YouSaid · the spoken record

Gustav Soderstrom

lines on the record: 123
first: 2019-07-29
most recent: 2019-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Let's say that if you set the expectation with the user that this is a discovery product, like Discover Weekly, you're actually setting the expectation that most of what we show you will not be relevant. When you're in the discovery process, you're going to accept that actually if you find one gem every Monday that you totally love, you're probably going to be happy, even though statistical meaning one out of 10 is terrible or one out of 20 is terrible. From a user point of view, because the setting was discovered, it's fine.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how do you do that? And he came up with this notion that the test set is the new wireframe. The job of the product manager is to source a good test set that is representative of what, like if you say, I want to play this that is song sisting in the car. Job of the product manager go and source like a good test set of what that means. So then you can work with engineering to have algorithms to try to produce that, right? So we try to think a lot about how to structure product development for machine learning age. And what we discovered was that a lot of it is actually in the expectation. And you can go two ways.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a different level. So we're trying, you can think of it as different products. And I think when one of the interesting things to answer your question on, It's better to lift the user choose or to play. I think the answer is the challenge when machine learning kind of came along. There was a lot of thinking about what does product development mean in a machine learning context. People like Andrew Eng, for example, when he went to Baidu, he started doing a lot of practical machine learning, went from academia, and he thought a lot about this. And he had this notion that a product manager, designer, and engineer, they used to work around this wireframe. kind of describe what the product should look like or something to talk about when you're doing like a chatbot or a playlist how do you what are you going to say like it should be good that's not a good product description”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to feel upbeat or I want to feel happy or I want songs to sing in the car. So they put in the information at a very different level and then we need to translate that into what that means musically. So Stations is a test to create like a consumption input vector that is much simpler where you can just tune it a little bit and see if that increases the overall reach. But we're trying to kind of serve the entire gamut of super advanced so-called music aficionados all the way to people who they love listening to music, but it's not their number one priority in life right they're not going to sit and follow every new release from every new artist. They need to be able to influence music at a”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The store is Spotify as we have grown has been that we made it more accessible to different audiences. And Stations is another one of those where the question is, some people want to be very specific. They actually want to hear Stairway to Heaven right now. That needs to be very easy to do. And some people, or even the same person at some point, might say,”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a very, we want to be very careful though because it's been a very good wild west. I think it's this fragile ecosystem. And we want to make sure that you don't barge in and say like, oh, we're going to internetize this thing. And you have to think about the craters. You have to understand. They get distribution today, who listens to how they make money today, try to make sure that their business model works, that they understand, I think it's back to doing something to improving their product, like feedback sloops and distribution.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone, but then they talk about something that you're not interested in the rest of the episode. So I think what we're spending a lot of time on now is just first understanding the domain and creating kind of the knowledge graph of how do these objects relate and how do people consume. And I think we'll find that it's going to be different.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I think part of the problem is it's kind of like music. There isn't one answer. People use music for different things and there's actually many different types of music. There's workout music and there's class copiana music and focus music and so forth. I think the same with podcasts. Some podcasts are sequential. They're supposed to be listened to in order. It's actually telling a narrative. Some podcasts are one topic kind of like yours but different guests. So you could jump in anywhere. Some podcasts actually have completely different topics. And for those podcasts, it might be that I want, you know, we should recommend one episode because it's about AI.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think the podcast catalog will probably grow tremendously because the creation tools are getting easier. And then you're going to have this discovery opportunity that I think is really big. So a lot of people tell me that they love their shows. Discovering podcasts kind of suck. It's really hard to get into new show. They're usually quite long. It's a big time investment. So I think there's plenty of opportunity in the discovery part.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think you kind of fall in love with people and experience in a different way. So I think shows and hosts are going to be very, very important. I don't think that's going to go away into some sort of thing where you don't even know who you're listening to. I don't think that's going to happen. What I do think is I think there's a tremendous discovery opportunity in podcast because the catalog is growing quite quickly. I think podcast is only a few like five six hundred thousand shows right now. If you look back to YouTube as another analogy for creators, no one really knows. If you would lift the lid on YouTube, but it's probably billions of episodes.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas, if you look at something on TV, the audio actually would come from, it would sit over there. The audio would come to you from both of us. As if you were watching, not as you were part of the conversation. So, my experience of having listened to podcasts like yours and Joe Rogan is, I feel like I know all of these people. They have no idea who I am, but I feel like I've listened to so many hours. It's very different from me watching a... Watching a TV show or an inter”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's different. You can argue that podcasts might be more like shows on Netflix, you have a full season of Narcos, and you're probably not going to do like one episode of Narcos and then one of House of Cards. There's a narrative there and you love the cast and you love these characters. So I think people love shows. And I think they will listen to those shows. I do think you follow a bunch of shows at the same time. So there's certainly an opportunity to bring you the latest episode of, you know, whatever the five, six, ten things that you're into, but I think people are going to listen to specific hosts and love those hosts for a long time because I think there is something. Different with podcast where this format of the experience of the audience is actually sitting here right between us.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. So I think in In music, you're right. Basically, you bought an album. So it was like you bought a small catalog of like 10 tracks, right? It was, again, it was actually a lot of consumption, you think it's about what you like, but it's based on the business model. You paid for this 10 Service and then you listen to that for a while. And then when everything was flat priced, you tended to listen differently. So I think the album is still tremendously important. That's why we have it. And you can save albums and so forth. And you have a huge amount of people who really listen according to albums. And I like that because it is a creator format. You can tell a longer story over several tracks. And so some people listen to just one track. Some people actually want to hear that whole story. Now, in podcasts, I think.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creators, because we're looking at the end to end flow, I think there's a tremendous amount of innovation to do around podcast as a format. When we have creation tools and consumption, I think we could start improving what podcasting is. I mean, podcast is this opaque, big, like one, two hour file that you're streaming, which it really doesn't make that much sense in 2019 that it's not interactive. There's no feedback loops, nothing like that. So I think if we're going to win, it's going to have to be because we build a better product for creators and for consumers. So we'll see, but it's certainly our goal. We have a long way to go.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meant that we actually had 200 million people to offer this to instead of starting from zero. So I think we have a good chance because we're taking a different approach than the competition. And back to the other thing I mentioned about”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We looked at this and said, Can we bring something to this? We want to do this, but back to the original Spotify, we have to do something that consumers actually value to be able to do this. And the reason we've gone from not existing at all to being the quite a wide margin, the second largest podcast consumption, still wide gap to iTunes, but we're growing quite fast. I think it's because when we looked at the consumer problem, people said surprisingly that they wanted their podcast and music in the same application. So what we did was we took a little bit of a different approach where we said instead of building a separate podcast app, we thought is there a consumer problem to solve here because the others are very successful already. And we thought there was in making a more seamless experience where you can have your podcast and your music in the same application because we think it's audio to you. And that has been successful.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that decision was made for us. We think the world made that decision. Whether we like it or not, when you put in your headphones, you're going to make a choice between music and a new episode of your podcast or something else, right? We're in that world whether we like it And that's how radio worked. So we decided that we think it's about audio. You can see the rise of audiobooks and so forth. We think audio is a great opportunity. So we decided to enter it. And obviously Apple and Apple podcast is absolutely dominating in podcasting. And we didn't have a single podcast only like two years ago. We did though, was”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I certainly hope so. That is our mission. Our mission as a company is actually to enable a million creators to live off of their art and a billion people inspired by it. And what I think is interesting about that mission is it actually puts the creators first, even though it started as a consumer-focused company. And it says to be able to live off of their art, not just make some money off of their art as well. So it's quite an ambitious project. So we think about creators of all kinds. We kind of expanded our mission from being music to being audio a while back. And that's not so much because We think we made that decision.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to Photoshop that you liked. I think that's an interesting analogy as well. Photoshop, I think, has been very innovative in helping photographers and artists. And I think there should be the same kind of tools for music creators where you could get AI assistance, for example, as you're creating music, as you can do with Adobe, where you can, I want to sky over here and you can get help creating that sky.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is an app that you can download, you can verify that you are that creator. And then you get things that... On software developers have had for years, you can see where if you look at your podcast, for example, on Spotify or a song that you released, you can see how it's performing, which CIDIS is performing in, who's listening to it, what's the demographic breakup. So similar in the sense that you can understand how you're actually doing on the platform. So we definitely want to build tools. I think you also interviewed the head of research for Adobe. And I think that's an...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So we have made some acquisitions the last few years around music creation. This company called Soundtrap, which is a digital audio workstation that is browser-based. And their focus was really the Google Docs approach. We can collaborate with people much more easily than you could in previous tools. So we have some of these tools that we're working with that we want to make accessible. And then we can connect it with our consumption data. We can create this feedback loop where we could help you understand we could help you create and help you understand how you will perform. We also acquired this other company within podcasting called Anchor, which is one of the biggest podcasting tools, mobile focused. So really focused on simple creation or easy access to creation. But that also gives us this feedback loop. And even before that, we invested in something called Spotify for Artists and Spotify for podcasters.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put a company to your music like drums or something, help you master and mix automatically, help you understand how this track will perform. Exactly what you would expect as a software developer I think makes a lot of sense. And I think the same goes for a podcaster. I think podcasters will expect to have the same kind of feedback loop that Zirach has. Why wouldn't you? Maybe it's not healthy, but...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And then you would look at the feedback loops and try to optimize that thing, right? So I think if you think of it as a very specific software tool chain, it looks quite arcane. The tools that a music creator has versus what a software developer has. So that's kind of how we think about it. Why wouldn't a music creator have something like GitHub where you could collaborate much more easily? So we bought this company called Soundtrap, which has a kind of Google Docs for music approach where you can collaborate with other people on the kind of source code format with stamps. And I think introducing things like AI tools there to help you as you're creating music, both in... In helping you”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you think it'd be crazy to just ship one version of your software without doing an A-B test, without any feedback loop.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you make the leap as a musician, if you think about it as a software tool chain, really, your door with the stems, that's the IDE, right? That's where you work in source code format with what you're creating. Then you sit around and you play with that. And when you're happy, you compile that thing into some sort of AC or MP3 or something. You do that because you get distribution. There are so many runtimes for that MP3 across the world and car series and stuff. So you kind of compile this executable and you ship it out in kind of an old fashioned boxed software analogy. And then you hope for the best, right? But as a software developer. You would never do that. First, you go on GitHub and you collaborate with other creators.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the feedback loop is almost non existent. That's right. So if we back out one level, I think Actually, both for music and podcasts, which we also do at Spotify. I think there's a tremendous opportunity just for the creation workflow. And I think it's really interesting speaking to you because you're a musician, a developer, and a podcaster. If you think about those three different roles,”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I listened to the podcast with Ziraj and I thought it was fantastic and reacted to the same thing where he said he posted something in the morning. Immediately, what's the feedback where the drop off was, and then responded to that in the afternoon? Which is quite different from how people make podcasts, for example.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behavior and it turns out that there is a lot of we can predict things like skips based on the song itself. We could say that maybe you should move that chorus a bit because your skip is going to go up here. There is a lot of latent structure in the music, which is not surprising because it is some sort of mind hack. So there should be structure. That's probably what we respond to.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And combine kind of our user data with their content-based. So you can think of it as we were user-based and they were content-based in their recommendations. And we combine those two. And for some cases where you have a new song that has no play data, obviously you have to try to go by either who the artist is or the sonic information in the song or what it's similar to. So there's definitely value in both. And we do a lot in both. But I would say yes. The user data captures things that have to do with culture in the greater society that you would never see in the content itself. But that said, we have seen, we have a research lab in Paris when we can talk about more about that on machine learning on the creator side, what it can do for creators, not just for the consumers, but where we looked at how does the structure of a song actually affect the listening.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we use both. Our biggest success initially was with playlist data without understanding anything about the structure of the song. But when we acquired the EconAS, they had the inverse problem. They actually didn't have any play data. They were a provider of recommendations, but they didn't actually have any play data. So they looked at the structure of songs sonically, and they looked at Wikipedia for cultural references and so forth, right? And did a lot of NLU and so forth. So we got that skill into the company.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The algorithms would start performing best with mainstreamers first because it somehow feels like an easier problem to solve mainstream taste than really particular taste. It was the complete opposite for us. The recommendations performed fantastically for people who saw themselves as having very unique taste. That's probably because all of them playlisted and they didn't perform so well for mainstream as they actually thought they were a bit too particular and unorthodox. So we had a complete opposite of what we expected. Success within the hardest problem first and then had to try to scale to more mainstream recommendations.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do think that the embeddings you find are going to be reflective of the people who play listed. So if you have a lot of indie lovers who playlist, your embedded is going to perform better there. What we found was that yes, there were these latent similarities. They were very powerful. And we had, it was interesting because I think that the people who playlisted the most initially were the so-called music aficionados who really into music and they often had a certain their taste was often geared towards a certain pop of music and so what surprised us if you look at the problem from the outside you”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What this is people are grouping tracks for themselves that have some semantic meaning to them. And then they actually label it with a playlist name as well. So in a sense, people were grouping tracks along semantic dimensions and labeling them. And so could you use that information to find that latent embedding? And so we started playing around with collaborative filtering. And we saw tremendous success with it, basically trying to extract some of these dimensions. And if you think about it, it's not surprising at all, it would be quite surprising if playlists were actually random, if they had no semantic meaning. For most people, they grouped these tracks for some reason. So we just happen across this incredible data set for people that taken these tens of millions of tracks and grouped them along different semantic vectors.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some people in the company, a person named Eric Bernadzon, who was really good at machine learning already back then, in 2007, 2008. Back then it was mostly collaborative filtering and so forth. Realized that”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that broadened the product. But then the obvious next, and we use statistical means where they could see when they created a playlist, how did that playlist perform? You know, they could see skips of the songs. They could see how the songs perform. And they manually iterated the playlist to maximize performance for a large group of people. But there were never enough editors to playlist for you personally. So the promise of machine learning was to go from kind of group personalization using editors and tools and statistics to individualization. And then what's so interesting about the 3 billion playlists we have is the truth is we lucked out. This was not a priority strategy, as is often the case. It looks really smart in hindsight, but as dumb luck. We looked at these playlists and”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we found in our data not surprising that people who playlisted lots, they retained much better, they had a great experience. And so our first attempt was to playlist four users. And so we acquired this company called Tunigo of editors and professional playlisters and kind of leveraged the maximum of human intelligence to help build kind of these vectors through the track space for people.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To all this, like metaprogramming language for music to soundtrack your life. People who were good at music, it's back to how do you scale the product. For people who are good at music, that was actually enough. If you had the catalog in a good search tool and you can create your own sessions, you could create really good a soundtrack for your entire life. Probably perfectly personalized because you did it yourself. But the problem was most people, many people aren't that good at music. They just can't spend the time. Even if you're very good at music, it's going to be hard to keep up. So what we did to try to scale this was to essentially try to build, you can think of them as agents that this friend that some people had that helped them navigate this music catalog. That's what we're trying to do for you.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so the way I think about it is that. From his statistic or machine learning point of view. You have all these. If you want to think about reinforcement learning, you have this state space of all the tracks. And you can take different journeys through this world. And I think of these as like people helping themselves and each other, creating interesting vectors through this space of tracks. And then it's not so surprising that across many tens of millions of kind of atomic units, there will be billions of paths that make sense. And we're probably pretty quite far away from having found all of them. So kind of our job now is users, when Spotify started, it was really a search box that was for the time pretty powerful. And then I'd like to refer to this programming language called playlisting, where if you, as you probably were pretty good at music, you knew your new releases, you knew your back catalog, you knew your star with the heaven, you could create a soundtrack for yourself using this playlist.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can put in all this time, but if you stop paying, you lose all your work. I think that would have been a big challenge and was the big challenge for a lot of our competitors. That's another reason why I think the free tier is really important, that people need to feel the security that the work they put in, it will never disappear, even if they decide not to pay.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you took your files and you stored them in a locker at Google, it'd be a streaming service. It's just that in that locker, you have all the world's music now for free. So instead of giving away your music, you got all the music. It's yours. You could think of it as having a copy of the world's catalog there forever. So you actually got more music instead of less. It's just that you just took that hard disk and you sent it to someone who stored it for you. And once you go through that mental journey of like, still my files, they're just over there and I just have 40 million of them or 50 million of them or something now. Then people are like, okay, that's good. The problem is I think because you paid us a subscription, if we hadn't had the free tier where you would feel like even if I don't want to pay anymore, I still get to keep them. You keep your playlist forever. They don't disappear even though you stop paying. I think that was really important. If we would have started as”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the mental trick is so actually we've seen the user data when Spotify started, a lot of people did the exact same thing. They started hoarding as if the music would disappear, right? Almost the equivalent of downloading. And so we had these playlists that had limits of like a few hundred thousand tracks. No one will ever like, well, they do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tracks. And to this day, some people want to actually save quote-unquote and play the entire catalog. But I think the therapist session goes something like instead of throwing away your music.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key innovation that was technology, but on a meta level, the innovation was really the access model versus the ownership model. And that was tricky. A lot of people said that they wanted to own their music. They would never kind of rent it or borrow it. But I think the fact that we had a free tier, which meant that you get to keep this music for life as well, helped quite a lot.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think is a great product proposition if you can be too good to be true. But what I saw again and again was people showing each other, clicking the song, showing how fast it started, and saying, can you believe this? So I really think it was about speed. Then we also had an invite program that was really meant for scaling because we hosted our own service. We needed to control scaling. But that built a lot of expectation. I don't want to say hype because I hype implies that it was that it wasn't true. Expectation, excitement around. Product and we've replicated that when we launched in the US, we also built up an invite only program first. There are lots of tactics, but I think you need a great product that solves some problem. And basically”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they did. So back to the point of piracy, it was a totally new way to listen to music legally, but people had been used to the access model in Sweden and the rest of the world for a long time through piracy. So one way to think about Spotify, it was just legal and fast piracy. And so people have been using it for a long time. So they weren't alien to it. They didn't really understand how it could be legal because it seemed too fast and too good to be true”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a bunch of tactical answers. So, first of all, I think you need a great product. I don't think you take a bad product and market it to be successful. So you need a great product.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's similar to what. Strangely, maybe it's similar to what we were for the piracy networks. Where YouTube, for historical reasons, have a lot of music videos. So people use YouTube for a lot of the discovery part of the process, I think. But then it's not a really good sort of quote-unquote MP3 player because it doesn't even background. Then you have to keep the app in the foreground. So it's not a good consumption tool, but it's a decently good discovery. I mean, I think YouTube is fantastic product. And I use it for all kinds of purposes. That's true.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we do have music videos on the service, but the way we think about ourselves is that we're an audio service and we think that if you look at the amount of time that people spend on audio, it's actually very similar to the amount of time that people spend on video. So the opportunity should be equally big. But today is not at all valued. Videos value much higher. So we think it's basically completely undervalued. So we think of ourselves as an audio service. But within that audio service, I think video can make a lot of sense. I think for when you're discovering an artist, you probably do want to see them and understand who they are to understand their identity. You won't see the video every time. No, 90% of the time the phone is going to be in your pocket. For podcasters, you use video. I think that can make a ton of sense. So we do have video, but we're an audio service where think of it as we call it internally backgroundable video that is”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no phone. The iPhone came out in 2008, but the App Store came out one year later, I think. So the writing was on the wall, but there was no phone yet.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could do an experience that felt like a step change these days. We actually are on GCP. We don't host our own stuff. And everyone is really fast these days. So that was the initial competitive advantage. But then obviously you have to move on over time.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he was acquired very early by Daniel and Martin, who founded Spotify. And they actually sold the UTON client to BitTorrent, but kept Ludwig. So Spotify had a lot of experience within peer-to-peer networking. So the original innovation was a distribution innovation where Spotify built an end-to-end media distribution system up until only a few years ago, we actually hosted all the music ourselves. So we had both the server side and the client. And that meant that we could do things such as having a peer-to-peer solution to use local caching on the client side, because back then the world was mostly desktop. But we could also do things like hack the TCP protocols, things like Nagel's algorithm for kind of exponential backoff or ramp up and just go full throttle and optimize for latency at the cost of bandwidth. And all of this end-to-end control meant that”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source