Daniel Ek

On a personal level, if you liken that to coding, I used to code, but I haven't now for about 10 years.

And so probably a little bit embarrassing to admit, but the barrier to entry or re-entry for me was so high with all Node, all of these different frameworks, even setting up my own workflow for me to be able to do something in the Spotify environment.

ecosystem this is hundreds of hours probably for me to kind of re um acquaint myself with all all the stuff right how do i install the php server yeah i got bad news for you yeah it it's changed a lot right and so the amazing thing is um i i just for the fun of it like wanted to start doing stuff and i asked chat gpt to help me and pretty much um on a few hours on a sunday afternoon i was up and running

And because of that sort of starter help, I had my own sort of environment set up.

I was contributing code.

I was iterating.

Did you contribute code to the Spotify code base?

No, they won't let me do that yet.

So I got a little bit more work done.

to do before before they allow you gotta pass a coding test yeah i think out of spite they probably won't let me do that anyway they pride themselves on on not um i don't have any access to any of the actual systems um

But it was such a liberating feeling because it made the re-entry for me so much easier and so much more enjoyable.

And so I think about that.

So if you think about the world of music now, there are tens of millions of people in the world that probably are recording stuff, but there's 100, 200 million, something like that, that's playing some kind of instrument and expressing themselves musically.

Yeah.

There's nothing that says that it wouldn't be possible for those hundred million plus people to make something that actually sounds pretty good.

Now, again, what is that going to do with the music industry?

And is it really going to be that all of a sudden everything becomes commoditized?

I don't believe so, because we've seen time and time again, the quality rises to the top and actually becomes even more valuable in that world.

Photography being the sort of key reference point.

When Instagram came, oh, no one's going to want photography, but price of fine art photography actually increased, not decreased.