Daniel Ek: belief

Transcript context

…Not investment advice. Yeah, exactly. It is one of the areas that I'm the most intrigued about. I think Ben Thompson had this piece very recently. I think he called it the unified content business model piece. I don't necessarily agree with everything he said, but I think his main takeaway is obviously that all media models ought to move to freemium. He's someone who's been saying that for 15 years. I obviously agree with him there, but I think that's true in all formats. Like, as I said, what's the difference between audiobooks and podcasting? There are definitely differences, but the format's are blurring. The main one is the business model, as I said. It's talk audio but with a paid or an ad-supported business model. I guess my advice to you guys would just be, I think you should explore both and see, to an extent, what's possible. Yeah. Speaking of the podcasting business model, there's the potential for podcasting to be a far better business at scale than music streaming. Obviously, with music streaming, you take 30%, and you share 70% with the labels. With podcasting, there's the potential for real operating leverage, especially if you own the content to build a fantastic ad network or however you want to monetize it, but you actually can take advantage of the scale of your audience in a way that it's hard to outrun your costs in the music world. I'm curious, how early in your dreaming about becoming a podcasting platform did you start thinking about that? Or was it purely product-driven?…

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