Daniel Ek: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, because before a platform like that, obviously it could happen, and maybe there are examples where it did. Maybe the Acquired audience, not as many people know Bad Bunny or know the lyrics to his songs, but a large portion of non-Spanish speaking Americans and non-Spanish speaking people around the world know all the lyrics and Spanish to Bad Bunny songs. They may not know what the lyrics are about, though. That would be a very different thing. There are a lot of local cultural things that seem like, what? He's talking about someone cheating with this one and all these relationship stuff. That's the local nuances. That's the fascinating thing. At the same time, you probably wouldn't have imagined MSG being sold out in 20,000, if not more people singing Korean lyrics that don't look Korean, by the way, and know every word to every lyric. That's the amazing thing. When things catch on, it's music. It makes people feel there's something about the artists, there's something about how they're communicating that resonates with you as an individual. It is the foundational storytelling. We've always used music. It is so hard to describe art. We can objectively describe, oh, there's art, but how you feel. Why do you feel a certain way when you're looking at a painting? Why do you feel a certain way when you're listening to a song? It's really hard to describe that. That's the amazing thing about what we're able to do. The really cool thing is, you're able to take artists that otherwise, perhaps, may not even have been able to be professional, and now they have a global audience. I don't know how to express it other than that they have some God-given talent. That's the best way I can describe this. It's genius when they're able to express these things in a way that just resonates with people all over the world instantly. It's like, how do you do that? Clearly, they're tapping something innate to humans, independent of culture, which, absent data, if you were to ask me and say, hey, do you think that someone is inventing a brand new genre of music today, do you think it's going to appeal to people similar to them or all humans equally in some way? I would probably tell you, no, it's more about nurture than nature.…

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