Earlier last week, I watched Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give his latest pitch to video podcasters, many of whom have a hard time seeing anything other than YouTube as their primary source of distribution and revenue.
Spotify has been working to increase the amount of video on its service for nearly a decade. There are now more than 300,000 video podcasts on the service. Overall time spent watching video is growing faster than audio-only listening time. With video podcasts playing an increasingly important role in culture, Spotify thinks it has an opening to more directly compete with the dominance of YouTube.
Ek will need to convince video creators that Spotify’s new engagement-based payouts can replace and even exceed what they make on YouTube. Many big podcasters — some of whom were in the audience with me while Ek made the pitch this week at Spotify’s Los Angeles HQ — are skeptical and worried about cannibalizing their existing audiences and businesses. After his keynote, I spoke with Ek to hear more about why he thinks this approach to video will work.
“I am confident enough to know that partners will be very surprised when they start seeing the payout numbers because it will be very competitive against the best-in-class platforms that exist today,” he told me. We also talked about where he thinks Spotify has an edge against YouTube and how he thinks AI will change the way people interact with Spotify in the not-too-distant future.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
On the way here, I was thinking back to when you first announced video on Spotify in 2015. What have you learned from doing video on Spotify for almost a decade now?
The first learning we had is whenever I do things top-down, it doesn’t go very well. I should say my track record is kind of mixed when it comes to that. What really works for us is that intersection between creators and consumers. It’s really about how you create a win-win where you find something that creators want and something that consumers want.
This iteration of [video] actually started with the [Joe] Rogan deal. Rogan had a video podcast, and as he was coming onto Spotify, he said, “I want to bring the video podcast.” We did it, but honestly, I’m not sure any of us thought that it would be very successful. But then the numbers started growing. And then other people said, “I want that, too.”
If you fast-forward to today, what we’re addressing are the single-biggest points of feedback that we’re getting from our podcasters, which is essentially, “How do I monetize in this world where I have this way of monetizing on other video platforms that doesn’t work on Spotify?” The data [we share with creators], the uploading speeds, are still not great. We’re fixing all of those things under the hood.
It comes from the place where Spotify is the most successful, which is when we’re already seeing something is working and we’re doubling down on it. That’s a big difference from 2015, where we were like, “Hey, video on the internet seems like a great thing,” but we had no sort of proof points that anyone wanted to do it on Spotify.
I’ve been talking to your partners, and there are a lot of questions about how your payouts will work, especially for those who have an established video podcasting business on YouTube. There’s a concern that coming over to Spotify with this new system will cannibalize not only your business but also your audience. How much are you prepared to spend on this program, and where is the money coming from?
Hopefully people should give us the credit for the track record we have. We’ve actually repeated the same formula over and over again, which is, whenever we enter an industry, the payouts grow.
We’ve separated all the pools of revenue, and we are investing in all of these different verticals. In music, in podcasts, and in books — all three of them have record payouts. While I can’t get into specifics, I’m very confident that we’ll see the same thing happen here. I am confident enough to know that partners will be very surprised when they start seeing the payout numbers because it will be very competitive against the best-in-class platforms that exist today.
Now, with all that said, it’s always a chicken-and-egg problem. We’re doing this event because we want people to come on board and test this out. Some people are going to be willing to do that. I think the people that do that will be positively surprised at what we can offer.
We’ve never restricted a music creator to put their music on any platform. In podcasting, there’s content that resonates really well on Spotify that probably will not resonate as well on some of the other platforms, and probably vice versa, too. I think the amazing thing for you as a creator is you should try it out and see if it works, and if you’re really worried about it, maybe sit back and wait for a moment. But I do think that you’re going to be rewarded if you lean in and try things out. That’s the new world we live in.
What do you think is Spotify’s competitive edge against YouTube, and what is YouTube’s edge against Spotify?
If I think about the industry, a lot of the other platforms are really focused on the consumer experience and how to improve the consumer experience. Some of the other stuff ends up becoming a little bit of an afterthought. Almost every other platform has one format. There’s lots of content that fits in that format. If you think about the Spotify experience already today, music shows up in a very unique way on the platform, podcasts show up in a very unique way on the platform, and audiobooks show up in a very unique way on the platform.
What’s really interesting about Spotify is the moments during the day [in which] we do really well. That’s where we’re uniquely positioned against many others. The consumption of Spotify tends to be more longform because people tend to go in and out. They tend to watch it, tend to put it down to the pocket. And this will work seamlessly on Spotify. The default experience of these other platforms is you sit there and are glued, which also means disrupting all your other experiences.
[Spotify copresident] Gustav Söderström just told me you’re starting to think of how Spotify can be an AI “friend” for audio. Can you expound on how that vision changes the product over the next few years? Because that sounds like a pretty big change.
We’ve lived with the best practices of what ended up becoming mobile user interfaces. In the early App Store days, everyone was experimenting. By 2012, it started harmonizing. I feel like we’re in the same moment now. None of us really know what the right form factor is for how we should interact with the AI.
One of the barriers that used to exist was that speech-to-text was just not good enough. With ChatGPT, we’re now getting something that is very good. Even in my native Swedish, I can now speak to it, and I’d say it’s like 99 percent accurate, which is kind of insane.
If you think about how you speak to a voice agent today, it is not natural. The future clearly will be one where this thing will react instantly to what you’re saying and will respond back. When you think about that on a global scale, it really is profound. Take a country like India. Many years back, voice queries on Google surpassed text queries. We are going to use the human superpower, which is language and our ability to converse with each other, to power next-gen AI experiences. If you think about that from a media base of podcasts, videos, and books, there are so many things we will know not just about you but also about the universe of things you like.
I really do believe that the next decade for Spotify is more exciting than the first decade, which was wild because that was where people went from owning things to being able to rely on the cloud to access things. We take that for granted today. Ten years from now, we’re going to interact with Spotify in a way that we will take for granted. That’s all I know.
