Daniel Ek: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. But this gets at the point of social music listening was this core insight that you had. Mark was on board to build it together. He got a lot out of it, too, but let you use Facebook to distribute it. And yet everyone here who’s a Spotify customer today, when I think of Spotify, I think, oh, that’s like the easy way to access music, podcasts, and now audio books. But I don’t think, oh, it's social listening. At what point did you let go of that precious idea and say maybe social is important but not that important? Well, I still think social is hugely important. For instance, we have a product now called Jam, which allows you to be with your friends and actually alter what you’re listening to at the same time. It’s growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world. It’s something that I think very much is a social product. But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product. But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we’re in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing. You see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone’s jam, and you can all queue up songs together. Instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be working together on something. But what we saw during the pandemic, and that’s where Jam started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having this shared consistent music listening where we’re all listening to the same thing at the same time, even though we were apart. It’s like the best of Linear TV brought to music.…

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