --> 53:05.560
- oh wow okay
-
-53:05.560 --> 53:07.560
- the moment I started talking
-
-53:07.560 --> 53:09.560
- I might be depressed by this
-
-53:09.560 --> 53:11.560
- but okay so one
-
-53:11.560 --> 53:13.560
- one other question
-
-53:13.560 --> 53:15.560
- the original
-
-53:15.560 --> 53:17.560
- Spotify for music
-
-53:17.560 --> 53:19.560
- and I have a question about
-
-53:19.560 --> 53:21.560
- podcasting in this line
-
-53:21.560 --> 53:23.560
- is the idea of albums
-
-53:23.560 --> 53:25.560
- I have
-
-53:25.560 --> 53:27.560
- music aficionados
-
-53:27.560 --> 53:29.560
- friends who are really
-
-53:29.560 --> 53:31.560
- big fans of music
-
-53:31.560 --> 53:33.560
- often really enjoy albums
-
-53:33.560 --> 53:35.560
- listening to entire albums of
-
-53:35.560 --> 53:37.560
- an artist correct me if I'm wrong
-
-53:37.560 --> 53:39.560
- but I feel like
-
-53:39.560 --> 53:41.560
- Spotify has helped
-
-53:41.560 --> 53:43.560
- replace the idea of an album with playlists
-
-53:43.560 --> 53:45.560
- so you create your own albums
-
-53:45.560 --> 53:47.560
- that's kind of the way
-
-53:47.560 --> 53:49.560
- at least I've experienced music
-
-53:49.560 --> 53:51.560
- and I've really enjoyed it that way
-
-53:51.560 --> 53:53.560
- one of the things that was missing
-
-53:53.560 --> 53:55.560
- in podcasting for me
-
-53:55.560 --> 53:57.560
- I don't know if it's missing I don't know
-
-53:57.560 --> 53:59.560
- it's an open question for me
-
-53:59.560 --> 54:01.560
- but the way I listen to podcasts is the way I would listen to albums
-
-54:01.560 --> 54:03.560
- so I take
-
-54:03.560 --> 54:05.560
- Joe Rogan Experience
-
-54:05.560 --> 54:07.560
- and that's an album and I listen
-
-54:07.560 --> 54:09.560
- I put that on
-
-54:09.560 --> 54:11.560
- and I listen one episode after the next
-
-54:11.560 --> 54:13.560
- and there's a sequence and so on
-
-54:13.560 --> 54:15.560
- is there room for
-
-54:15.560 --> 54:17.560
- doing
-
-54:17.560 --> 54:19.560
- what Spotify did for music
-
-54:19.560 --> 54:21.560
- but creating
-
-54:21.560 --> 54:23.560
- playlists
-
-54:23.560 --> 54:25.560
- sort of this kind of playlisting
-
-54:25.560 --> 54:27.560
- idea of breaking apart from podcasting
-
-54:27.560 --> 54:29.560
- from individual
-
-54:29.560 --> 54:31.560
- podcasts and creating kind of
-
-54:31.560 --> 54:33.560
- this interplay
-
-54:33.560 --> 54:35.560
- or have you thought about that
-
-54:35.560 --> 54:37.560
- it's a great question so I think in
-
-54:37.560 --> 54:39.560
- music
-
-54:39.560 --> 54:41.560
- you're right basically you bought an album
-
-54:41.560 --> 54:43.560
- so it was like you bought a small catalog of
-
-54:43.560 --> 54:45.560
- 10 tracks
-
-54:45.560 --> 54:47.560
- again it was actually a lot of consumption
-
-54:47.560 --> 54:49.560
- you think it's about what you like
-
-54:49.560 --> 54:51.560
- but it's based on the business model
-
-54:51.560 --> 54:53.560
- you paid for this 10 track
-
-54:53.560 --> 54:55.560
- service and then you listen to that for a while
-
-54:55.560 --> 54:57.560
- and then when everything was flat
-
-54:57.560 --> 54:59.560
- priced you tended to listen differently
-
-54:59.560 --> 55:01.560
- now so I think
-
-55:01.560 --> 55:03.560
- the album is still tremendously important that's why we have it
-
-55:03.560 --> 55:05.560
- and you can save albums and so forth
-
-55:05.560 --> 55:07.560
- and you have a huge amount of people who really listen
-
-55:07.560 --> 55:09.560
- according to albums and I like that because
-
-55:09.560 --> 55:11.560
- it is a creator format you can tell a longer
-
-55:11.560 --> 55:13.560
- story over several tracks
-
-55:13.560 --> 55:15.560
- and so some people listen to just one track
-
-55:15.560 --> 55:17.560
- some people actually want to hear that whole
-
-55:17.560 --> 55:19.560
- story
-
-55:19.560 --> 55:21.560
- now in podcast I think
-
-55:21.560 --> 55:23.560
- I think it's different
-
-55:23.560 --> 55:25.560
- you can argue that podcasts might be more
-
-55:25.560 --> 55:27.560
- like shows on Netflix
-
-55:27.560 --> 55:29.560
- you have like a full season of Narcos
-
-55:29.560 --> 55:31.560
- and you're probably not going to do like one
-
-55:31.560 --> 55:33.560
- episode of Narcos and then one of House of Cards
-
-55:33.560 --> 55:35.560
- like you know
-
-55:35.560 --> 55:37.560
- there's a narrative there
-
-55:37.560 --> 55:39.560
- and you love the cast
-
-55:39.560 --> 55:41.560
- and you love these characters
-
-55:41.560 --> 55:43.560
- so I think people love shows
-
-55:43.560 --> 55:45.560
- and I think they will
-
-55:45.560 --> 55:47.560
- listen to those shows
-
-55:47.560 --> 55:49.560
- I do think you follow a bunch of shows at the same time
-
-55:49.560 --> 55:51.560
- so there's certainly an opportunity to bring you the
-
-55:51.560 --> 55:53.560
- latest episode of
-
-55:53.560 --> 55:55.560
- whatever the 5, 6, 10 things that you're into
-
-55:55.560 --> 55:57.560
- but I think
-
-55:57.560 --> 55:59.560
- I think people are going to listen
-
-55:59.560 --> 56:01.560
- to specific hosts
-
-56:01.560 --> 56:03.560
- and love those hosts
-
-56:03.560 --> 56:05.560
- for a long time because I think there's something
-
-56:05.560 --> 56:07.560
- different with podcasts
-
-56:07.560 --> 56:09.560
- where this format
-
-56:09.560 --> 56:11.560
- of the
-
-56:11.560 --> 56:13.560
- experience of the audience
-
-56:13.560 --> 56:15.560
- is actually standing here right between us
-
-56:15.560 --> 56:17.560
- whereas if you look at something on TV
-
-56:17.560 --> 56:19.560
- the audio actually would come from
-
-56:19.560 --> 56:21.560
- you would sit over there and the audio would come to you
-
-56:21.560 --> 56:23.560
- from both of us as if you were watching
-
-56:23.560 --> 56:25.560
- not as if you were part of the conversation
-
-56:25.560 --> 56:27.560
- so my experience of having to listen to podcasts
-
-56:27.560 --> 56:29.560
- like yours and Joe Rogan
-
-56:29.560 --> 56:31.560
- I feel like I know all of these people
-
-56:31.560 --> 56:33.560
- and I have no idea who I am
-
-56:33.560 --> 56:35.560
- but I feel like I've listened to so many hours of them
-
-56:35.560 --> 56:37.560
- it's very different from me watching
-
-56:37.560 --> 56:39.560
- like a TV show or an interview
-
-56:39.560 --> 56:41.560
- so I think you kind of
-
-56:41.560 --> 56:43.560
- fall in love with people
-
-56:43.560 --> 56:45.560
- and experience in a different way
-
-56:45.560 --> 56:47.560
- so I think shows and hosts
-
-56:47.560 --> 56:49.560
- are going to be very important
-
-56:49.560 --> 56:51.560
- I don't think that's going to go away into some sort of thing
-
-56:51.560 --> 56:53.560
- where you don't even know who you're listening to
-
-56:53.560 --> 56:55.560
- I don't think that's going to happen
-
-56:55.560 --> 56:57.560
- what I do think is, I think there's a tremendous
-
-56:57.560 --> 56:59.560
- discovery opportunity
-
-56:59.560 --> 57:01.560
- in podcasts because
-
-57:01.560 --> 57:03.560
- the catalogue is growing quite quickly
-
-57:03.560 --> 57:05.560
- and
-
-57:05.560 --> 57:07.560
- I think podcasts is only
-
-57:07.560 --> 57:09.560
- a few like five, six hundred thousand
-
-57:09.560 --> 57:11.560
- shows right now
-
-57:11.560 --> 57:13.560
- if you look back to YouTube as another analogy
-
-57:13.560 --> 57:15.560
- for creators, no one really knows
-
-57:15.560 --> 57:17.560
- if you would lift the lid on
-
-57:17.560 --> 57:19.560
- YouTube but it's probably billions
-
-57:19.560 --> 57:21.560
- of episodes
-
-57:21.560 --> 57:23.560
- and so I think the podcast catalogue would probably grow
-
-57:23.560 --> 57:25.560
- tremendously because the creation
-
-57:25.560 --> 57:27.560
- tools are getting easier
-
-57:27.560 --> 57:29.560
- and you're going to have this
-
-57:29.560 --> 57:31.560
- discovery opportunity that I think is really big
-
-57:31.560 --> 57:33.560
- so a lot of people tell me that they love their shows
-
-57:33.560 --> 57:35.560
- but discovering
-
-57:35.560 --> 57:37.560
- podcasts kind of suck
-
-57:37.560 --> 57:39.560
- it's really hard to get into new show
-
-57:39.560 --> 57:41.560
- they're usually quite long, it's a big time investment
-
-57:41.560 --> 57:43.560
- so I think there's plenty of opportunity
-
-57:43.560 --> 57:45.560
- in the discovery part
-
-57:45.560 --> 57:47.560
- yeah for sure, a hundred percent
-
-57:47.560 --> 57:49.560
- and even the dumbest
-
-57:49.560 --> 57:51.560
- there's so many low hanging fruit too
-
-57:51.560 --> 57:53.560
- for example
-
-57:53.560 --> 57:55.560
- just knowing
-
-57:55.560 --> 57:57.560
- what episode to listen to first
-
-57:57.560 --> 57:59.560
- to try out a podcast
-
-57:59.560 --> 58:01.560
- exactly because most podcasts
-
-58:01.560 --> 58:03.560
- don't have an order to them
-
-58:03.560 --> 58:05.560
- they can be listened to out of order
-
-58:05.560 --> 58:07.560
- and
-
-58:07.560 --> 58:09.560
- sorry to say
-
-58:09.560 --> 58:11.560
- some are better than others
-
-58:11.560 --> 58:13.560
- episodes so some episodes of Joe Rogan
-
-58:13.560 --> 58:15.560
- are better than others
-
-58:15.560 --> 58:17.560
- and it's nice to know
-
-58:17.560 --> 58:19.560
- which you should listen to
-
-58:19.560 --> 58:21.560
- to try it out and there's as far
-
-58:21.560 --> 58:23.560
- as I know almost no information
-
-58:23.560 --> 58:25.560
- in terms of
-
-58:25.560 --> 58:27.560
- like upvotes
-
-58:27.560 --> 58:29.560
- on how good an episode is
-
-58:29.560 --> 58:31.560
- so I think part of the problem is
-
-58:31.560 --> 58:33.560
- it's kind of like music
-
-58:33.560 --> 58:35.560
- there isn't one answer, people use music for different things
-
-58:35.560 --> 58:37.560
- and there's actually many different types of music
-
-58:37.560 --> 58:39.560
- there's workout music and there's classical piano music
-
-58:39.560 --> 58:41.560
- and focus music and
-
-58:41.560 --> 58:43.560
- and so forth
-
-58:43.560 --> 58:45.560
- I think the same with podcasts, some podcasts are sequential
-
-58:45.560 --> 58:47.560
- they're supposed to be listened to
-
-58:47.560 --> 58:49.560
- in order
-
-58:49.560 --> 58:51.560
- it's actually telling and narrative
-
-58:51.560 --> 58:53.560
- podcasts are one topic
-
-58:53.560 --> 58:55.560
- kind of like yours but different guests
-
-58:55.560 --> 58:57.560
- so you could jump in anywhere
-
-58:57.560 --> 58:59.560
- some podcasts actually have completely different topics
-
-58:59.560 --> 59:01.560
- and for those podcasts it might be that
-
-59:01.560 --> 59:03.560
- we should recommend
-
-59:03.560 --> 59:05.560
- one episode because it's about AI
-
-59:05.560 --> 59:07.560
- from someone
-
-59:07.560 --> 59:09.560
- but then they talk about something that you're not interested in
-
-59:09.560 --> 59:11.560
- the rest of the episode
-
-59:11.560 --> 59:13.560
- so I think what we're spending a lot of time on now
-
-59:13.560 --> 59:15.560
- is just first understanding the domain
-
-59:15.560 --> 59:17.560
- and creating kind of the knowledge graph
-
-59:17.560 --> 59:19.560
- of
-
-59:19.560 --> 59:21.560
- how do these objects relate
-
-59:21.560 --> 59:23.560
- and how do people consume and I think we'll find that it's going to be
-
-59:23.560 --> 59:25.560
- it's going to be different
-
-59:25.560 --> 59:27.560
- I'm excited
-
-59:27.560 --> 59:29.560
- Spotify is the first
-
-59:29.560 --> 59:31.560
- people I'm aware of that are
-
-59:31.560 --> 59:33.560
- trying to do this
-
-59:33.560 --> 59:35.560
- for podcasting
-
-59:35.560 --> 59:37.560
- podcasting has been like a wild west
-
-59:37.560 --> 59:39.560
- until now
-
-59:39.560 --> 59:41.560
- we want to be very careful though
-
-59:41.560 --> 59:43.560
- because it's been a very good wild west
-
-59:43.560 --> 59:45.560
- I think it's this fragile ecosystem
-
-59:45.560 --> 59:47.560
- and
-
-59:47.560 --> 59:49.560
- we want to make sure that
-
-59:49.560 --> 59:51.560
- you don't barge in and say
-
-59:51.560 --> 59:53.560
- we're going to internetize this thing
-
-59:53.560 --> 59:55.560
- and you have to think about
-
-59:55.560 --> 59:57.560
- the creators, you have to understand
-
-59:57.560 --> 59:59.560
- how they get distribution today
-
-59:59.560 --> 1:00:01.560
- who listens to how they make money today
-
-1:00:01.560 --> 1:00:03.560
- try to
-
-1:00:03.560 --> 1:00:05.560
- make sure that their business model works, that they understand
-
-1:00:05.560 --> 1:00:07.560
- I think it's back to doing something
-
-1:00:07.560 --> 1:00:09.560
- improving their products
-
-1:00:09.560 --> 1:00:11.560
- like feedback loops and distribution
-
-1:00:13.560 --> 1:00:15.560
- jumping back into terms of this
-
-1:00:15.560 --> 1:00:17.560
- fascinating world of
-
-1:00:17.560 --> 1:00:19.560
- recommender system and listening to music
-
-1:00:19.560 --> 1:00:21.560
- and using machine learning to analyze things
-
-1:00:21.560 --> 1:00:23.560
- do you think it's better
-
-1:00:23.560 --> 1:00:25.560
- to
-
-1:00:25.560 --> 1:00:27.560
- what currently
-
-1:00:27.560 --> 1:00:29.560
- correct me if I'm wrong but
-
-1:00:29.560 --> 1:00:31.560
- Spotify lets people pick what they listen to
-
-1:00:31.560 --> 1:00:33.560
- for the most part
-
-1:00:33.560 --> 1:00:35.560
- there's a discovery process but you kind of
-
-1:00:35.560 --> 1:00:37.560
- organize playlists
-
-1:00:37.560 --> 1:00:39.560
- is it better to let people pick
-
-1:00:39.560 --> 1:00:41.560
- what they listen to or recommend
-
-1:00:41.560 --> 1:00:43.560
- what they should listen to
-
-1:00:43.560 --> 1:00:45.560
- something like stations by Spotify
-
-1:00:45.560 --> 1:00:47.560
- that I saw that you're playing around with
-
-1:00:47.560 --> 1:00:49.560
- maybe you can tell me
-
-1:00:49.560 --> 1:00:51.560
- what's the status of that
-
-1:00:51.560 --> 1:00:53.560
- this is a Pandora style app
-
-1:00:53.560 --> 1:00:55.560
- that just kind of as opposed to you select
-
-1:00:55.560 --> 1:00:57.560
- the music you listen to
-
-1:00:57.560 --> 1:00:59.560
- it kind of feeds you
-
-1:00:59.560 --> 1:01:01.560
- the music you listen to
-
-1:01:01.560 --> 1:01:03.560
- what's the status of stations by Spotify
-
-1:01:03.560 --> 1:01:05.560
- what's its future
-
-1:01:05.560 --> 1:01:07.560
- the store is Spotify as we have grown
-
-1:01:07.560 --> 1:01:09.560
- has been that we made it more accessible
-
-1:01:09.560 --> 1:01:11.560
- to different audiences
-
-1:01:11.560 --> 1:01:13.560
- and
-
-1:01:13.560 --> 1:01:15.560
- stations is another one of those where
-
-1:01:15.560 --> 1:01:17.560
- the question is
-
-1:01:17.560 --> 1:01:19.560
- some people want to be very specific
-
-1:01:19.560 --> 1:01:21.560
- they actually want to start with heaven right now
-
-1:01:21.560 --> 1:01:23.560
- that needs to be very easy to do
-
-1:01:23.560 --> 1:01:25.560
- and some people or even the same person
-
-1:01:25.560 --> 1:01:27.560
- at some point might say
-
-1:01:27.560 --> 1:01:29.560
- I want to feel upbeat
-
-1:01:29.560 --> 1:01:31.560
- or I want to feel happy
-
-1:01:31.560 --> 1:01:33.560
- or I want songs to sing in the car
-
-1:01:33.560 --> 1:01:35.560
- so they put in the information
-
-1:01:35.560 --> 1:01:37.560
- at a very different level
-
-1:01:37.560 --> 1:01:39.560
- and then we need to translate that into
-
-1:01:39.560 --> 1:01:41.560
- musically
-
-1:01:41.560 --> 1:01:43.560
- so stations is a test to
-
-1:01:43.560 --> 1:01:45.560
- create like a consumption input vector
-
-1:01:45.560 --> 1:01:47.560
- that is much simpler where you can just tune it a little bit
-
-1:01:47.560 --> 1:01:49.560
- and see if that increases the overall reach
-
-1:01:49.560 --> 1:01:51.560
- but we're trying to kind of serve
-
-1:01:51.560 --> 1:01:53.560
- the entire gamut of super advanced
-
-1:01:53.560 --> 1:01:55.560
- so called music aficionados
-
-1:01:55.560 --> 1:01:57.560
- all the way to
-
-1:01:57.560 --> 1:01:59.560
- to people who
-
-1:01:59.560 --> 1:02:01.560
- they love listening to music but it's not
-
-1:02:01.560 --> 1:02:03.560
- their number one priority in life
-
-1:02:03.560 --> 1:02:05.560
- they're not going to sit and follow every new release
-
-1:02:05.560 --> 1:02:07.560
- from every new artist
-
-1:02:07.560 --> 1:02:09.560
- to influence music at
-
-1:02:09.560 --> 1:02:11.560
- at a different level
-
-1:02:11.560 --> 1:02:13.560
- so we're trying, you can think of it as different
-
-1:02:13.560 --> 1:02:15.560
- products and I think when
-
-1:02:15.560 --> 1:02:17.560
- one of the interesting things
-
-1:02:17.560 --> 1:02:19.560
- to answer your question on
-
-1:02:19.560 --> 1:02:21.560
- if it's better to lift the user choose
-
-1:02:21.560 --> 1:02:23.560
- or to play I think the answer is
-
-1:02:23.560 --> 1:02:25.560
- the challenge when you
-
-1:02:25.560 --> 1:02:27.560
- when machine learning kind of came along
-
-1:02:27.560 --> 1:02:29.560
- there was a lot of thinking about
-
-1:02:29.560 --> 1:02:31.560
- what does product development mean
-
-1:02:31.560 --> 1:02:33.560
- in a machine learning context
-
-1:02:33.560 --> 1:02:35.560
- people like Andrew Eng for example
-
-1:02:35.560 --> 1:02:37.560
- when he went to Baidu
-
-1:02:37.560 --> 1:02:39.560
- he started doing a lot of practical machine learning
-
-1:02:39.560 --> 1:02:41.560
- went from academia and he thought a lot about this
-
-1:02:41.560 --> 1:02:43.560
- and he had this notion that
-
-1:02:43.560 --> 1:02:45.560
- you know product manager, designer
-
-1:02:45.560 --> 1:02:47.560
- and they used to work around this wireframe
-
-1:02:47.560 --> 1:02:49.560
- kind of describe what the product should look like
-
-1:02:49.560 --> 1:02:51.560
- was something to talk about when you're doing
-
-1:02:51.560 --> 1:02:53.560
- like a chat bot or a playlist
-
-1:02:53.560 --> 1:02:55.560
- what are you going to say like it should be good
-
-1:02:55.560 --> 1:02:57.560
- that's not a good product description
-
-1:02:57.560 --> 1:02:59.560
- so how do you do that and he came up with this notion
-
-1:02:59.560 --> 1:03:01.560
- that
-
-1:03:01.560 --> 1:03:03.560
- the test set is the new wireframe
-
-1:03:03.560 --> 1:03:05.560
- and the job of the product manager is to source
-
-1:03:05.560 --> 1:03:07.560
- a good test set that is representative of what
-
-1:03:07.560 --> 1:03:09.560
- like if you say like I want to play this
-
-1:03:09.560 --> 1:03:11.560
- that is songsticing in the car
-
-1:03:11.560 --> 1:03:13.560
- job of the product manager to go and source
-
-1:03:13.560 --> 1:03:15.560
- like a good test set of what that means
-
-1:03:15.560 --> 1:03:17.560
- then you can work with engineering to have algorithms
-
-1:03:17.560 --> 1:03:19.560
- to try to produce that right
-
-1:03:19.560 --> 1:03:21.560
- so we try to think a lot about
-
-1:03:21.560 --> 1:03:23.560
- how to structure product development
-
-1:03:23.560 --> 1:03:25.560
- for machine learning
-
-1:03:25.560 --> 1:03:27.560
- age and what we discovered
-
-1:03:27.560 --> 1:03:29.560
- was that a lot of it is actually in the expectation
-
-1:03:29.560 --> 1:03:31.560
- and you can go
-
-1:03:31.560 --> 1:03:33.560
- you can go two ways so
-
-1:03:35.560 --> 1:03:37.560
- let's say that
-
-1:03:37.560 --> 1:03:39.560
- if you set the expectation with the user
-
-1:03:39.560 --> 1:03:41.560
- that this is a discovery product like Discover Weekly
-
-1:03:41.560 --> 1:03:43.560
- you're actually setting
-
-1:03:43.560 --> 1:03:45.560
- the expectation that most of what we show you will not be
-
-1:03:45.560 --> 1:03:47.560
- relevant when you're in the discovery
-
-1:03:47.560 --> 1:03:49.560
- process you're going to accept that
-
-1:03:49.560 --> 1:03:51.560
- actually if you find one gem every Monday
-
-1:03:51.560 --> 1:03:53.560
- that you totally love
-
-1:03:53.560 --> 1:03:55.560
- you're probably going to be happy
-
-1:03:55.560 --> 1:03:57.560
- even though the statistical meaning
-
-1:03:57.560 --> 1:03:59.560
- 1 out of 10 is terrible or 1 out of 20
-
-1:03:59.560 --> 1:04:01.560
- is terrible from a user point of view
-
-1:04:01.560 --> 1:04:03.560
- because the setting was discovered it's fine
-
-1:04:03.560 --> 1:04:05.560
- can I start to interrupt real quick
-
-1:04:05.560 --> 1:04:07.560
- I just actually learned about Discover Weekly
-
-1:04:07.560 --> 1:04:09.560
- which is a Spotify
-
-1:04:09.560 --> 1:04:11.560
- I don't know
-
-1:04:11.560 --> 1:04:13.560
- it's a feature of Spotify that shows you
-
-1:04:13.560 --> 1:04:15.560
- cool songs to listen
-
-1:04:15.560 --> 1:04:17.560
- maybe I can do
-
-1:04:17.560 --> 1:04:19.560
- issue tracking I couldn't find it on my Spotify app
-
-1:04:19.560 --> 1:04:21.560
- it's in your library
-
-1:04:21.560 --> 1:04:23.560
- it's in the library it's in the list of live
-
-1:04:23.560 --> 1:04:25.560
- because I was like whoa this is cool I didn't know this existed
-
-1:04:25.560 --> 1:04:27.560
- and I tried to find it
-
-1:04:27.560 --> 1:04:29.560
- but I would show it to you
-
-1:04:29.560 --> 1:04:31.560
- and feed it back to our product teams
-
-1:04:31.560 --> 1:04:33.560
- there you go
-
-1:04:33.560 --> 1:04:35.560
- so yeah sorry
-
-1:04:35.560 --> 1:04:37.560
- just to mention
-
-1:04:37.560 --> 1:04:39.560
- the expectation there is
-
-1:04:39.560 --> 1:04:41.560
- basically you're going to
-
-1:04:41.560 --> 1:04:43.560
- discover new songs
-
-1:04:43.560 --> 1:04:45.560
- so then you can be quite adventurous
-
-1:04:45.560 --> 1:04:47.560
- in the recommendations you do
-
-1:04:47.560 --> 1:04:49.560
- but we have
-
-1:04:49.560 --> 1:04:51.560
- another product called Daily Mix
-
-1:04:51.560 --> 1:04:53.560
- which kind of implies that these are only going to be your favorites
-
-1:04:53.560 --> 1:04:55.560
- so if you have
-
-1:04:55.560 --> 1:04:57.560
- 9 out of 10 that is good
-
-1:04:57.560 --> 1:04:59.560
- and 9 out of 10 that doesn't work for you
-
-1:04:59.560 --> 1:05:01.560
- you're going to think it's a horrible product
-
-1:05:01.560 --> 1:05:03.560
- so actually a lot of the product development
-
-1:05:03.560 --> 1:05:05.560
- we learned over the years is about setting the right expectations
-
-1:05:05.560 --> 1:05:07.560
- so for Daily Mix
-
-1:05:07.560 --> 1:05:09.560
- you know algorithmically
-
-1:05:09.560 --> 1:05:11.560
- we would pick among things that feel very safe
-
-1:05:11.560 --> 1:05:13.560
- in your taste space
-
-1:05:13.560 --> 1:05:15.560
- or discover weekly we go kind of wild
-
-1:05:15.560 --> 1:05:17.560
- because the expectation is
-
-1:05:17.560 --> 1:05:19.560
- most of this is not going to
-
-1:05:19.560 --> 1:05:21.560
- so a lot of that a lot of to answer your question there
-
-1:05:21.560 --> 1:05:23.560
- a lot of
-
-1:05:23.560 --> 1:05:25.560
- we have some products where the whole point is
-
-1:05:25.560 --> 1:05:27.560
- that the user can click play put the phone in the pocket
-
-1:05:27.560 --> 1:05:29.560
- and it should be really good music for like an hour
-
-1:05:29.560 --> 1:05:31.560
- we have other products where
-
-1:05:31.560 --> 1:05:33.560
- you probably need to say like no
-
-1:05:33.560 --> 1:05:35.560
- save, no, no
-
-1:05:35.560 --> 1:05:37.560
- and it's very interactive
-
-1:05:37.560 --> 1:05:39.560
- that makes sense and then the radio product
-
-1:05:39.560 --> 1:05:41.560
- the stations product is one of these like click play
-
-1:05:41.560 --> 1:05:43.560
- put in your pocket for hours
-
-1:05:43.560 --> 1:05:45.560
- that's really interesting so you're thinking of
-
-1:05:45.560 --> 1:05:47.560
- different test sets
-
-1:05:47.560 --> 1:05:49.560
- for different users
-
-1:05:49.560 --> 1:05:51.560
- and trying to create products that sort of
-
-1:05:51.560 --> 1:05:53.560
- optimize
-
-1:05:53.560 --> 1:05:55.560
- optimize for those test sets
-
-1:05:55.560 --> 1:05:57.560
- that represents a specific set of
-
-1:05:57.560 --> 1:05:59.560
- users yes I think
-
-1:05:59.560 --> 1:06:01.560
- one thing that I think is interesting
-
-1:06:01.560 --> 1:06:03.560
- is
-
-1:06:03.560 --> 1:06:05.560
- we invested quite heavily in editorial
-
-1:06:05.560 --> 1:06:07.560
- in people creating playlists
-
-1:06:07.560 --> 1:06:09.560
- using statistical data
-
-1:06:09.560 --> 1:06:11.560
- and that was successful for us and then we also
-
-1:06:11.560 --> 1:06:13.560
- invested in machine learning
-
-1:06:13.560 --> 1:06:15.560
- and for the longest time
-
-1:06:15.560 --> 1:06:17.560
- within Spotify and within the rest of the
-
-1:06:17.560 --> 1:06:19.560
- industry there was always this narrative of
-
-1:06:19.560 --> 1:06:21.560
- humans versus the machine
-
-1:06:21.560 --> 1:06:23.560
- algo versus editorial
-
-1:06:23.560 --> 1:06:25.560
- and editors would say like well
-
-1:06:25.560 --> 1:06:27.560
- if I had that data if I could see your
-
-1:06:27.560 --> 1:06:29.560
- playlisting history and I made a choice
-
-1:06:29.560 --> 1:06:31.560
- for you I would have made a better choice
-
-1:06:31.560 --> 1:06:33.560
- and they would have because they're
-
-1:06:33.560 --> 1:06:35.560
- much smarter than these algorithms
-
-1:06:35.560 --> 1:06:37.560
- human is incredibly smart compared to our
-
-1:06:37.560 --> 1:06:39.560
- algorithms they can take
-
-1:06:39.560 --> 1:06:41.560
- culture into account and so forth
-
-1:06:41.560 --> 1:06:43.560
- the problem is that they can't make 200 million
-
-1:06:43.560 --> 1:06:45.560
- decisions
-
-1:06:45.560 --> 1:06:47.560
- per hour for every user that logs
-
-1:06:47.560 --> 1:06:49.560
- in so the algo may be
-
-1:06:49.560 --> 1:06:51.560
- not as sophisticated but much more efficient
-
-1:06:51.560 --> 1:06:53.560
- so there was this contradiction
-
-1:06:53.560 --> 1:06:55.560
- but then a few years ago
-
-1:06:55.560 --> 1:06:57.560
- we started
-
-1:06:57.560 --> 1:06:59.560
- focusing on this kind of human in the loop
-
-1:06:59.560 --> 1:07:01.560
- thinking around machine learning
-
-1:07:01.560 --> 1:07:03.560
- and we actually coined an internal
-
-1:07:03.560 --> 1:07:05.560
- term for it called algotorial
-
-1:07:05.560 --> 1:07:07.560
- the combination of algorithms and editors
-
-1:07:07.560 --> 1:07:09.560
- where if we take a concrete
-
-1:07:09.560 --> 1:07:11.560
- example you think
-
-1:07:11.560 --> 1:07:13.560
- of the editor this
-
-1:07:13.560 --> 1:07:15.560
- paid expert that we have
-
-1:07:15.560 --> 1:07:17.560
- there's really good at something like
-
-1:07:17.560 --> 1:07:19.560
- soul, hip hop
-
-1:07:19.560 --> 1:07:21.560
- EDM something right there are two experts
-
-1:07:21.560 --> 1:07:23.560
- no one in the industry
-
-1:07:23.560 --> 1:07:25.560
- so they have all the cultural knowledge
-
-1:07:25.560 --> 1:07:27.560
- you think of them as the product manager
-
-1:07:27.560 --> 1:07:29.560
- and you say that
-
-1:07:29.560 --> 1:07:31.560
- let's say that you want to create
-
-1:07:31.560 --> 1:07:33.560
- you think that there's a product
-
-1:07:33.560 --> 1:07:35.560
- need in the world for something like songs to sing
-
-1:07:35.560 --> 1:07:37.560
- in the car or songs to sing in the shower
-
-1:07:37.560 --> 1:07:39.560
- I'm taking that example because it exists
-
-1:07:39.560 --> 1:07:41.560
- people love to scream songs in the car
-
-1:07:41.560 --> 1:07:43.560
- when they drive right
-
-1:07:43.560 --> 1:07:45.560
- so you want to create that product and you have this product manager
-
-1:07:45.560 --> 1:07:47.560
- who's a musical expert
-
-1:07:47.560 --> 1:07:49.560
- they create, they come up with a concept
-
-1:07:49.560 --> 1:07:51.560
- like I think this is a missing thing in humanity
-
-1:07:51.560 --> 1:07:53.560
- like a playlist called songs to sing in the car
-
-1:07:53.560 --> 1:07:55.560
- they create
-
-1:07:55.560 --> 1:07:57.560
- the framing, the image
-
-1:07:57.560 --> 1:07:59.560
- the title and they create a test set
-
-1:07:59.560 --> 1:08:01.560
- they create a group of songs
-
-1:08:01.560 --> 1:08:03.560
- like a few thousand songs out of the catalog
-
-1:08:03.560 --> 1:08:05.560
- that they manually curate
-
-1:08:05.560 --> 1:08:07.560
- that are known songs that are great to sing in the car
-
-1:08:07.560 --> 1:08:09.560
- and they can take like
-
-1:08:09.560 --> 1:08:11.560
- through romance into account they understand things
-
-1:08:11.560 --> 1:08:13.560
- that algorithms do not at all
-
-1:08:13.560 --> 1:08:15.560
- so they have this huge set of tracks
-
-1:08:15.560 --> 1:08:17.560
- then when we deliver that to you
-
-1:08:17.560 --> 1:08:19.560
- we look at your taste vectors
-
-1:08:19.560 --> 1:08:21.560
- and you get the 20 tracks that are songs to sing in the car
-
-1:08:21.560 --> 1:08:23.560
- in your taste
-
-1:08:23.560 --> 1:08:25.560
- so you have personalization
-
-1:08:25.560 --> 1:08:27.560
- and editorial input
-
-1:08:27.560 --> 1:08:29.560
- in the same process
-
-1:08:29.560 --> 1:08:31.560
- if that makes sense
-
-1:08:31.560 --> 1:08:33.560
- it makes total sense and I have several questions around that
-
-1:08:33.560 --> 1:08:35.560
- this is like
-
-1:08:35.560 --> 1:08:37.560
- fascinating
-
-1:08:37.560 --> 1:08:39.560
- so first it is a little bit surprising
-
-1:08:39.560 --> 1:08:41.560
- to me
-
-1:08:41.560 --> 1:08:43.560
- that the world expert
-
-1:08:43.560 --> 1:08:45.560
- humans are outperforming
-
-1:08:45.560 --> 1:08:47.560
- machines
-
-1:08:47.560 --> 1:08:49.560
- at specifying
-
-1:08:49.560 --> 1:08:51.560
- songs to sing in the car
-
-1:08:51.560 --> 1:08:53.560
- so
-
-1:08:53.560 --> 1:08:55.560
- maybe you could talk to that a little bit
-
-1:08:55.560 --> 1:08:57.560
- I don't know if you can put it into words but
-
-1:08:57.560 --> 1:08:59.560
- what is it
-
-1:08:59.560 --> 1:09:01.560
- how difficult is this problem
-
-1:09:01.560 --> 1:09:03.560
- of
-
-1:09:03.560 --> 1:09:05.560
- I guess what I'm trying to ask
-
-1:09:05.560 --> 1:09:07.560
- is there how difficult is it to encode
-
-1:09:07.560 --> 1:09:09.560
- the cultural references
-
-1:09:09.560 --> 1:09:11.560
- the context
-
-1:09:11.560 --> 1:09:13.560
- of the song, the artists
-
-1:09:13.560 --> 1:09:15.560
- all those things together
-
-1:09:15.560 --> 1:09:17.560
- can machine learning really not do that
-
-1:09:17.560 --> 1:09:19.560
- I mean I think machine learning is great
-
-1:09:19.560 --> 1:09:21.560
- at replicating patterns
-
-1:09:21.560 --> 1:09:23.560
- if you have the patterns
-
-1:09:23.560 --> 1:09:25.560
- but if you try to write
-
-1:09:25.560 --> 1:09:27.560
- a spec of what song is great
-
-1:09:27.560 --> 1:09:29.560
- to sing in the car definition is
-
-1:09:29.560 --> 1:09:31.560
- is it loud
-
-1:09:31.560 --> 1:09:33.560
- does it have many choruses to have been in movies
-
-1:09:33.560 --> 1:09:35.560
- it quickly gets incredibly complicated
-
-1:09:35.560 --> 1:09:37.560
- right
-
-1:09:37.560 --> 1:09:39.560
- and a lot of it may not be
-
-1:09:39.560 --> 1:09:41.560
- in the structure of the song or the title
-
-1:09:41.560 --> 1:09:43.560
- it could be cultural references because
-
-1:09:43.560 --> 1:09:45.560
- it was a hasty one
-
-1:09:45.560 --> 1:09:47.560
- so the definition problems
-
-1:09:47.560 --> 1:09:49.560
- quickly get
-
-1:09:49.560 --> 1:09:51.560
- and I think that was the insight of Andrew Eng
-
-1:09:51.560 --> 1:09:53.560
- when he said that job of the product manager
-
-1:09:53.560 --> 1:09:55.560
- is to understand these things that
-
-1:09:55.560 --> 1:09:57.560
- algorithms don't and then
-
-1:09:57.560 --> 1:09:59.560
- define what that looks like
-
-1:09:59.560 --> 1:10:01.560
- and then you have something to train towards
-
-1:10:01.560 --> 1:10:03.560
- then you have kind of the test set
-
-1:10:03.560 --> 1:10:05.560
- but today the editors create this
-
-1:10:05.560 --> 1:10:07.560
- pool of tracks and then we personalize
-
-1:10:07.560 --> 1:10:09.560
- you could easily imagine that once you have this set
-
-1:10:09.560 --> 1:10:11.560
- you could have some automatic exploration
-
-1:10:11.560 --> 1:10:13.560
- of the rest of the catalog because then you understand
-
-1:10:13.560 --> 1:10:15.560
- what it is
-
-1:10:15.560 --> 1:10:17.560
- and then the other side of it when machine learning
-
-1:10:17.560 --> 1:10:19.560
- does help is this taste
-
-1:10:19.560 --> 1:10:21.560
- vector
-
-1:10:21.560 --> 1:10:23.560
- how hard is it to construct
-
-1:10:23.560 --> 1:10:25.560
- a vector that represents the things
-
-1:10:25.560 --> 1:10:27.560
- an individual human likes
-
-1:10:27.560 --> 1:10:29.560
- this human preference
-
-1:10:29.560 --> 1:10:31.560
- so you can
-
-1:10:31.560 --> 1:10:33.560
- you know music isn't like
-
-1:10:33.560 --> 1:10:35.560
- it's not like Amazon
-
-1:10:35.560 --> 1:10:37.560
- like things you usually buy
-
-1:10:37.560 --> 1:10:39.560
- music seems more amorphous
-
-1:10:39.560 --> 1:10:41.560
- like it's this thing
-
-1:10:41.560 --> 1:10:43.560
- that's hard to specify like
-
-1:10:43.560 --> 1:10:45.560
- what is
-
-1:10:45.560 --> 1:10:47.560
- if you look at my playlist what is the music
-
-1:10:47.560 --> 1:10:49.560
- that I love it's harder
-
-1:10:49.560 --> 1:10:51.560
- it seems to be
-
-1:10:51.560 --> 1:10:53.560
- much more difficult to specify concretely
-
-1:10:53.560 --> 1:10:55.560
- so how hard is it
-
-1:10:55.560 --> 1:10:57.560
- to build a taste vector
-
-1:10:57.560 --> 1:10:59.560
- it is very hard in the sense that you need a lot of
-
-1:10:59.560 --> 1:11:01.560
- data
-
-1:11:01.560 --> 1:11:03.560
- and I think what we found was that
-
-1:11:03.560 --> 1:11:05.560
- so it's not a stationary problem
-
-1:11:05.560 --> 1:11:07.560
- it changes over time
-
-1:11:07.560 --> 1:11:09.560
- and so
-
-1:11:09.560 --> 1:11:11.560
- we've gone
-
-1:11:11.560 --> 1:11:13.560
- through the journey of if
-
-1:11:13.560 --> 1:11:15.560
- you've done a lot of computer vision
-
-1:11:15.560 --> 1:11:17.560
- obviously I've done a bunch of computer vision
-
-1:11:17.560 --> 1:11:19.560
- in my past and we started
-
-1:11:19.560 --> 1:11:21.560
- kind of with the handcrafted heuristics
-
-1:11:21.560 --> 1:11:23.560
- for you know
-
-1:11:23.560 --> 1:11:25.560
- this is kind of in the music this is this
-
-1:11:25.560 --> 1:11:27.560
- and if you consume this you probably like this
-
-1:11:27.560 --> 1:11:29.560
- so we have
-
-1:11:29.560 --> 1:11:31.560
- we started there and we have some of that still
-
-1:11:31.560 --> 1:11:33.560
- then what was interesting about the playlist data
-
-1:11:33.560 --> 1:11:35.560
- was that you could find these latent things that
-
-1:11:35.560 --> 1:11:37.560
- wouldn't necessarily even make sense to you
-
-1:11:37.560 --> 1:11:39.560
- that could
-
-1:11:39.560 --> 1:11:41.560
- could even capture maybe cultural references
-
-1:11:41.560 --> 1:11:43.560
- because they co occurred things that
-
-1:11:43.560 --> 1:11:45.560
- that wouldn't have appeared
-
-1:11:45.560 --> 1:11:47.560
- kind of mechanistically either in the content
-
-1:11:47.560 --> 1:11:49.560
- or so forth so
-
-1:11:49.560 --> 1:11:51.560
- um
-
-1:11:51.560 --> 1:11:53.560
- I think that
-
-1:11:53.560 --> 1:11:55.560
- um
-
-1:11:55.560 --> 1:11:57.560
- I think the core assumption
-
-1:11:57.560 --> 1:11:59.560
- is that
-
-1:11:59.560 --> 1:12:01.560
- there are patterns
-
-1:12:01.560 --> 1:12:03.560
- in almost everything
-
-1:12:03.560 --> 1:12:05.560
- and if there are patterns
-
-1:12:05.560 --> 1:12:07.560
- these embedding techniques are getting better and better
-
-1:12:07.560 --> 1:12:09.560
- now as everyone else
-
-1:12:09.560 --> 1:12:11.560
- we're also using
-
-1:12:11.560 --> 1:12:13.560
- kind of deep embeddings where you can encode binary
-
-1:12:13.560 --> 1:12:15.560
- values and so forth
-
-1:12:15.560 --> 1:12:17.560
- and what I think
-
-1:12:17.560 --> 1:12:19.560
- is interesting is this process
-
-1:12:19.560 --> 1:12:21.560
- to try to find things that
-
-1:12:21.560 --> 1:12:23.560
- um
-
-1:12:23.560 --> 1:12:25.560
- necessarily you wouldn't actually have
-
-1:12:25.560 --> 1:12:27.560
- guest so it is very
-
-1:12:27.560 --> 1:12:29.560
- hard in an engineering
-
-1:12:29.560 --> 1:12:31.560
- sense to find the right dimensions
-
-1:12:31.560 --> 1:12:33.560
- it's an incredible scalability
-
-1:12:33.560 --> 1:12:35.560
- problem to do for hundreds of millions
-
-1:12:35.560 --> 1:12:37.560
- of users and to update it every day
-
-1:12:37.560 --> 1:12:39.560
- but in
-
-1:12:39.560 --> 1:12:41.560
- theory
-
-1:12:41.560 --> 1:12:43.560
- in theory embeddings isn't that
-
-1:12:43.560 --> 1:12:45.560
- complicated the fact
-
-1:12:45.560 --> 1:12:47.560
- that you try to find some principle components
-
-1:12:47.560 --> 1:12:49.560
- or something like that dimensionality reduction
-
-1:12:49.560 --> 1:12:51.560
- and so forth so the theory I guess is easy
-
-1:12:51.560 --> 1:12:53.560
- because it's very very hard
-
-1:12:53.560 --> 1:12:55.560
- and it's a huge
-
-1:12:55.560 --> 1:12:57.560
- engineering challenge but fortunately we have
-
-1:12:57.560 --> 1:12:59.560
- some amazing both research and
-
-1:12:59.560 --> 1:13:01.560
- engineering teams in this space
-
-1:13:01.560 --> 1:13:03.560
- yeah I guess the
-
-1:13:03.560 --> 1:13:05.560
- question is all
-
-1:13:05.560 --> 1:13:07.560
- I mean it's similar I deal with the autonomous
-
-1:13:07.560 --> 1:13:09.560
- vehicle space is the question is
-
-1:13:09.560 --> 1:13:11.560
- how hard is driving
-
-1:13:11.560 --> 1:13:13.560
- and here is
-
-1:13:13.560 --> 1:13:15.560
- basically the question is of
-
-1:13:15.560 --> 1:13:17.560
- edge cases
-
-1:13:17.560 --> 1:13:19.560
- so embedding
-
-1:13:19.560 --> 1:13:21.560
- probably works
-
-1:13:21.560 --> 1:13:23.560
- not probably but
-
-1:13:23.560 --> 1:13:25.560
- I would imagine works well
-
-1:13:25.560 --> 1:13:27.560
- in a lot of cases
-
-1:13:27.560 --> 1:13:29.560
- so there's a bunch of questions that arise then
-
-1:13:29.560 --> 1:13:31.560
- so do song
-
-1:13:31.560 --> 1:13:33.560
- preferences does your taste vector
-
-1:13:33.560 --> 1:13:35.560
- depend on context
-
-1:13:35.560 --> 1:13:37.560
- like mood
-
-1:13:37.560 --> 1:13:39.560
- right so there's
-
-1:13:39.560 --> 1:13:41.560
- different moods and
-
-1:13:41.560 --> 1:13:43.560
- absolutely so how does that
-
-1:13:43.560 --> 1:13:45.560
- take in
-
-1:13:45.560 --> 1:13:47.560
- is it is it possible to take that
-
-1:13:47.560 --> 1:13:49.560
- consideration or do you just leave
-
-1:13:49.560 --> 1:13:51.560
- that as a interface
-
-1:13:51.560 --> 1:13:53.560
- problem that allows the user to just control
-
-1:13:53.560 --> 1:13:55.560
- it so when I'm looking for a work
-
-1:13:55.560 --> 1:13:57.560
- out music I kind of specify it
-
-1:13:57.560 --> 1:13:59.560
- by choosing certain playlists
-
-1:13:59.560 --> 1:14:01.560
- doing certain search yeah
-
-1:14:01.560 --> 1:14:03.560
- so that's a great point and back to the product
-
-1:14:03.560 --> 1:14:05.560
- development you could try
-
-1:14:05.560 --> 1:14:07.560
- to spend a few years trying to predict
-
-1:14:07.560 --> 1:14:09.560
- which mood you're in automatically when you open
-
-1:14:09.560 --> 1:14:11.560
- Spotify or you create a tab
-
-1:14:11.560 --> 1:14:13.560
- which is happy and sad right and you're going to be
-
-1:14:13.560 --> 1:14:15.560
- right 100% of the time with one click
-
-1:14:15.560 --> 1:14:17.560
- now probably much better to let
-
-1:14:17.560 --> 1:14:19.560
- the user tell you if they're happy or sad
-
-1:14:19.560 --> 1:14:21.560
- or if they want to work out on the other hand
-
-1:14:21.560 --> 1:14:23.560
- if your user interface become 2000
-
-1:14:23.560 --> 1:14:25.560
- tabs you're introducing so much friction
-
-1:14:25.560 --> 1:14:27.560
- so no one will use the product so then you have to
-
-1:14:27.560 --> 1:14:29.560
- get better so it's this
-
-1:14:29.560 --> 1:14:31.560
- thing where I think it maybe was
-
-1:14:31.560 --> 1:14:33.560
- I remember who coined it but it's
-
-1:14:33.560 --> 1:14:35.560
- called full tolerant UIs right to build a UI
-
-1:14:35.560 --> 1:14:37.560
- that is tolerant to being wrong
-
-1:14:37.560 --> 1:14:39.560
- and then you can be much
-
-1:14:39.560 --> 1:14:41.560
- less right in your
-
-1:14:41.560 --> 1:14:43.560
- in your algorithms so
-
-1:14:43.560 --> 1:14:45.560
- we had to learn a lot of that
-
-1:14:45.560 --> 1:14:47.560
- building the right UI that fits
-
-1:14:47.560 --> 1:14:49.560
- where the machine learning is
-
-1:14:49.560 --> 1:14:51.560
- and a great
-
-1:14:51.560 --> 1:14:53.560
- discovery there which was
-
-1:14:53.560 --> 1:14:55.560
- by the teams during
-
-1:14:55.560 --> 1:14:57.560
- one of our hack days was this
-
-1:14:57.560 --> 1:14:59.560
- thing of taking discovery packaging
-
-1:14:59.560 --> 1:15:01.560
- into a playlist and saying that
-
-1:15:01.560 --> 1:15:03.560
- these are new tracks
-
-1:15:03.560 --> 1:15:05.560
- that we think you might like
-
-1:15:05.560 --> 1:15:07.560
- based on this and setting the right expectation
-
-1:15:07.560 --> 1:15:09.560
- made it a great product
-
-1:15:09.560 --> 1:15:11.560
- so I think we have this benefit that for example
-
-1:15:11.560 --> 1:15:13.560
- Tesla doesn't have
-
-1:15:13.560 --> 1:15:15.560
- that we can
-
-1:15:15.560 --> 1:15:17.560
- we can change the expectation we can build
-
-1:15:17.560 --> 1:15:19.560
- a full tolerant setting it's very hard to be
-
-1:15:19.560 --> 1:15:21.560
- full tolerant when you're driving at
-
-1:15:21.560 --> 1:15:23.560
- 100 miles per hour or something
-
-1:15:23.560 --> 1:15:25.560
- and we have the luxury of
-
-1:15:25.560 --> 1:15:27.560
- being able to say that
-
-1:15:27.560 --> 1:15:29.560
- of being wrong if we have the right
-
-1:15:29.560 --> 1:15:31.560
- UI which gives us
-
-1:15:31.560 --> 1:15:33.560
- different abilities to take more risk
-
-1:15:33.560 --> 1:15:35.560
- so I actually think the self driving
-
-1:15:35.560 --> 1:15:37.560
- problem is much harder
-
-1:15:37.560 --> 1:15:39.560
- oh yeah for sure
-
-1:15:39.560 --> 1:15:41.560
- it's much less fun
-
-1:15:41.560 --> 1:15:43.560
- because
-
-1:15:43.560 --> 1:15:45.560
- people die exactly
-
-1:15:45.560 --> 1:15:47.560
- and in Spotify
-
-1:15:47.560 --> 1:15:49.560
- it's
-
-1:15:49.560 --> 1:15:51.560
- such a more fun problem because
-
-1:15:51.560 --> 1:15:53.560
- failure will
-
-1:15:53.560 --> 1:15:55.560
- I mean failure is beautiful in a way
-
-1:15:55.560 --> 1:15:57.560
- at least exploration so it's a really fun
-
-1:15:57.560 --> 1:15:59.560
- reinforcement learning problem and the worst
-
-1:15:59.560 --> 1:16:01.560
- case scenario is you get these WTF tweets
-
-1:16:01.560 --> 1:16:03.560
- like how did I get this
-
-1:16:03.560 --> 1:16:05.560
- which is a lot better than the self
-
-1:16:05.560 --> 1:16:07.560
- driving failure
-
-1:16:07.560 --> 1:16:09.560
- so
-
-1:16:09.560 --> 1:16:11.560
- what's the feedback that a user
-
-1:16:11.560 --> 1:16:13.560
- what's the signal
-
-1:16:13.560 --> 1:16:15.560
- that a user provides
-
-1:16:15.560 --> 1:16:17.560
- into the system so
-
-1:16:17.560 --> 1:16:19.560
- you mentioned skipping
-
-1:16:19.560 --> 1:16:21.560
- what is like the strongest signal
-
-1:16:21.560 --> 1:16:23.560
- you didn't mention clicking
-
-1:16:23.560 --> 1:16:25.560
- like
-
-1:16:25.560 --> 1:16:27.560
- so we have a few signals that are important
-
-1:16:27.560 --> 1:16:29.560
- obviously playing
-
-1:16:29.560 --> 1:16:31.560
- playing through
-
-1:16:31.560 --> 1:16:33.560
- so one of the benefits of music actually
-
-1:16:33.560 --> 1:16:35.560
- even compared to podcasts or
-
-1:16:35.560 --> 1:16:37.560
- movies is the object itself
-
-1:16:37.560 --> 1:16:39.560
- is really only about three minutes
-
-1:16:39.560 --> 1:16:41.560
- so you get a lot of chances to recommend
-
-1:16:41.560 --> 1:16:43.560
- and the feedback loop is
-
-1:16:43.560 --> 1:16:45.560
- every three minutes instead of every two hours
-
-1:16:45.560 --> 1:16:47.560
- or something so you actually get
-
-1:16:47.560 --> 1:16:49.560
- kind of noisy but
-
-1:16:49.560 --> 1:16:51.560
- quite fast feedback and so you can see
-
-1:16:51.560 --> 1:16:53.560
- if people played through or if the
-
-1:16:53.560 --> 1:16:55.560
- which is the inverse of skip really
-
-1:16:55.560 --> 1:16:57.560
- that's an important signal on the other hand
-
-1:16:57.560 --> 1:16:59.560
- much of the consumption happens
-
-1:16:59.560 --> 1:17:01.560
- when your phone is in your pocket maybe you're running
-
-1:17:01.560 --> 1:17:03.560
- or driving or you're playing on a speaker
-
-1:17:03.560 --> 1:17:05.560
- and you're not skipping doesn't mean that you love that song
-
-1:17:05.560 --> 1:17:07.560
- it might be that it wasn't bad enough
-
-1:17:07.560 --> 1:17:09.560
- that you would walk up and skip
-
-1:17:09.560 --> 1:17:11.560
- so it's a noisy signal
-
-1:17:11.560 --> 1:17:13.560
- then we have the equivalent of the like
-
-1:17:13.560 --> 1:17:15.560
- which is you save it to your library
-
-1:17:15.560 --> 1:17:17.560
- that's a pretty strong signal of affection
-
-1:17:17.560 --> 1:17:19.560
- and then
-
-1:17:19.560 --> 1:17:21.560
- we have the more explicit signal
-
-1:17:21.560 --> 1:17:23.560
- of play listing like you took the time
-
-1:17:23.560 --> 1:17:25.560
- to create a playlist you put it in there
-
-1:17:25.560 --> 1:17:27.560
- there's a very little small chance that
-
-1:17:27.560 --> 1:17:29.560
- if you took all that trouble this is not
-
-1:17:29.560 --> 1:17:31.560
- a really important track to you
-
-1:17:31.560 --> 1:17:33.560
- but also
-
-1:17:33.560 --> 1:17:35.560
- what are the tracks it relates to so we have
-
-1:17:35.560 --> 1:17:37.560
- we have the play listing we have the like and then we have
-
-1:17:37.560 --> 1:17:39.560
- the listening or skip
-
-1:17:39.560 --> 1:17:41.560
- and you have to
-
-1:17:41.560 --> 1:17:43.560
- have very different approaches to all of them because
-
-1:17:43.560 --> 1:17:45.560
- at different levels of noise
-
-1:17:45.560 --> 1:17:47.560
- one is very voluminous but noisy
-
-1:17:47.560 --> 1:17:49.560
- and the other is rare but
-
-1:17:49.560 --> 1:17:51.560
- you can probably trust it
-
-1:17:51.560 --> 1:17:53.560
- yeah it's interesting because
-
-1:17:53.560 --> 1:17:55.560
- I think between those signals captures
-
-1:17:55.560 --> 1:17:57.560
- all the information you'd want to capture
-
-1:17:57.560 --> 1:17:59.560
- I mean there's a feeling
-
-1:17:59.560 --> 1:18:01.560
- for me that there's sometimes that I'll
-
-1:18:01.560 --> 1:18:03.560
- hear a song that's like yes this is
-
-1:18:03.560 --> 1:18:05.560
- you know this was the right song for the moment
-
-1:18:05.560 --> 1:18:07.560
- but there's really no way to express
-
-1:18:07.560 --> 1:18:09.560
- that fact except by
-
-1:18:09.560 --> 1:18:11.560
- listening through it all the way
-
-1:18:11.560 --> 1:18:13.560
- and maybe playing it again at that time
-
-1:18:13.560 --> 1:18:15.560
- or something but there's
-
-1:18:15.560 --> 1:18:17.560
- no need for a button that says
-
-1:18:17.560 --> 1:18:19.560
- this was the best song could have
-
-1:18:19.560 --> 1:18:21.560
- heard at this moment well we're playing around
-
-1:18:21.560 --> 1:18:23.560
- with that with kind of the thumbs up
-
-1:18:23.560 --> 1:18:25.560
- concept saying like I really like this
-
-1:18:25.560 --> 1:18:27.560
- just kind of talking to the algorithm
-
-1:18:27.560 --> 1:18:29.560
- it's unclear if that's the best way
-
-1:18:29.560 --> 1:18:31.560
- for humans to interact maybe it is
-
-1:18:31.560 --> 1:18:33.560
- maybe they should think of Spotify
-
-1:18:33.560 --> 1:18:35.560
- as a person an agent sitting there
-
-1:18:35.560 --> 1:18:37.560
- trying to serve you and you can say like
-
-1:18:37.560 --> 1:18:39.560
- that's Spotify, good Spotify
-
-1:18:39.560 --> 1:18:41.560
- right now the analogy we've had is more
-
-1:18:41.560 --> 1:18:43.560
- you shouldn't think of us
-
-1:18:43.560 --> 1:18:45.560
- we should be investable and the feedback
-
-1:18:45.560 --> 1:18:47.560
- is if you save it
-
-1:18:47.560 --> 1:18:49.560
- you work for yourself you do a playlist
-
-1:18:49.560 --> 1:18:51.560
- because you think is great and we can learn from that
-
-1:18:51.560 --> 1:18:53.560
- it's kind of back to Tesla
-
-1:18:53.560 --> 1:18:55.560
- how they kind of have this shadow mode
-
-1:18:55.560 --> 1:18:57.560
- we sit in what you drive
-
-1:18:57.560 --> 1:18:59.560
- we kind of took the same analogy
-
-1:18:59.560 --> 1:19:01.560
- we sit in what you playlist
-
-1:19:01.560 --> 1:19:03.560
- and then maybe we can offer you an autopilot
-
-1:19:03.560 --> 1:19:05.560
- we can take over for a while or something like that
-
-1:19:05.560 --> 1:19:07.560
- and then back off if you say like
-
-1:19:07.560 --> 1:19:09.560
- that's not good enough
-
-1:19:09.560 --> 1:19:11.560
- but I think it's interesting to figure out
-
-1:19:11.560 --> 1:19:13.560
- what your mental model is
-
-1:19:13.560 --> 1:19:15.560
- if Spotify is an AI that you talk to
-
-1:19:15.560 --> 1:19:17.560
- which I think might be a bit too abstract
-
-1:19:17.560 --> 1:19:19.560
- for many consumers
-
-1:19:19.560 --> 1:19:21.560
- or if you still think of it as
-
-1:19:21.560 --> 1:19:23.560
- it's my music app
-
-1:19:23.560 --> 1:19:25.560
- it's more helpful
-
-1:19:25.560 --> 1:19:27.560
- and depends on the device it's running on
-
-1:19:27.560 --> 1:19:29.560
- which brings us to
-
-1:19:29.560 --> 1:19:31.560
- smart speakers
-
-1:19:31.560 --> 1:19:33.560
- so I have a lot of the Spotify listening I do
-
-1:19:33.560 --> 1:19:35.560
- is on
-
-1:19:35.560 --> 1:19:37.560
- things on devices I can talk to
-
-1:19:37.560 --> 1:19:39.560
- whether it's from Amazon, Google
-
-1:19:39.560 --> 1:19:41.560
- or Apple
-
-1:19:41.560 --> 1:19:43.560
- what's the role of Spotify in those devices
-
-1:19:43.560 --> 1:19:45.560
- how do you think of it differently than
-
-1:19:45.560 --> 1:19:47.560
- on the phone or on the desktop
-
-1:19:47.560 --> 1:19:49.560
- there are a few things
-
-1:19:49.560 --> 1:19:51.560
- to say about the first of all
-
-1:19:51.560 --> 1:19:53.560
- it's incredibly exciting they're growing like crazy
-
-1:19:53.560 --> 1:19:55.560
- especially here in the US
-
-1:19:59.560 --> 1:20:01.560
- and it's solving
-
-1:20:01.560 --> 1:20:03.560
- a consumer need that I think is
-
-1:20:05.560 --> 1:20:07.560
- you can think of it as
-
-1:20:07.560 --> 1:20:09.560
- just remote interactivity
-
-1:20:09.560 --> 1:20:11.560
- you can control this thing from
-
-1:20:11.560 --> 1:20:13.560
- across the room and it may
-
-1:20:13.560 --> 1:20:15.560
- feel like a small thing but it turns out
-
-1:20:15.560 --> 1:20:17.560
- that friction matters to consumers
-
-1:20:17.560 --> 1:20:19.560
- being able to say play, pause
-
-1:20:19.560 --> 1:20:21.560
- and so forth from across the room
-
-1:20:21.560 --> 1:20:23.560
- is very powerful so basically
-
-1:20:23.560 --> 1:20:25.560
- you made the living room interactive
-
-1:20:25.560 --> 1:20:27.560
- now
-
-1:20:27.560 --> 1:20:29.560
- and
-
-1:20:29.560 --> 1:20:31.560
- what we see in our data is that
-
-1:20:31.560 --> 1:20:33.560
- the number one use case for these speakers
-
-1:20:33.560 --> 1:20:35.560
- is music, music and podcast
-
-1:20:35.560 --> 1:20:37.560
- so
-
-1:20:37.560 --> 1:20:39.560
- fortunately for us it's been important
-
-1:20:39.560 --> 1:20:41.560
- to these companies to have those use case
-
-1:20:41.560 --> 1:20:43.560
- covered so they want to Spotify on this
-
-1:20:43.560 --> 1:20:45.560
- we have very good relationships with
-
-1:20:45.560 --> 1:20:47.560
- them
-
-1:20:47.560 --> 1:20:49.560
- and we're seeing tremendous
-
-1:20:49.560 --> 1:20:51.560
- success with them
-
-1:20:51.560 --> 1:20:53.560
- what I think is interesting
-
-1:20:53.560 --> 1:20:55.560
- about them is
-
-1:20:55.560 --> 1:20:57.560
- it's already working
-
-1:20:57.560 --> 1:20:59.560
- we kind of had this
-
-1:20:59.560 --> 1:21:01.560
- epiphany
-
-1:21:01.560 --> 1:21:03.560
- many years ago back when we started
-
-1:21:03.560 --> 1:21:05.560
- using Sonos if you went through all the
-
-1:21:05.560 --> 1:21:07.560
- trouble of setting up your Sonos system
-
-1:21:07.560 --> 1:21:09.560
- you had this magical experience where you had
-
-1:21:09.560 --> 1:21:11.560
- all the music ever made in your living room
-
-1:21:11.560 --> 1:21:13.560
- and we
-
-1:21:13.560 --> 1:21:15.560
- made this assumption that
-
-1:21:15.560 --> 1:21:17.560
- at home everyone used to have a CD player at home
-
-1:21:17.560 --> 1:21:19.560
- but they never managed to get their files
-
-1:21:19.560 --> 1:21:21.560
- working in the home having this network attached
-
-1:21:21.560 --> 1:21:23.560
- storage was too cumbersome for most consumers
-
-1:21:23.560 --> 1:21:25.560
- so we made the assumption that
-
-1:21:25.560 --> 1:21:27.560
- the home would skip from the CD all the way to
-
-1:21:27.560 --> 1:21:29.560
- streaming box
-
-1:21:29.560 --> 1:21:31.560
- where you would buy the steering wheel without
-
-1:21:31.560 --> 1:21:33.560
- all the music built in that took longer than we
-
-1:21:33.560 --> 1:21:35.560
- thought but with the voice speakers that was the
-
-1:21:35.560 --> 1:21:37.560
- unlocking that made kind of the connected speaker
-
-1:21:37.560 --> 1:21:39.560
- happen in the home
-
-1:21:39.560 --> 1:21:41.560
- so it really
-
-1:21:41.560 --> 1:21:43.560
- it really exploded and
-
-1:21:43.560 --> 1:21:45.560
- we saw this engagement that we
-
-1:21:45.560 --> 1:21:47.560
- predicted would happen
-
-1:21:47.560 --> 1:21:49.560
- what I think is interesting though is where it's going
-
-1:21:49.560 --> 1:21:51.560
- from now
-
-1:21:51.560 --> 1:21:53.560
- right now you think of them as voice speakers
-
-1:21:53.560 --> 1:21:55.560
- but I think if you look at
-
-1:21:55.560 --> 1:21:57.560
- Google I.O. for example
-
-1:21:57.560 --> 1:21:59.560
- they just added a camera
-
-1:21:59.560 --> 1:22:01.560
- to it where when the alarm goes off
-
-1:22:01.560 --> 1:22:03.560
- instead of saying
-
-1:22:03.560 --> 1:22:05.560
- hey Google stop you can just
-
-1:22:05.560 --> 1:22:07.560
- wave your hand
-
-1:22:07.560 --> 1:22:09.560
- so I think they're going to think more of it as
-
-1:22:09.560 --> 1:22:11.560
- an agent
-
-1:22:11.560 --> 1:22:13.560
- as an assistant truly an assistant
-
-1:22:13.560 --> 1:22:15.560
- and an assistant that can see you
-
-1:22:15.560 --> 1:22:17.560
- is going to be much more effective than a blind
-
-1:22:17.560 --> 1:22:19.560
- assistant so I think these things will
-
-1:22:19.560 --> 1:22:21.560
- morph and we won't necessarily think of them as
-
-1:22:21.560 --> 1:22:23.560
- quote unquote voice speakers anymore
-
-1:22:23.560 --> 1:22:25.560
- just as
-
-1:22:25.560 --> 1:22:27.560
- interactive
-
-1:22:27.560 --> 1:22:29.560
- access to the internet in the home
-
-1:22:29.560 --> 1:22:31.560
- but I still think that
-
-1:22:31.560 --> 1:22:33.560
- the biggest use case for those will be
-
-1:22:33.560 --> 1:22:35.560
- will be audio so
-
-1:22:35.560 --> 1:22:37.560
- for that reason we're investing heavily in it
-
-1:22:37.560 --> 1:22:39.560
- and we built our own NLU stack
-
-1:22:39.560 --> 1:22:41.560
- to be able to
-
-1:22:41.560 --> 1:22:43.560
- the challenge here is
-
-1:22:43.560 --> 1:22:45.560
- how do you innovate in that world
-
-1:22:45.560 --> 1:22:47.560
- it lowers friction for consumers
-
-1:22:47.560 --> 1:22:49.560
- but it's also much more constrained
-
-1:22:49.560 --> 1:22:51.560
- you have no pixels to play with
-
-1:22:51.560 --> 1:22:53.560
- in an audio only world
-
-1:22:53.560 --> 1:22:55.560
- it's really the vocabulary that is the interface
-
-1:22:55.560 --> 1:22:57.560
- so we started investing
-
-1:22:57.560 --> 1:22:59.560
- and playing around quite a lot with that
-
-1:22:59.560 --> 1:23:01.560
- trying to understand what the future will be
-
-1:23:01.560 --> 1:23:03.560
- of you speaking and gesturing
-
-1:23:03.560 --> 1:23:05.560
- and waving at your music
-
-1:23:05.560 --> 1:23:07.560
- and actually you're actually nudging closer
-
-1:23:07.560 --> 1:23:09.560
- to autonomous vehicle space
-
-1:23:09.560 --> 1:23:11.560
- because from everything I've seen
-
-1:23:11.560 --> 1:23:13.560
- the level of frustration people experience
-
-1:23:13.560 --> 1:23:15.560
- upon failure of natural language
-
-1:23:15.560 --> 1:23:17.560
- understanding is much higher
-
-1:23:17.560 --> 1:23:19.560
- than failure in other context
-
-1:23:19.560 --> 1:23:21.560
- people get frustrated really fast
-
-1:23:21.560 --> 1:23:23.560
- so if you screw that
-
-1:23:23.560 --> 1:23:25.560
- experience up even just a little bit
-
-1:23:25.560 --> 1:23:27.560
- they give up really quickly
-
-1:23:27.560 --> 1:23:29.560
- and I think you see that in the data
-
-1:23:29.560 --> 1:23:31.560
- while it's tremendously successful
-
-1:23:31.560 --> 1:23:33.560
- the most common interactions
-
-1:23:33.560 --> 1:23:35.560
- are play, pause
-
-1:23:35.560 --> 1:23:37.560
- and you know next
-
-1:23:37.560 --> 1:23:39.560
- the things where if you compare it to taking up your phone
-
-1:23:39.560 --> 1:23:41.560
- unlocking it, bringing up the app and skipping
-
-1:23:41.560 --> 1:23:43.560
- clicking skip
-
-1:23:43.560 --> 1:23:45.560
- it was much lower friction
-
-1:23:45.560 --> 1:23:47.560
- but then
-
-1:23:47.560 --> 1:23:49.560
- for longer more complicated things
-
-1:23:49.560 --> 1:23:51.560
- can you find me that song about people still bring up their phone
-
-1:23:51.560 --> 1:23:53.560
- and search and then play it on their speaker
-
-1:23:53.560 --> 1:23:55.560
- so we tried again to build a fault tolerant UI
-
-1:23:55.560 --> 1:23:57.560
- where for the more
-
-1:23:57.560 --> 1:23:59.560
- complicated things you can still pick up your phone
-
-1:23:59.560 --> 1:24:01.560
- have powerful full keyboard search
-
-1:24:01.560 --> 1:24:03.560
- and then try to optimize
-
-1:24:03.560 --> 1:24:05.560
- for where there is actually lower friction
-
-1:24:05.560 --> 1:24:07.560
- and try to, it's kind of like the
-
-1:24:07.560 --> 1:24:09.560
- test autopilot thing
-
-1:24:09.560 --> 1:24:11.560
- you have to be at the level where
-
-1:24:11.560 --> 1:24:13.560
- you're helpful if you're too smart
-
-1:24:13.560 --> 1:24:15.560
- and just in the way people are going to get frustrated
-
-1:24:15.560 --> 1:24:17.560
- and first of all
-
-1:24:17.560 --> 1:24:19.560
- I'm not obsessed with where it happens
-
-1:24:19.560 --> 1:24:21.560
- it's just a good song but let me mention that as a use case
-
-1:24:21.560 --> 1:24:23.560
- because it's an interesting one
-
-1:24:23.560 --> 1:24:25.560
- I've literally told
-
-1:24:25.560 --> 1:24:27.560
- I don't want to say the name of the speaker
-
-1:24:27.560 --> 1:24:29.560
- because when people are listening to it
-
-1:24:29.560 --> 1:24:31.560
- it'll make their speaker go off
-
-1:24:31.560 --> 1:24:33.560
- but I talk to the speaker
-
-1:24:33.560 --> 1:24:35.560
- and I say play
-
-1:24:35.560 --> 1:24:37.560
- Stairway to Heaven
-
-1:24:37.560 --> 1:24:39.560
- and every time
-
-1:24:39.560 --> 1:24:41.560
- but a large percentage of the time plays the wrong
-
-1:24:41.560 --> 1:24:43.560
- Stairway to Heaven
-
-1:24:43.560 --> 1:24:45.560
- it plays some cover of the
-
-1:24:45.560 --> 1:24:47.560
- and
-
-1:24:47.560 --> 1:24:49.560
- that part of the experience
-
-1:24:49.560 --> 1:24:51.560
- I actually wonder from a business perspective
-
-1:24:51.560 --> 1:24:53.560
- the Spotify control
-
-1:24:53.560 --> 1:24:55.560
- that entire experience
-
-1:24:55.560 --> 1:24:57.560
- or no
-
-1:24:57.560 --> 1:24:59.560
- it seems like the NLU
-
-1:24:59.560 --> 1:25:01.560
- stuff is controlled by the speaker
-
-1:25:01.560 --> 1:25:03.560
- and then Spotify stays
-
-1:25:03.560 --> 1:25:05.560
- at a layer below that
-
-1:25:05.560 --> 1:25:07.560
- it's a good and complicated question
-
-1:25:07.560 --> 1:25:09.560
- some of which is dependent
-
-1:25:09.560 --> 1:25:11.560
- on the
-
-1:25:11.560 --> 1:25:13.560
- partners so it's hard to comment on the specifics
-
-1:25:13.560 --> 1:25:15.560
- but
-
-1:25:15.560 --> 1:25:17.560
- the question is the right one
-
-1:25:17.560 --> 1:25:19.560
- the challenge is
-
-1:25:19.560 --> 1:25:21.560
- if you can't use any of the personalization
-
-1:25:21.560 --> 1:25:23.560
- we know which Stairway to Heaven
-
-1:25:23.560 --> 1:25:25.560
- and the truth is maybe for one person
-
-1:25:25.560 --> 1:25:27.560
- it is exactly the cover that they want
-
-1:25:27.560 --> 1:25:29.560
- to be very frustrated
-
-1:25:29.560 --> 1:25:31.560
- I think
-
-1:25:31.560 --> 1:25:33.560
- we default to the right version
-
-1:25:33.560 --> 1:25:35.560
- but you actually want to be able to do the cover
-
-1:25:35.560 --> 1:25:37.560
- for the person that just played the cover 50 times
-
-1:25:37.560 --> 1:25:39.560
- or Spotify is just going to seem stupid
-
-1:25:39.560 --> 1:25:41.560
- so you want to be able to leverage the personalization
-
-1:25:41.560 --> 1:25:43.560
- but you have this stack
-
-1:25:43.560 --> 1:25:45.560
- where you have the
-
-1:25:45.560 --> 1:25:47.560
- the ASR and this thing called the end best list
-
-1:25:47.560 --> 1:25:49.560
- or the end best guesses
-
-1:25:49.560 --> 1:25:51.560
- here and then the personalization comes in at the end
-
-1:25:51.560 --> 1:25:53.560
- you actually want the personalization to be here
-
-1:25:53.560 --> 1:25:55.560
- when you're guessing about what they actually meant
-
-1:25:55.560 --> 1:25:57.560
- we're working with these partners
-
-1:25:57.560 --> 1:25:59.560
- and it's a complicated
-
-1:25:59.560 --> 1:26:01.560
- it's a complicated thing
-
-1:26:01.560 --> 1:26:03.560
- where you want to
-
-1:26:03.560 --> 1:26:05.560
- so first of all you want to be very
-
-1:26:05.560 --> 1:26:07.560
- careful with your users data
-
-1:26:07.560 --> 1:26:09.560
- you don't want to share your users data without the permission
-
-1:26:09.560 --> 1:26:11.560
- but you want to share some data so that their experience gets better
-
-1:26:11.560 --> 1:26:13.560
- so that these partners
-
-1:26:13.560 --> 1:26:15.560
- can understand enough but not too much and so forth
-
-1:26:15.560 --> 1:26:17.560
- so
-
-1:26:17.560 --> 1:26:19.560
- it's really the trick is that
-
-1:26:19.560 --> 1:26:21.560
- it's like a business driven relationship
-
-1:26:21.560 --> 1:26:23.560
- where you're doing product development across companies
-
-1:26:23.560 --> 1:26:25.560
- together
-
-1:26:25.560 --> 1:26:27.560
- which is really complicated
-
-1:26:27.560 --> 1:26:29.560
- but this is exactly why we built our own NLU
-
-1:26:29.560 --> 1:26:31.560
- so that we actually
-
-1:26:31.560 --> 1:26:33.560
- can make personalized guesses
-
-1:26:33.560 --> 1:26:35.560
- because this is the biggest frustration
-
-1:26:35.560 --> 1:26:37.560
- from a user point of view they don't understand
-
-1:26:37.560 --> 1:26:39.560
- about ASRs and end best lists
-
-1:26:39.560 --> 1:26:41.560
- and business deals they're like how hard can it be
-
-1:26:41.560 --> 1:26:43.560
- I've told this thing 50 times
-
-1:26:43.560 --> 1:26:45.560
- this version and still it plays the wrong thing
-
-1:26:45.560 --> 1:26:47.560
- it can't be hard
-
-1:26:47.560 --> 1:26:49.560
- so we try to take that user approach
-
-1:26:49.560 --> 1:26:51.560
- if the user is not going to understand
-
-1:26:51.560 --> 1:26:53.560
- the implications of business we have to
-
-1:26:53.560 --> 1:26:55.560
- solve it
-
-1:26:55.560 --> 1:26:57.560
- let's talk about sort of a complicated subject
-
-1:26:57.560 --> 1:26:59.560
- that I myself
-
-1:26:59.560 --> 1:27:01.560
- I'm quite
-
-1:27:01.560 --> 1:27:03.560
- torn about
-
-1:27:03.560 --> 1:27:05.560
- the idea sort of of
-
-1:27:05.560 --> 1:27:07.560
- paying
-
-1:27:07.560 --> 1:27:09.560
- artists
-
-1:27:09.560 --> 1:27:11.560
- I saw as of August 31
-
-1:27:11.560 --> 1:27:13.560
- 2018
-
-1:27:13.560 --> 1:27:15.560
- over 11 billion dollars
-
-1:27:15.560 --> 1:27:17.560
- were paid to rights holders
-
-1:27:17.560 --> 1:27:19.560
- and further distributed
-
-1:27:19.560 --> 1:27:21.560
- to artists from Spotify
-
-1:27:21.560 --> 1:27:23.560
- so a lot of money is being paid to artists
-
-1:27:23.560 --> 1:27:25.560
- first of all
-
-1:27:25.560 --> 1:27:27.560
- the whole time as a consumer for me
-
-1:27:27.560 --> 1:27:29.560
- when I look at Spotify
-
-1:27:29.560 --> 1:27:31.560
- I'm not sure I'm remembering
-
-1:27:31.560 --> 1:27:33.560
- correctly but I think you said exactly how I feel
-
-1:27:33.560 --> 1:27:35.560
- which is this is too good to be true
-
-1:27:35.560 --> 1:27:37.560
- like
-
-1:27:37.560 --> 1:27:39.560
- when I started using Spotify
-
-1:27:39.560 --> 1:27:41.560
- I assumed you guys would go bankrupt
-
-1:27:41.560 --> 1:27:43.560
- in like a month
-
-1:27:43.560 --> 1:27:45.560
- it's like this is too good
-
-1:27:45.560 --> 1:27:47.560
- a lot of people did
-
-1:27:47.560 --> 1:27:49.560
- this is amazing
-
-1:27:49.560 --> 1:27:51.560
- so one question I have
-
-1:27:51.560 --> 1:27:53.560
- is sort of the bigger question
-
-1:27:53.560 --> 1:27:55.560
- how do you make money in this complicated world
-
-1:27:55.560 --> 1:27:57.560
- how do you deal with the relationship
-
-1:27:57.560 --> 1:27:59.560
- with record labels
-
-1:27:59.560 --> 1:28:01.560
- who
-
-1:28:01.560 --> 1:28:03.560
- are
-
-1:28:03.560 --> 1:28:05.560
- complicated
-
-1:28:05.560 --> 1:28:07.560
- these big
-
-1:28:07.560 --> 1:28:09.560
- you essentially have the task
-
-1:28:09.560 --> 1:28:11.560
- of hurting
-
-1:28:11.560 --> 1:28:13.560
- cats but like rich
-
-1:28:13.560 --> 1:28:15.560
- and powerful cats
-
-1:28:15.560 --> 1:28:17.560
- and also
-
-1:28:17.560 --> 1:28:19.560
- have the task of paying artists enough
-
-1:28:19.560 --> 1:28:21.560
- and paying those labels enough
-
-1:28:21.560 --> 1:28:23.560
- and still making money in the internet
-
-1:28:23.560 --> 1:28:25.560
- space where people are not willing to pay
-
-1:28:25.560 --> 1:28:27.560
- hundreds of dollars a month
-
-1:28:27.560 --> 1:28:29.560
- so
-
-1:28:29.560 --> 1:28:31.560
- how do you navigate the space
-
-1:28:31.560 --> 1:28:33.560
- that's a beautiful description, hurting rich cats
-
-1:28:33.560 --> 1:28:35.560
- I've never heard that before
-
-1:28:35.560 --> 1:28:37.560
- it is
-
-1:28:37.560 --> 1:28:39.560
- very complicated and I think
-
-1:28:39.560 --> 1:28:41.560
- certainly
-
-1:28:41.560 --> 1:28:43.560
- actually betting against Spotify has been statistically
-
-1:28:43.560 --> 1:28:45.560
- a very smart thing to do
-
-1:28:45.560 --> 1:28:47.560
- just looking at the
-
-1:28:47.560 --> 1:28:49.560
- line of roadkill in music streaming services
-
-1:28:51.560 --> 1:28:53.560
- it's kind of
-
-1:28:53.560 --> 1:28:55.560
- I think if I understood the complexity
-
-1:28:55.560 --> 1:28:57.560
- when I joined Spotify
-
-1:28:57.560 --> 1:28:59.560
- fortunately I didn't know enough
-
-1:28:59.560 --> 1:29:01.560
- about
-
-1:29:01.560 --> 1:29:03.560
- the music industry to understand the complexities
-
-1:29:03.560 --> 1:29:05.560
- because then I would have made a more rational guess
-
-1:29:05.560 --> 1:29:07.560
- that it wouldn't work
-
-1:29:07.560 --> 1:29:09.560
- so ignorance is bliss
-
-1:29:09.560 --> 1:29:11.560
- but I think
-
-1:29:11.560 --> 1:29:13.560
- there have been a few distinct challenges
-
-1:29:13.560 --> 1:29:15.560
- I think as I said
-
-1:29:15.560 --> 1:29:17.560
- one of the things that made it work at all
-
-1:29:17.560 --> 1:29:19.560
- was that Sweden and the Nordics
-
-1:29:19.560 --> 1:29:21.560
- was a lost market
-
-1:29:21.560 --> 1:29:23.560
- so there was
-
-1:29:23.560 --> 1:29:25.560
- no risk for labels to try this
-
-1:29:25.560 --> 1:29:27.560
- I don't think it would have worked
-
-1:29:27.560 --> 1:29:29.560
- if the market was
-
-1:29:29.560 --> 1:29:31.560
- healthy
-
-1:29:31.560 --> 1:29:33.560
- so that was the initial condition
-
-1:29:33.560 --> 1:29:35.560
- then we had this tremendous
-
-1:29:35.560 --> 1:29:37.560
- challenge with the model itself
-
-1:29:37.560 --> 1:29:39.560
- so now
-
-1:29:39.560 --> 1:29:41.560
- we're pirating but for the people who bought
-
-1:29:41.560 --> 1:29:43.560
- a download or a CD
-
-1:29:43.560 --> 1:29:45.560
- the artist would get
-
-1:29:45.560 --> 1:29:47.560
- all the revenue for all the future plays
-
-1:29:47.560 --> 1:29:49.560
- then right so you got it all up front
-
-1:29:49.560 --> 1:29:51.560
- whereas the streaming model was like
-
-1:29:51.560 --> 1:29:53.560
- almost nothing they won almost nothing they too
-
-1:29:53.560 --> 1:29:55.560
- and then at some point this curve
-
-1:29:55.560 --> 1:29:57.560
- of incremental revenue
-
-1:29:57.560 --> 1:29:59.560
- would intersect with your day one payment
-
-1:29:59.560 --> 1:30:01.560
- and that took a long time to play out
-
-1:30:01.560 --> 1:30:03.560
- before
-
-1:30:03.560 --> 1:30:05.560
- the music labels
-
-1:30:05.560 --> 1:30:07.560
- they understood that but on the artist side
-
-1:30:07.560 --> 1:30:09.560
- it took a lot of time to understand
-
-1:30:09.560 --> 1:30:11.560
- that actually if I have a big hit that is going to be played
-
-1:30:11.560 --> 1:30:13.560
- for many years this is a much better model
-
-1:30:13.560 --> 1:30:15.560
- because I get paid based
-
-1:30:15.560 --> 1:30:17.560
- on how much people use the product
-
-1:30:17.560 --> 1:30:19.560
- not how much they thought they would use it day one
-
-1:30:19.560 --> 1:30:21.560
- or so forth
-
-1:30:21.560 --> 1:30:23.560
- so it was a complicated model to get across
-
-1:30:23.560 --> 1:30:25.560
- but time helped with that
-
-1:30:25.560 --> 1:30:27.560
- and now
-
-1:30:27.560 --> 1:30:29.560
- the revenues to the music industry actually are bigger
-
-1:30:29.560 --> 1:30:31.560
- again
-
-1:30:31.560 --> 1:30:33.560
- it's gone through this incredible dip and now they're back up
-
-1:30:33.560 --> 1:30:35.560
- and so we're very proud
-
-1:30:35.560 --> 1:30:37.560
- of having been
-
-1:30:37.560 --> 1:30:39.560
- a part of that
-
-1:30:39.560 --> 1:30:41.560
- so there have been distinct problems
-
-1:30:41.560 --> 1:30:43.560
- I think when it comes to the
-
-1:30:43.560 --> 1:30:45.560
- labels
-
-1:30:45.560 --> 1:30:47.560
- we have taken the painful approach
-
-1:30:47.560 --> 1:30:49.560
- some of our competition at the time
-
-1:30:49.560 --> 1:30:51.560
- they kind of
-
-1:30:51.560 --> 1:30:53.560
- looked at other companies and said
-
-1:30:53.560 --> 1:30:55.560
- if we just ignore the rights
-
-1:30:55.560 --> 1:30:57.560
- we get really big really fast
-
-1:30:57.560 --> 1:30:59.560
- we're going to be too big for the
-
-1:30:59.560 --> 1:31:01.560
- labels to fail
-
-1:31:01.560 --> 1:31:03.560
- they're not going to kill us
-
-1:31:03.560 --> 1:31:05.560
- we're going to take that approach
-
-1:31:05.560 --> 1:31:07.560
- we went legal from day one
-
-1:31:07.560 --> 1:31:09.560
- and we negotiated
-
-1:31:09.560 --> 1:31:11.560
- and negotiated and negotiated
-
-1:31:11.560 --> 1:31:13.560
- it was very slow, very frustrating
-
-1:31:13.560 --> 1:31:15.560
- we were angry at seeing other companies
-
-1:31:15.560 --> 1:31:17.560
- taking shortcuts and seeming to get away with it
-
-1:31:17.560 --> 1:31:19.560
- it was this game theory thing
-
-1:31:19.560 --> 1:31:21.560
- where over many rounds of playing the game
-
-1:31:21.560 --> 1:31:23.560
- this would be the right strategy
-
-1:31:23.560 --> 1:31:25.560
- and even though
-
-1:31:25.560 --> 1:31:27.560
- clearly there's a lot of frustrations
-
-1:31:27.560 --> 1:31:29.560
- at times during renegotiations
-
-1:31:29.560 --> 1:31:31.560
- there is this weird trust
-
-1:31:31.560 --> 1:31:33.560
- honest and fair
-
-1:31:33.560 --> 1:31:35.560
- we've never screwed them, they've never screwed us
-
-1:31:35.560 --> 1:31:37.560
- it's ten years but
-
-1:31:37.560 --> 1:31:39.560
- there's this trust in like
-
-1:31:39.560 --> 1:31:41.560
- they know that if music doesn't get really big
-
-1:31:41.560 --> 1:31:43.560
- if lots of people do not want to listen
-
-1:31:43.560 --> 1:31:45.560
- to music and want to pay for it
-
-1:31:45.560 --> 1:31:47.560
- Spotify has no business model
-
-1:31:47.560 --> 1:31:49.560
- so we actually are incredibly aligned
-
-1:31:49.560 --> 1:31:51.560
- right?
-
-1:31:51.560 --> 1:31:53.560
- other companies have other business models
-
-1:31:53.560 --> 1:31:55.560
- where even if they made new music
-
-1:31:55.560 --> 1:31:57.560
- no money for music
-
-1:31:57.560 --> 1:31:59.560
- they'd still be profitable companies
-
-1:31:59.560 --> 1:32:01.560
- and I think the industry sees that
-
-1:32:01.560 --> 1:32:03.560
- we are actually aligned
-
-1:32:03.560 --> 1:32:05.560
- business wise
-
-1:32:05.560 --> 1:32:07.560
- so there is this trust
-
-1:32:07.560 --> 1:32:09.560
- that allows us to do
-
-1:32:09.560 --> 1:32:11.560
- product development even if it's scary
-
-1:32:11.560 --> 1:32:13.560
- you know
-
-1:32:13.560 --> 1:32:15.560
- taking risks
-
-1:32:15.560 --> 1:32:17.560
- the free model itself was an incredible risk
-
-1:32:17.560 --> 1:32:19.560
- for the music industry to take
-
-1:32:19.560 --> 1:32:21.560
- that they should get credit for
-
-1:32:21.560 --> 1:32:23.560
- now some of it was that they had nothing to lose in Sweden
-
-1:32:23.560 --> 1:32:25.560
- but frankly a lot of the labels also took risk
-
-1:32:25.560 --> 1:32:27.560
- and so I think we built up that trust
-
-1:32:27.560 --> 1:32:29.560
- with
-
-1:32:29.560 --> 1:32:31.560
- I think hurting a cat sounds a bit
-
-1:32:31.560 --> 1:32:33.560
- what's the word
-
-1:32:33.560 --> 1:32:35.560
- it sounds like
-
-1:32:35.560 --> 1:32:37.560
- dismissive? no every cat matter
-
-1:32:37.560 --> 1:32:39.560
- they are all beautiful and very important
-
-1:32:39.560 --> 1:32:41.560
- exactly they've taken a lot of risks
-
-1:32:41.560 --> 1:32:43.560
- and certainly it's been frustrating on both sides
-
-1:32:45.560 --> 1:32:47.560
- it's really like playing
-
-1:32:47.560 --> 1:32:49.560
- it's game theory if you play the
-
-1:32:49.560 --> 1:32:51.560
- if you play the game many times
-
-1:32:51.560 --> 1:32:53.560
- then you can have the statistical outcome
-
-1:32:53.560 --> 1:32:55.560
- that you bet on and it feels very painful
-
-1:32:55.560 --> 1:32:57.560
- when you're in the middle of that
-
-1:32:57.560 --> 1:32:59.560
- I mean there's risk there's trust
-
-1:32:59.560 --> 1:33:01.560
- there's relationships from
-
-1:33:01.560 --> 1:33:03.560
- just having read the biography
-
-1:33:03.560 --> 1:33:05.560
- of Steve Jobs
-
-1:33:05.560 --> 1:33:07.560
- similar kind of relationship were discussed
-
-1:33:07.560 --> 1:33:09.560
- in iTunes the idea of selling
-
-1:33:09.560 --> 1:33:11.560
- a song for a dollar was very uncomfortable
-
-1:33:11.560 --> 1:33:13.560
- for labels and
-
-1:33:13.560 --> 1:33:15.560
- and there was no
-
-1:33:15.560 --> 1:33:17.560
- it was the same kind of thing it was trust
-
-1:33:17.560 --> 1:33:19.560
- it was game theory
-
-1:33:19.560 --> 1:33:21.560
- as a lot of relationships that had to be built
-
-1:33:21.560 --> 1:33:23.560
- and it's really
-
-1:33:23.560 --> 1:33:25.560
- terrifyingly difficult
-
-1:33:25.560 --> 1:33:27.560
- process
-
-1:33:27.560 --> 1:33:29.560
- that Apple could go through a little bit
-
-1:33:29.560 --> 1:33:31.560
- because they could afford for that process
-
-1:33:31.560 --> 1:33:33.560
- to fail
-
-1:33:33.560 --> 1:33:35.560
- for Spotify it seems terrifying because
-
-1:33:35.560 --> 1:33:37.560
- you can't
-
-1:33:37.560 --> 1:33:39.560
- initially
-
-1:33:39.560 --> 1:33:41.560
- I think a lot of it comes down to
-
-1:33:41.560 --> 1:33:43.560
- honestly Daniel and his tenacity
-
-1:33:43.560 --> 1:33:45.560
- in negotiating which seems like an impossible
-
-1:33:45.560 --> 1:33:47.560
- discipline task
-
-1:33:47.560 --> 1:33:49.560
- because
-
-1:33:49.560 --> 1:33:51.560
- he was completely unknown and so forth
-
-1:33:51.560 --> 1:33:53.560
- and also the reason that
-
-1:33:53.560 --> 1:33:55.560
- it worked
-
-1:33:55.560 --> 1:33:57.560
- but I think
-
-1:34:01.560 --> 1:34:03.560
- I think game theory is probably the best way to think about it
-
-1:34:03.560 --> 1:34:05.560
- you could straight go straight for this like Nash
-
-1:34:05.560 --> 1:34:07.560
- equilibrium that someone is going to defect
-
-1:34:07.560 --> 1:34:09.560
- or you play many times
-
-1:34:09.560 --> 1:34:11.560
- and you try to actually go for the top left
-
-1:34:11.560 --> 1:34:13.560
- the corporations sell
-
-1:34:13.560 --> 1:34:15.560
- is there any magical
-
-1:34:15.560 --> 1:34:17.560
- reason why Spotify
-
-1:34:17.560 --> 1:34:19.560
- seems to have won
-
-1:34:19.560 --> 1:34:21.560
- so a lot of people have tried to do
-
-1:34:21.560 --> 1:34:23.560
- what Spotify tried to do
-
-1:34:23.560 --> 1:34:25.560
- and Spotify has come out
-
-1:34:25.560 --> 1:34:27.560
- well so the answer is that
-
-1:34:27.560 --> 1:34:29.560
- there's no magical reason because I don't believe in magic
-
-1:34:29.560 --> 1:34:31.560
- but I think there are
-
-1:34:31.560 --> 1:34:33.560
- there are reasons
-
-1:34:33.560 --> 1:34:35.560
- and I think some of them are that
-
-1:34:35.560 --> 1:34:37.560
- people have
-
-1:34:37.560 --> 1:34:39.560
- misunderstood
-
-1:34:39.560 --> 1:34:41.560
- a lot of what we actually do
-
-1:34:41.560 --> 1:34:43.560
- the actual
-
-1:34:43.560 --> 1:34:45.560
- Spotify model is very complicated
-
-1:34:45.560 --> 1:34:47.560
- they've looked at the premium model
-
-1:34:47.560 --> 1:34:49.560
- like you can charge 9.99
-
-1:34:49.560 --> 1:34:51.560
- for music and people are going to pay
-
-1:34:51.560 --> 1:34:53.560
- but that's not what happened
-
-1:34:53.560 --> 1:34:55.560
- actually when we launched the original mobile product
-
-1:34:55.560 --> 1:34:57.560
- everyone said they would never pay
-
-1:34:57.560 --> 1:34:59.560
- what happened was they started on the free product
-
-1:34:59.560 --> 1:35:01.560
- and then their engagement
-
-1:35:01.560 --> 1:35:03.560
- grew so much that eventually
-
-1:35:03.560 --> 1:35:05.560
- they said maybe it is worth
-
-1:35:05.560 --> 1:35:07.560
- 9.99 right it's
-
-1:35:07.560 --> 1:35:09.560
- your propensity to pay gross with your engagement
-
-1:35:09.560 --> 1:35:11.560
- so we had this super complicated
-
-1:35:11.560 --> 1:35:13.560
- business model where you operate
-
-1:35:13.560 --> 1:35:15.560
- two different business model advertising and premium
-
-1:35:15.560 --> 1:35:17.560
- products at the same time
-
-1:35:17.560 --> 1:35:19.560
- and I think that is hard to replicate
-
-1:35:19.560 --> 1:35:21.560
- I struggle to think of other companies
-
-1:35:21.560 --> 1:35:23.560
- that run large scale advertising
-
-1:35:23.560 --> 1:35:25.560
- and subscription products at the same time
-
-1:35:25.560 --> 1:35:27.560
- so I think the business model is actually
-
-1:35:27.560 --> 1:35:29.560
- much more complicated than people think it is
-
-1:35:29.560 --> 1:35:31.560
- and so
-
-1:35:31.560 --> 1:35:33.560
- some people went after just the premium part
-
-1:35:33.560 --> 1:35:35.560
- without the free part and ran into a wall
-
-1:35:35.560 --> 1:35:37.560
- where no one wanted to pay
-
-1:35:37.560 --> 1:35:39.560
- some people went after just
-
-1:35:39.560 --> 1:35:41.560
- music should be free just ads
-
-1:35:41.560 --> 1:35:43.560
- which doesn't give you enough revenue
-
-1:35:43.560 --> 1:35:45.560
- for the music industry
-
-1:35:45.560 --> 1:35:47.560
- so I think that combination is
-
-1:35:47.560 --> 1:35:49.560
- kind of opaque from the outside
-
-1:35:49.560 --> 1:35:51.560
- so maybe I shouldn't say it here and reveal the secret
-
-1:35:51.560 --> 1:35:53.560
- but that turns out to be hard
-
-1:35:53.560 --> 1:35:55.560
- to replicate
-
-1:35:55.560 --> 1:35:57.560
- than you would think
-
-1:35:57.560 --> 1:35:59.560
- so there is a lot of brilliant business strategy here
-
-1:35:59.560 --> 1:36:01.560
- brilliance or luck
-
-1:36:01.560 --> 1:36:03.560
- probably more luck but it doesn't really matter
-
-1:36:03.560 --> 1:36:05.560
- it looks brilliant in retrospect
-
-1:36:05.560 --> 1:36:07.560
- so let's call it brilliant
-
-1:36:07.560 --> 1:36:09.560
- yeah when the books are written it will be brilliant
-
-1:36:09.560 --> 1:36:11.560
- you have
-
-1:36:11.560 --> 1:36:13.560
- mentioned that your philosophy is to
-
-1:36:13.560 --> 1:36:15.560
- embrace change
-
-1:36:15.560 --> 1:36:17.560
- so how will the music streaming
-
-1:36:17.560 --> 1:36:19.560
- and music listening
-
-1:36:19.560 --> 1:36:21.560
- world change over the next
-
-1:36:21.560 --> 1:36:23.560
- 10 years, 20 years
-
-1:36:23.560 --> 1:36:25.560
- you look out into the far future
-
-1:36:25.560 --> 1:36:27.560
- what do you think?
-
-1:36:27.560 --> 1:36:29.560
- I think that music
-
-1:36:29.560 --> 1:36:31.560
- and for that matter audio
-
-1:36:31.560 --> 1:36:33.560
- podcast audio books
-
-1:36:33.560 --> 1:36:35.560
- I think it's one of the few
-
-1:36:35.560 --> 1:36:37.560
- core human needs
-
-1:36:37.560 --> 1:36:39.560
- I think there is no good reason to me
-
-1:36:39.560 --> 1:36:41.560
- why it shouldn't be at the scale
-
-1:36:41.560 --> 1:36:43.560
- of something like messaging or social networking
-
-1:36:43.560 --> 1:36:45.560
- I don't think it's a niche thing
-
-1:36:45.560 --> 1:36:47.560
- to listen to music or news or something
-
-1:36:47.560 --> 1:36:49.560
- so I think scale is obviously one of the things
-
-1:36:49.560 --> 1:36:51.560
- that I really hope for
-
-1:36:51.560 --> 1:36:53.560
- I hope that it's going to be
-
-1:36:53.560 --> 1:36:55.560
- billions of users, I hope eventually
-
-1:36:55.560 --> 1:36:57.560
- everyone in the world gets access to
-
-1:36:57.560 --> 1:36:59.560
- all the world's music ever made
-
-1:36:59.560 --> 1:37:01.560
- so obviously I think it's going to be a much bigger business
-
-1:37:01.560 --> 1:37:03.560
- otherwise we wouldn't be betting this big
-
-1:37:05.560 --> 1:37:07.560
- now if you look more at how
-
-1:37:07.560 --> 1:37:09.560
- it is consumed
-
-1:37:09.560 --> 1:37:11.560
- what I'm hoping is back to this
-
-1:37:11.560 --> 1:37:13.560
- analogy of the
-
-1:37:13.560 --> 1:37:15.560
- software tool chain
-
-1:37:15.560 --> 1:37:17.560
- where I think
-
-1:37:17.560 --> 1:37:19.560
- sometimes internally
-
-1:37:19.560 --> 1:37:21.560
- I make this analogy to
-
-1:37:21.560 --> 1:37:23.560
- text messaging
-
-1:37:23.560 --> 1:37:25.560
- text messaging was also based on
-
-1:37:25.560 --> 1:37:27.560
- standards
-
-1:37:27.560 --> 1:37:29.560
- in the area of mobile carriers
-
-1:37:29.560 --> 1:37:31.560
- you had the SMS, the 140 character
-
-1:37:31.560 --> 1:37:33.560
- 120 carat SMS
-
-1:37:33.560 --> 1:37:35.560
- and it was great
-
-1:37:35.560 --> 1:37:37.560
- because everyone agreed on the standard
-
-1:37:37.560 --> 1:37:39.560
- so as a consumer you got a lot of distributions
-
-1:37:39.560 --> 1:37:41.560
- and interoperability but it was a very constrained format
-
-1:37:41.560 --> 1:37:43.560
- and when the industry
-
-1:37:43.560 --> 1:37:45.560
- wanted to add pictures to that format
-
-1:37:45.560 --> 1:37:47.560
- to do the MMS, I looked it up
-
-1:37:47.560 --> 1:37:49.560
- and I think it took from the late 80s to early 2000
-
-1:37:49.560 --> 1:37:51.560
- this is like a 15, 20 year product cycle
-
-1:37:51.560 --> 1:37:53.560
- to bring pictures into that
-
-1:37:53.560 --> 1:37:55.560
- now once that entire
-
-1:37:55.560 --> 1:37:57.560
- value chain
-
-1:37:57.560 --> 1:37:59.560
- of creation and consumption got wrapped
-
-1:37:59.560 --> 1:38:01.560
- in one software stack
-
-1:38:01.560 --> 1:38:03.560
- within something like Snapchat or WhatsApp
-
-1:38:03.560 --> 1:38:05.560
- the first week
-
-1:38:05.560 --> 1:38:07.560
- they added disappearing messages
-
-1:38:07.560 --> 1:38:09.560
- then two weeks later they added stories
-
-1:38:09.560 --> 1:38:11.560
- the pace of innovation when you're on one software stack
-
-1:38:11.560 --> 1:38:13.560
- you can
-
-1:38:13.560 --> 1:38:15.560
- affect both creation and consumption
-
-1:38:15.560 --> 1:38:17.560
- I think it's going to be rapid
-
-1:38:17.560 --> 1:38:19.560
- so with these streaming services
-
-1:38:19.560 --> 1:38:21.560
- we now for the first time in history
-
-1:38:21.560 --> 1:38:23.560
- have enough I hope people
-
-1:38:23.560 --> 1:38:25.560
- on one of these services
-
-1:38:25.560 --> 1:38:27.560
- actually whether it's Spotify or Amazon
-
-1:38:27.560 --> 1:38:29.560
- or Apple or YouTube
-
-1:38:29.560 --> 1:38:31.560
- and hopefully enough creators
-
-1:38:31.560 --> 1:38:33.560
- can do the format again
-
-1:38:33.560 --> 1:38:35.560
- and that excites me
-
-1:38:35.560 --> 1:38:37.560
- I think being able to change these constraints from 100 years
-
-1:38:37.560 --> 1:38:39.560
- that could really
-
-1:38:39.560 --> 1:38:41.560
- do something interesting
-
-1:38:41.560 --> 1:38:43.560
- I really hope it's not just going to be there
-
-1:38:43.560 --> 1:38:45.560
- iteration on the same thing
-
-1:38:45.560 --> 1:38:47.560
- for the next 10 to 20 years as well
-
-1:38:47.560 --> 1:38:49.560
- yeah changing the creation
-
-1:38:49.560 --> 1:38:51.560
- of music or creation of audio
-
-1:38:51.560 --> 1:38:53.560
- or creation of podcasts
-
-1:38:53.560 --> 1:38:55.560
- is a really fascinating possibility
-
-1:38:55.560 --> 1:38:57.560
- I myself don't understand
-
-1:38:57.560 --> 1:38:59.560
- what it is about podcasts that's so intimate
-
-1:38:59.560 --> 1:39:01.560
- it just is I listen to a lot of podcasts
-
-1:39:01.560 --> 1:39:03.560
- I think it touches
-
-1:39:03.560 --> 1:39:05.560
- on a human on a deep
-
-1:39:05.560 --> 1:39:07.560
- human need for connection
-
-1:39:07.560 --> 1:39:09.560
- that people do feel like they're
-
-1:39:09.560 --> 1:39:11.560
- connected
-
-1:39:11.560 --> 1:39:13.560
- to when they listen I don't understand
-
-1:39:13.560 --> 1:39:15.560
- what the psychology that is
-
-1:39:15.560 --> 1:39:17.560
- but in this world is becoming
-
-1:39:17.560 --> 1:39:19.560
- more and more disconnected
-
-1:39:19.560 --> 1:39:21.560
- it feels like
-
-1:39:21.560 --> 1:39:23.560
- this is fulfilling a certain kind of
-
-1:39:23.560 --> 1:39:25.560
- need and
-
-1:39:25.560 --> 1:39:27.560
- empowering the creator as opposed
-
-1:39:27.560 --> 1:39:29.560
- to just the listener
-
-1:39:29.560 --> 1:39:31.560
- is really interesting
-
-1:39:31.560 --> 1:39:33.560
- I'm really excited that you're working on this
-
-1:39:33.560 --> 1:39:35.560
- yeah I think one of the things that is inspiring
-
-1:39:35.560 --> 1:39:37.560
- for our teams to work on podcasts
-
-1:39:37.560 --> 1:39:39.560
- is exactly that
-
-1:39:39.560 --> 1:39:41.560
- whether you think like I probably do
-
-1:39:41.560 --> 1:39:43.560
- that it's something biological about
-
-1:39:43.560 --> 1:39:45.560
- perceiving to be in the middle of the conversation
-
-1:39:45.560 --> 1:39:47.560
- that makes you listen in a different way
-
-1:39:47.560 --> 1:39:49.560
- it doesn't really matter people seem to perceive it
-
-1:39:49.560 --> 1:39:51.560
- differently and
-
-1:39:51.560 --> 1:39:53.560
- there was this narrative for a long time that
-
-1:39:53.560 --> 1:39:55.560
- you know if you look at video
-
-1:39:55.560 --> 1:39:57.560
- it's something kind of in the foreground it got shorter
-
-1:39:57.560 --> 1:39:59.560
- and shorter and shorter because of financial
-
-1:39:59.560 --> 1:40:01.560
- pressures and monetization and so forth
-
-1:40:01.560 --> 1:40:03.560
- and eventually at the end there's almost like
-
-1:40:03.560 --> 1:40:05.560
- 20 seconds clip
-
-1:40:05.560 --> 1:40:07.560
- people just screaming something
-
-1:40:07.560 --> 1:40:09.560
- and
-
-1:40:09.560 --> 1:40:11.560
- I'm really I feel really good about
-
-1:40:11.560 --> 1:40:13.560
- the fact that
-
-1:40:13.560 --> 1:40:15.560
- you could have interpreted that as people have
-
-1:40:15.560 --> 1:40:17.560
- no attention span anymore
-
-1:40:17.560 --> 1:40:19.560
- they don't want to listen to things they're not interested
-
-1:40:19.560 --> 1:40:21.560
- in deeper stories
-
-1:40:21.560 --> 1:40:23.560
- like you know people are getting dumber
-
-1:40:23.560 --> 1:40:25.560
- but then podcast came along and it's almost like no
-
-1:40:25.560 --> 1:40:27.560
- no the need still existed
-
-1:40:27.560 --> 1:40:29.560
- once but maybe maybe it was
-
-1:40:29.560 --> 1:40:31.560
- the fact that you're not prepared to look at your
-
-1:40:31.560 --> 1:40:33.560
- phone like this for two hours
-
-1:40:33.560 --> 1:40:35.560
- but if you can drive at the same time it seems like
-
-1:40:35.560 --> 1:40:37.560
- people really want to dig deeper
-
-1:40:37.560 --> 1:40:39.560
- and they want to hear like the more complicated version
-
-1:40:39.560 --> 1:40:41.560
- so to me that is very inspiring
-
-1:40:41.560 --> 1:40:43.560
- that podcast is actually long form
-
-1:40:43.560 --> 1:40:45.560
- it gives me a lot of hope for
-
-1:40:45.560 --> 1:40:47.560
- for humanity that people seem really interested
-
-1:40:47.560 --> 1:40:49.560
- in hearing deeper more complicated
-
-1:40:49.560 --> 1:40:51.560
- conversations this is
-
-1:40:51.560 --> 1:40:53.560
- I don't understand it
-
-1:40:53.560 --> 1:40:55.560
- it's fascinating so the majority
-
-1:40:55.560 --> 1:40:57.560
- for this podcast listen to the whole thing
-
-1:40:57.560 --> 1:40:59.560
- this whole conversation
-
-1:40:59.560 --> 1:41:01.560
- we've been talking for an hour and 45 minutes
-
-1:41:01.560 --> 1:41:03.560
- and somebody will
-
-1:41:03.560 --> 1:41:05.560
- I mean most people will be listening
-
-1:41:05.560 --> 1:41:07.560
- to these words I'm speaking right now
-
-1:41:07.560 --> 1:41:09.560
- you wouldn't have thought that 10 years ago
-
-1:41:09.560 --> 1:41:11.560
- where the world seemed to go
-
-1:41:11.560 --> 1:41:13.560
- that's very positive I think
-
-1:41:13.560 --> 1:41:15.560
- that's really exciting and empowering the creator
-
-1:41:15.560 --> 1:41:17.560
- there's as really exciting
-
-1:41:17.560 --> 1:41:19.560
- last question
-
-1:41:19.560 --> 1:41:21.560
- do you also have a passion for
-
-1:41:21.560 --> 1:41:23.560
- just mobile in general
-
-1:41:23.560 --> 1:41:25.560
- how do you see the smartphone world
-
-1:41:27.560 --> 1:41:29.560
- the digital space
-
-1:41:29.560 --> 1:41:31.560
- of
-
-1:41:31.560 --> 1:41:33.560
- of smartphones
-
-1:41:33.560 --> 1:41:35.560
- and just everything that's on the move
-
-1:41:35.560 --> 1:41:37.560
- whether it's
-
-1:41:37.560 --> 1:41:39.560
- internet of things and so on
-
-1:41:39.560 --> 1:41:41.560
- changing over the next 10 years
-
-1:41:41.560 --> 1:41:43.560
- and so on
-
-1:41:43.560 --> 1:41:45.560
- I think that one way to think about it is that
-
-1:41:45.560 --> 1:41:47.560
- computing
-
-1:41:47.560 --> 1:41:49.560
- moving out of these
-
-1:41:49.560 --> 1:41:51.560
- multi purpose devices
-
-1:41:51.560 --> 1:41:53.560
- the computer we had in the phone
-
-1:41:53.560 --> 1:41:55.560
- into specific
-
-1:41:55.560 --> 1:41:57.560
- specific purpose devices
-
-1:41:57.560 --> 1:41:59.560
- and it will be ambient that
-
-1:41:59.560 --> 1:42:01.560
- at least in my home
-
-1:42:01.560 --> 1:42:03.560
- you just shout something at someone
-
-1:42:03.560 --> 1:42:05.560
- and there's always one of these speakers close enough
-
-1:42:05.560 --> 1:42:07.560
- and so
-
-1:42:07.560 --> 1:42:09.560
- you start behaving differently
-
-1:42:09.560 --> 1:42:11.560
- it's as if you have the internet ambience
-
-1:42:11.560 --> 1:42:13.560
- ambiently around you and you can ask it
-
-1:42:13.560 --> 1:42:15.560
- things
-
-1:42:15.560 --> 1:42:17.560
- so I think computing
-
-1:42:17.560 --> 1:42:19.560
- will kind of get more integrated
-
-1:42:19.560 --> 1:42:21.560
- and we won't necessarily think of it
-
-1:42:21.560 --> 1:42:23.560
- as
-
-1:42:23.560 --> 1:42:25.560
- connected to a device in the same way
-
-1:42:25.560 --> 1:42:27.560
- that we do today
-
-1:42:27.560 --> 1:42:29.560
- I don't know the path to that maybe
-
-1:42:29.560 --> 1:42:31.560
- we used to have these
-
-1:42:31.560 --> 1:42:33.560
- desktop computers
-
-1:42:33.560 --> 1:42:35.560
- and then we partially replaced that with
-
-1:42:35.560 --> 1:42:37.560
- the laptops and left
-
-1:42:37.560 --> 1:42:39.560
- desktop at home and at work and then
-
-1:42:39.560 --> 1:42:41.560
- we got these phones and we started leaving
-
-1:42:41.560 --> 1:42:43.560
- the laptop at home for a while and maybe
-
-1:42:43.560 --> 1:42:45.560
- for stretches of time
-
-1:42:45.560 --> 1:42:47.560
- you're going to start using the watch and you can leave
-
-1:42:47.560 --> 1:42:49.560
- your phone at home like for a run
-
-1:42:49.560 --> 1:42:51.560
- or something and we're on this
-
-1:42:51.560 --> 1:42:53.560
- progressive path where
-
-1:42:53.560 --> 1:42:55.560
- I think
-
-1:42:55.560 --> 1:42:57.560
- what is happening with
-
-1:42:57.560 --> 1:42:59.560
- voice is that
-
-1:42:59.560 --> 1:43:01.560
- you have an
-
-1:43:01.560 --> 1:43:03.560
- interaction paradigm that doesn't
-
-1:43:03.560 --> 1:43:05.560
- require
-
-1:43:05.560 --> 1:43:07.560
- as large physical devices so I definitely
-
-1:43:07.560 --> 1:43:09.560
- think there's a future where you can have
-
-1:43:09.560 --> 1:43:11.560
- your Airpods and
-
-1:43:11.560 --> 1:43:13.560
- your watch and you can do
-
-1:43:13.560 --> 1:43:15.560
- a lot of computing
-
-1:43:15.560 --> 1:43:17.560
- and I don't think
-
-1:43:17.560 --> 1:43:19.560
- it's going to be this binary
-
-1:43:19.560 --> 1:43:21.560
- thing, I think it's going to be like many of us
-
-1:43:21.560 --> 1:43:23.560
- still have a laptop, we just use it less
-
-1:43:23.560 --> 1:43:25.560
- and so you shift your consumption over
-
-1:43:25.560 --> 1:43:27.560
- and
-
-1:43:27.560 --> 1:43:29.560
- I don't know about
-
-1:43:29.560 --> 1:43:31.560
- AR glasses and so forth
-
-1:43:31.560 --> 1:43:33.560
- I'm excited about it, I spent a lot of time in that area
-
-1:43:33.560 --> 1:43:35.560
- but I still think it's quite far away
-
-1:43:35.560 --> 1:43:37.560
- AR, VR, all of that
-
-1:43:37.560 --> 1:43:39.560
- Yeah, VR is happening and
-
-1:43:39.560 --> 1:43:41.560
- working, I think the recent
-
-1:43:41.560 --> 1:43:43.560
- Oculus Quest is quite impressive
-
-1:43:43.560 --> 1:43:45.560
- I think AR is further away
-
-1:43:45.560 --> 1:43:47.560
- at least that type of AR
-
-1:43:47.560 --> 1:43:49.560
- but I do think
-
-1:43:51.560 --> 1:43:53.560
- your phone or watch or glasses understanding
-
-1:43:53.560 --> 1:43:55.560
- where you are and maybe what you're looking at
-
-1:43:55.560 --> 1:43:57.560
- and being able to give you audio cues about that or you can say
-
-1:43:57.560 --> 1:43:59.560
- like what is this and it tells you what it is
-
-1:43:59.560 --> 1:44:01.560
- that I think
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-1:44:01.560 --> 1:44:03.560
- might happen, you use
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-1:44:03.560 --> 1:44:05.560
- your watch or your glasses as
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-1:44:05.560 --> 1:44:07.560
- a mouse pointer on reality
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-1:44:07.560 --> 1:44:09.560
- I think it might be a while before
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-1:44:09.560 --> 1:44:11.560
- I might be wrong, I hope I'm wrong but I think it might be a while
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-1:44:11.560 --> 1:44:13.560
- before we walk around with these big lab glasses
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-1:44:13.560 --> 1:44:15.560
- that project things
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-1:44:15.560 --> 1:44:17.560
- I agree with you, it's actually really
-
-1:44:17.560 --> 1:44:19.560
- difficult when you have to
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-1:44:19.560 --> 1:44:21.560
- understand the physical world
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-1:44:21.560 --> 1:44:23.560
- enough to project
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-1:44:23.560 --> 1:44:25.560
- onto it
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-1:44:25.560 --> 1:44:27.560
- I lied about the last question
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-1:44:27.560 --> 1:44:29.560
- because I just thought
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-1:44:29.560 --> 1:44:31.560
- of audio
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-1:44:31.560 --> 1:44:33.560
- and my favorite topic which is the movie
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-1:44:33.560 --> 1:44:37.560
- Her, do you think
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-1:44:37.560 --> 1:44:39.560
- whether it's part of Spotify or not
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-1:44:39.560 --> 1:44:41.560
- will have
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-1:44:41.560 --> 1:44:43.560
- I don't know if you've seen the movie Her
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-1:44:43.560 --> 1:44:45.560
- absolutely
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-1:44:45.560 --> 1:44:47.560
- and there
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-1:44:47.560 --> 1:44:49.560
- audio is
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-1:44:49.560 --> 1:44:51.560
- the primary form of interaction
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-1:44:51.560 --> 1:44:53.560
- and the connection with another entity
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-1:44:53.560 --> 1:44:55.560
- that you can actually have a
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-1:44:55.560 --> 1:44:57.560
- relationship with or fall in love with
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-1:44:57.560 --> 1:44:59.560
- based on voice alone
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-1:44:59.560 --> 1:45:01.560
- audio alone
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-1:45:01.560 --> 1:45:03.560
- do you think that's possible first of all
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-1:45:03.560 --> 1:45:05.560
- based on audio alone to fall in love with somebody
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-1:45:05.560 --> 1:45:07.560
- somebody or well yeah let's go
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-1:45:07.560 --> 1:45:09.560
- with somebody, just have a relationship
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-1:45:09.560 --> 1:45:11.560
- based on audio alone
-
-1:45:11.560 --> 1:45:13.560
- and second question to that
-
-1:45:13.560 --> 1:45:15.560
- can we create an artificial intelligence system
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-1:45:15.560 --> 1:45:17.560
- that
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-1:45:17.560 --> 1:45:19.560
- allows one to fall in love
-
-1:45:19.560 --> 1:45:21.560
- with it and her, him
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-1:45:21.560 --> 1:45:23.560
- with you
-
-1:45:23.560 --> 1:45:25.560
- so this is my personal answer
-
-1:45:25.560 --> 1:45:27.560
- speaking for me as a person
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-1:45:27.560 --> 1:45:29.560
- the answer is quite unequivocally
-
-1:45:29.560 --> 1:45:31.560
- yes
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-1:45:31.560 --> 1:45:33.560
- on both
-
-1:45:33.560 --> 1:45:35.560
- well we just said about podcasts
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-1:45:35.560 --> 1:45:37.560
- and the feeling of being in the middle of a conversation
-
-1:45:37.560 --> 1:45:39.560
- if you could have an
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-1:45:39.560 --> 1:45:41.560
- assistant where
-
-1:45:41.560 --> 1:45:43.560
- and we just said that feels like a very personal
-
-1:45:43.560 --> 1:45:45.560
- setting so if you walk around with these
-
-1:45:45.560 --> 1:45:47.560
- headphones and this thing, you're speaking with this
-
-1:45:47.560 --> 1:45:49.560
- thing all of the time that feels like it's in your brain
-
-1:45:49.560 --> 1:45:51.560
- I think it's
-
-1:45:51.560 --> 1:45:53.560
- it's gonna be much easier to fall in love with
-
-1:45:53.560 --> 1:45:55.560
- than something that would be on your screen
-
-1:45:55.560 --> 1:45:57.560
- I think that's entirely possible
-
-1:45:57.560 --> 1:45:59.560
- and then from the, you can probably answer this better than me
-
-1:45:59.560 --> 1:46:01.560
- but from the concept of
-
-1:46:01.560 --> 1:46:03.560
- if it's going to be possible
-
-1:46:03.560 --> 1:46:05.560
- to build a machine
-
-1:46:05.560 --> 1:46:07.560
- that can achieve that
-
-1:46:07.560 --> 1:46:09.560
- I think whether you
-
-1:46:09.560 --> 1:46:11.560
- think of it as, if you can fake it
-
-1:46:11.560 --> 1:46:13.560
- the philosophical zombie that simulates it enough
-
-1:46:13.560 --> 1:46:15.560
- or it somehow actually is
-
-1:46:15.560 --> 1:46:17.560
- I think there's
-
-1:46:17.560 --> 1:46:19.560
- it's only a question, if you ask me about time
-
-1:46:19.560 --> 1:46:21.560
- I'd have to give an answer but if you say I've given
-
-1:46:21.560 --> 1:46:23.560
- some half infinite time
-
-1:46:23.560 --> 1:46:25.560
- absolutely, I think it's just
-
-1:46:25.560 --> 1:46:27.560
- atoms and arrangement
-
-1:46:27.560 --> 1:46:29.560
- of information
-
-1:46:29.560 --> 1:46:31.560
- well, I personally think that love
-
-1:46:31.560 --> 1:46:33.560
- is a lot simpler than people think
-
-1:46:33.560 --> 1:46:35.560
- so we started with true romance
-
-1:46:35.560 --> 1:46:37.560
- and ended in love
-
-1:46:37.560 --> 1:46:39.560
- I don't see a better place to end
-
-1:46:39.560 --> 1:46:40.560
- beautiful
-
-1:46:40.560 --> 1:46:41.560
- Gustav, thanks so much for talking today
-
-1:46:41.560 --> 1:46:55.560
- thank you so much, it was a lot of fun
-