Daniel Ek

Well, it was really a lot more of a first principles kind of thinking around it.

It didn't really make sense if you looked at sort of like, what are we trying to solve for?

And was it truly so different in terms of a consumer experience?

No, it was the same playing view, slightly different sort of modalities, but totally possible.

And if you thought about it as a discovery, okay, well, that's a similar problem.

Ubiquity, being able to play it on all these speakers, made a lot of sense of having the same thing.

Search, all of these things were basically shared infrastructure that we could utilize.

And again, if you're searching for content, why...

You don't really care all that much about it on YouTube.

And on one end, you're listening to music on one side, you had all these other short form videos and sports and so on.

You don't think that those are distinctly different behaviors.

So why do you think about it that way?

And it's because you really think podcasting is a different format.

But actually, it's audio, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing with audiobooks too, right?

Like, what's the difference between an audiobook and a podcast thing?

Well, you would say chaptering and some of those stuff.

My view, I guess, is the boundaries are from a format side is definitely being blurred quite a lot and for right reasons.

But the better way to think about audiobooks and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly.