Daniel Ek’s Post

When we were considering investing, there were lots of comparisons to Netflix who was beginning to deeply invest in proprietary content. Some skepticism that Spotify could sustain differentiation with a structural inability to do the same. But they were missing the power of the playlist. It was an abstraction layer that ultimately formed proprietary content, and importantly it was crowd sourced making it it a lot less capital intensive (free) than the Netflix model.

Unsolicited feedback: The main reason I don't use Spotify is that I'm a HUGE House, and EDM fan. Been listening since the 80's. I have playlists that go back to the begining comprised of hours of house music goodness. Even used to write a house music blog back in the day. Spotify has always been very weak in this space so there's no value in it for me. To be fair most platforms are weak in this area, which is weird considering how popular EDM is around the world. Google knocks it out of the park. Better than any other service with the exception of DI.fm and obviously Beatport. Also the inclusion of ad free YouTube makes it a better value. Also exclusive podcasts? Meh.

This is exactly why Spotify should step up and provide independent curators with their own metrics. By having access to tools that demonstrate which songs are getting more traction, the time of day users are listening more to the playlist, and even which season, independent curators can better understand their audience and make informed decisions about their playlists. Having a "Spotify for Curators" add-on feature, for example, would be a great place to start.

One of my favorite parts of the Spotify community is the people who share playlists for every moment in life.

Fun fact: I was the first person to ever apply for a job at Spotify by making my CV in to a playlist. It went viral and I came to interview 4 and failed the code test (I hadn't used MySQL for years). This was 10 years ago :).

That's the whole world population! 😳 Crazy numbers, but not surprised. These are my hot takes: 1. Spotify has been part of many people's lives. I mean, almost in every stage of our life. You can have playlist from when you fall in love, heartbroken, your wedding day, your birthday, for a good night sleep, exercise, deep work, and many other things. (Heck, I even have a playlist called "For the Restless Heart" consists of my fav Quran surah for when I feel overwhelmed) 2. It's heavily influenced by the K-music culture. I've been following one of K-pop group for several years and witnessed how militant and well organized fans online to support them. The goal is to improve their digital scores by streaming their music as much as possible when they're having a comeback or new release. As a fan, they will make a new dedicated playlist to stream that particular song. But since listening to the same song on loop will 'hurt' the score, they will add other songs and it will look like this: Main Song, Song 1, Song 2, Song 4, Main Song, Song 5, Song 6, etc. Now multiply that with the number of comebacks and releases! This strategy is not only done by fans in SK. Would love to see the real study case for SK users though!

There's a lot of factors and features of Spotify that I love Daniel. The ability to search based on different genres and keywords for one is phenomenal. Another is what you hit on, the playlists. The suggested ones and other ones users have created. I have the free version currently and although I understand the need for ads, the thumbs down or thumbs up button notoriously do not work the way I assume they are intended to. Answering that the ad is not relevant to me or I have seen this add too many times has not resulted in any noticeable difference. In one case ads for Las Vegas continuously reappeared despite consistently selecting it does not interest me or that I see it too many times. I am bringing this to your attention so you and your team can improve this.

The difference is the theif who stole his way to be rich off of backs of creators

I reached out and pitched to about 2000 playlist curators on Spotify in 2022, and about 95% wanted a payment ranging from $5 to the $1000's for a placement. Of course, the playlisters (including myself) advertise the playlists e.g. with ads, and need to pay for that somehow. While not paying for any specific streams compared to radioplay, that's still considered payola according to Spotify's statement to Financial Times 2015 (https://www.ft.com/content/af1728ca-4740-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22), but you probably already know it's how the industry works to this day, as Spotify used to have a interesting editorial curator team. User generated playlists can be a great way to reach new audiences, yet it is very difficult for artists/promoters to verify the legitimacy of a playlists listeners whenever a non-paid pitch is a success, something which Spotify also seem to see as the artists responsibility to somehow control. (https://variety.com/2024/music/news/spotify-artists-streaming-fraud-1235965379/)