YouSaid · the spoken record
Gustav Soderstrom
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- 2019-07-29
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- 2019-07-29
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“There was a group of really, really talented engineers, one of them called Ludwig Stragius. He wrote the, actually from Gothenburg, he wrote the initial, the U-Torn client, which is kind of an interesting backstory to Spotify, that we have one of the top developers from BitTorn clients as well. So he wrote UTORN, the world's smallest BitTorrent client.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High bandwidth broadband, it would still take you 30 seconds to a minute to download one of these tracks. So the Spotify experience of starting within the perceptual limit of immediacy about 250 milliseconds meant that the whole trick was it felt as if you had downloaded all of Pirate Bit. It was on your hard drive. It was that fast, even though it wasn't. And it was still free, but somehow you were actually still being a legal citizen. That was the trick that Spotify managed to pull off.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think two things. One is people are starting to pay for things on the internet. I think one way to think about it was that advertising was the first business model because no one would put their credit card on internet. Transactional with Amazon was the second. And maybe subscription is the third. And if you look offline, subscription is the biggest of those. So that may still happen. I think people are starting to pay, but definitely back then we needed to compete with free. And the first thing you need to do is obviously to lower the price to free. And then you need to be better somehow. And the way that Spotify was better was on the user experience, on the actual performance, the latency of, you know, even if you had...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough to take that risk, and Sweden was like the perfect testing ground, it had government funded high bandwidth, low latency broadband, which meant that the product would work. And it was also, there was no music revenue anyway. So they were kind of like, I don't think this is going to work, but why not? So, this product is one that I don't think could have happened in America, the world's largest music market, for example.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're right. I think it's a sign of an opportunity for product development and that sometimes there's a product market fit before there's a business model fit in product development. I think that's a sign of it. In Sweden, I think it was a bit of both. There was a culture where we even had a political party called the Pirate Party. And this was during the time when people said that information should be free. It was somehow wrong to charge for ones and zeros. So I think people felt that artists should probably make money somehow else in concerts or something. So at least in Sweden, it was part really social acceptance, even at the political level. But that also forced Spotify to compete with free, which I don't think would actually could have happened anywhere else in the world. The music industry needed to be doing bad.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Spotify, a huge amount of people listen to music while they sleep, while they go to sleep, and while they sleep. That costed you 99 cents per three minutes, you probably wouldn't do that. And you would be much less adventurous if there was a real dollar cost exploring music. So the access model is interesting in that it changes your music behavior. You can take much more risk because there's no margin cost to it.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consumers for the first time had this access model to music where they could without kind of any marginal cost. They could try different tracks. You could use music in new ways. There was no marginal cost. And that was a fantastic consumer experience to have access to all the music ever made. I think was fantastic. But it was also horrible for artists because there was no business model around it. So they didn't make any money. The user need almost drove the user interface before there was a business model. And then there were these download stores that allowed you to download files, which was a solution, but it didn't solve the access problem. There was still a marginal cost of 99 cents to try one more track. And I think that that heavily limits how you listen to music. The example I always give is”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think you had this file then that was distributed physically, but then you had the components of digital distribution, and then the internet happened, and there was this vacuum where you had a format that could be digitally shipped, but there was no business model. And then All these pirate networks happen naps there and in Sweden, Pirate Bay, which was one of the biggest. And I think from a consumer point of view, which kind of leads up to the inception of Spotify from a consumer point of view,”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good ass songs that were eight minutes, 10 minutes, and so forth because it started as a digital product that you downloaded. So you didn't have this constraint anymore. So I think it's something really interesting that I don't think has fully happened yet. We're kind of jumping ahead a little bit to where we are, but I think there's tons of format innovation in music that should happen now that couldn't happen when you needed to really adhere to the distribution constraints. If you didn't adhere to that, you would get no distribution. So Bj ⁇ rk, for example, Icelandic artist, she made a full iPad app as an album that was very expensive. Even though the app store has great distribution, she gets nowhere near the distribution versus staying within the three minute format. So I think now that music is fully digital inside these streaming services, there is the opportunity to change the format.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a digitalization of music with a CD, really. It was physical distribution, but the music became digital. So they were false, but basically boxed software to use a software analogy. And then you could start downloading these files. And I think there are two interesting things that happened back to music used to be longer before it was constrained by the distribution medium. I don't think that was a coincidence. And then really the only music genre to have developed mostly after music was a file again on the internet is EDM. And EDM is often much longer than the traditional music. I think it's interesting to think about the fact that music is no longer constrained in minutes per song or something. It's a legacy of an old distribution technology. And you see some of this new music that breaks the format. Not so much as I would have expected actually by now, but it still happens.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and as you said, there are some social benefits to that. I think, for example, there's a high statistical chance that if I talk about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, we have something to talk about just statistically. In the age of individual choice, maybe some of that goes away. So I do see the value of shared cultural components, but also we see love personalization.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and music was free so then you had this massive distribution where you could program to people i think those things that ecosystem is what what created the ability for for for hits but it was also a very broadcast medium so you would tend to get these massive massive hits but maybe not such a long tail”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So then you got this massive distribution that made it possible to create two things, I think. First of all, cultural phenomenals. They probably need distribution to be able to happen. But it also opened access for a new kind of artist. So you started to have these phenomenons like Beatles and Elvis and so forth that were really a functional distribution, I think, obviously of talent and innovation, but there was also taking a component. And of course, the next big innovation to come along was radio, broadcast radio. And I think Radio is interesting because it started not as a music medium, it started as an information medium for news and then radio needed to find something to fill the time with so that they could honestly play more ads and make more money.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that is definitely a thing. And there's always this component of if you have something infinite amount, so will you value it as much? Probably not. Humanity is always seeking some, is relative. So you're always seeking something you didn't have. And when you have it, you don't appreciate it as much. So I think that's probably true. But I think that's why concerts exist. So you can actually have both. But I think net, if you couldn't listen to music in your car driving, that'd be worse. That cost would be bigger than the benefit of the anticipation, I think, that you would have.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constraints on the music format. So you kind of said instead of doing this opus, tens of minutes or something, now you get three and a half minutes because then you're out of wax on this disc. But in return, you get amazing distribution. Your reach will widen, right?”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll try. It could be a 100 year podcast. I'll try to do a brief version. There are some things that I think are very interesting during the history of music, which is that Full recorded music to be able to enjoy music, you actually had to be where the music was produced because it couldn't record it and time shifted, right? Creation and consumption had to happen at the same time, basically concerts. And so you either had to get to the nearest village to listen to music. And while that was cumbersome and it severely limited the distribution of music, it also had some different qualities, which was that the creator could always interact with the audience. It was always live. And also there was no time cap on the music. So I think it's not a coincidence that these early classical works, they're much longer than the three minutes. The three minutes came in as a restriction of the first wax disc that could only contain a three-minute song on one side, right? So actually the recorded music severely limited the or put constraints. I won't say limit. I mean, constraints are often good, but it put very hard.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it comes to most people claim that they have a friend or two, that they are heavily inspired by and that they listen to. So I actually think music is very social, but in a smaller group setting, it's an intimate form of something that you necessarily share broadly. Now, at concerts, you can argue you do, but then you've gathered a lot of people that you have something in common with. I think this broadcast sharing of music is something we tried on social networks and so forth, but it turns out that people aren't super interested in what their friends listen to. They're interested in understanding if they have something in common, perhaps with a friend, but not just as information.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's the same answer that you use it for both. We've thought a lot about this during these 10 years at Spotify, obviously. In one sense, as you said, music is incredibly social. You go to concerts and so forth. On the other hand, It is your escape, and everyone has these things that are very personal to them. So what we've found is that”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think music has many different purposes. I think there is There's certainly a big purpose, which is the same as much of entertainment, which is escapism, and to be able to Live in some sort of other mental state for a while. But I also think you have the opposite of escaping, which is to help you focus on something you are actually doing. And so I think people use music as a tool to tune the brain to the activities that they are actually doing. And it's kind of like One sense, maybe it's the roast signal. If you think about the brain as neural networks, it's maybe the most efficient hack we can do to actually actively tune it into some state that you want to be. You can do it in other ways. You can tell stories to put people in a certain mood, but music is probably very effective to get you to a certain mood very fast, I think.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are great. They're not my personal favorites. I've realized that people have different tastes. And that's a big part of what we do.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The movie itself affected me back then. It was a big part of culture. I didn't really adopt any characters from the movie, but it was a great story of love, fantastic actors. And really, I didn't even know who Hans Simmo was at the time, but fantastic music. And so that song has followed me, and the movie actually has followed me throughout my life.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it came out during my formative years. And as I've discovered in music, you shape your music taste during those years. So it definitely affected me quite a bit.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty easy for me. There's this song called You're So Cool by Hans Zimmer, a soundtrack to True Romance. It was a movie that made a big impression on me and it's kind of been following me through my life. Actually, It play at my wedding. I sat with the organist and helped him play it on an organ, which was a pretty interesting experience.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source