Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on the future of podcasts

Axios Re:Cap

Axios

Daily News, News

4.5 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Spotify is one of the biggest players in podcasts, and has been spending big on shows like The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy. But the industry still very small compared to music and other types of media content. Axios Re:Cap digs into the past, present and future of the podcasting business with Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek, who also shares what he's been listening to revently.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story. I'm Naila Boodoo. It's Wednesday, July 28th. Google is up, Apple is down, and we're focused on the future of Spotify.
0:20.8	The new earnings report for Spotify was a mixed bag. The giant audio platform showed audience growth in the second quarter, but missed other projections, which sent its stock price tumbling. Three things to know. First, the good. Spotify had predicted it would add 6 million new subscribers this quarter, and it actually
0:38.7	added 7 million. It currently has 165 million premium subscribers. Now the bad. Its month-to-month
0:46.8	active users came in short of expectations. Even though that number is up 22% from last year,
0:52.8	it's still short of what Spotify itself predicted.
0:55.8	And the fallout, Wall Street, predictably, did not like those monthly user projections falling short.
1:02.0	Trading at the opening bell had Spotify stocks down 8%.
1:05.8	Spotify CEO Daniel Eck blames the pandemic for some of its losses, but points to strong overall numbers and major categories.
1:14.1	So what does all of this mean for the future of one of the world's biggest music and audio streaming services?
1:20.0	And just a moment, my colleague Dan Premack speaks with Spotify CEO, Daniel Eck.
1:26.6	We're joined now by Daniel Eck, founder and CEO of Spotify. So Daniel,
1:32.0	Spotify was started in his best known as a music streaming service, but you've been investing a lot of
1:37.5	money in podcasting, both individual shows and kind of enabling software. Why make such a big push
1:43.5	in podcasting? It really started a few years back.
1:47.4	And at the time of this, it was a market I visited in Germany where we'd been particularly
1:53.1	successful. One of the things that struck me was that in the top chart of top music tracks
1:59.2	ended up being all these audiobooks. And we had made no effort at that
2:03.9	time to, you know, make audiobooks available on Spotify. But because of Spotify being a large
2:10.1	platform, people try to game the system and you started seeing music companies signing up
2:15.5	audiobooks and trying to make them popular
2:17.6	because we provided both an audience and we provided monetization.
2:21.9	So that was the early innings of that insight.
	...

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