Daniel Ek: evaluation

Transcript context

…You got to pass the coding test. Yeah. I think out of spite, they probably won't let me into that anyway. They pride themselves on not. I don't have any access to any of the actual systems. It was such a liberating feeling because it made the reentry for me so much easier, and so much more enjoyable. I think about that. 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 are 200 million or something like that that's playing some instrument and expressing themselves musically. There's nothing that says that it wouldn't be possible for those 100 million-plus people to make something that actually sounds pretty good. Again, what is that going to do with the music industry? 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 our world, photography being the key reference point. When Instagram came, oh, no one's going to want photography, but the price of fine art photography actually increased, not decreased. My view is, you're going to see both extremes. You're going to see the middle getting wiped out, more people participating, but the very, very top is probably going to increase in value as well. They'll figure out other things to do with this technology. It is pretty cool for humanity. We talked about being able to relate and express ideas. Every permutation of every cultural idea will finally be able to be expressed. We've never been in a world where that's been possible before. It'll be really fascinating to see what that means for our understanding of other cultures, our ability to relate to other people, and some really cool stuff. This has already happened over the past few years in podcasting, too. There are—you probably know better than me—millions of podcasts out there.…

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