Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Completely agree. I think Spotify, in their music business, has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them. The question is, what do you do next? Audiobooks is a good bet, podcasting is a good bet, something where you can eventually gain operating leverage. The fact that they did the huge Rogan deal, they bought the Ringer, they bought Gimlet, if you look at the dollars and cents today, you're like, geez, they've spent a lot of money, but they haven't generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet. They totally bootstrapped their way to become the scale player in podcasting. To the extent that there is a big pile of money waiting to be the scale player in podcasting, they're well-positioned to make it given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars that they spent on content. They now have bootstrapped to scale. That was the price of entry. We see it in our analytics. Spotify is the majority of consumption of Acquired out there.…

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