Daniel Ek

And so one of my favorite topics is how often people game our platform.

For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audiobooks because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audiobook rights.

And so as the platform was taking off, they realized what else can we put on this platform that gives us a leg up and creates more revenue for us.

And they realized that they have this catalog of audio books sitting on there.

So I think that was kind of one realization where we kind of realized, hey, this platform, it doesn't seem to matter all that much what we're putting on it.

People just like consuming content.

And then I and others at Spotify, we were big podcast listeners ourselves.

And we love that, but we hate the fact that we had to switch app from our normal one.

We hate the fact that we couldn't get the recommendations working.

We hate the fact that we couldn't get this to work on my car speaker or my home speaker and all these things that we spent literally a decade building for the music industry.

So it kind of dawned upon us that podcasters have sort of the same problems that the music creators have.

And we should be able to play a pretty big role.

And all the primitives that we built for music should work really well in terms of discoverability, in terms of ubiquity that we call, which is sort of our ability to play on any device.

And of course, our freemium model where the ad supported and eventually paid models as well should be able to all work together.

And so the craziest thing in the beginning was probably when we started talking about it as building it in the same app.

That was what the biggest resistance was.

Because the common wisdom at the time was obviously, well, podcasting has to be a distinct own thing.

Even merchandising podcasting is a very different problem than music.

And it's actually one of the things that we're still working on trying to crack the code on.

But that was probably the most contrarian, both inside and outside.