Matthew Prince

What I hope it changes to is,

is one in which we reward content creators that create content that fills in the holes in that cheese, where they're actually doing things where they're making things better.

And my favorite example of this is, like I flipped a Stockholm, Sweden project

in order to meet with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify.

Almost no one in the history of humanity has compensated creators at scale the way Daniel has.

And you might argue that, you know, it's unfair in some ways or that, but the simple facts are that last year, Spotify sent out $10 billion to people who are creating music, which is more than the entire music industry was worth.

just 20 years ago.

And so like you go up there and I was sitting with him and we had this really interesting conversation.

And one of the things he told me is, you know, when somebody searches for something on Spotify, if you search for like Taylor Swift, shake it off, like they're really certain that they can give you a result.

But if you search for something that they may not have anything about, like I want a song to a disco beat about how fun it is to dance with my cat.

doesn't exist, right?

And they know that it doesn't exist.

So they try and give you results, but they also know that those results aren't very good.

And so they take those searches that have very bad results and they actually publish it back to music creators.

And there are music creators that are making tens of millions of dollars a year creating music for those things that people were searching for.

And you might think that that's silly, but when you search for something on Spotify, what you're really searching for is an emotion.

You're searching for something that you want some way to connect with.

And if the answer is that it doesn't exist, and yet some music creator can take that as signal for something that is created and then be compensated for it, I actually think that that's beautiful.

I think that's filling in the holes in the cheese.

And I think that as we think about what the future business model of the web is, we should be thinking about how can we do more of that?