Episode 9 - Transcript

I’m Gustav Söderström. I head up product, engineering, data and design for Spotify. And this is the season finale of Spotify: A Product Story.

On this show, we’ve brought you the untold stories behind Spotify’s biggest product launches -- from building a full-stack solution that let us stream audio faster than ever before:

Daniel Ek: Already from day one, the ambition was always to revolutionize the music industry. It was never about being a so, so start up.

To inventing, and then re-inventing, our entire business model just in time for the smartphone revolution:

Petra Hansson: The access model and subscription, I think that scared the music rights holders a little bit.

To entering the realm of hardware, and upending some conventions along the way:

Nicole Burrow: You have to just stay focused on the end user. Like, for them it's about getting what they're playing from their device to their speaker. It's just important that the experience remains consistent for them.

To pioneering the machine-learning that helps you find your next favorite song:

Ajay Kalia: We were seeing like a 100 percent increase, like 2x increase. Like I've never seen numbers that high in a first test in Spotify and probably never will again.

In retrospect, these decisions often look obvious. But that’s only because they worked -- you might know this as “survivor bias”. But in the moment, they are absolutely not obvious -- at all.

And that’s really what this episode is about. Because on today’s show, we’re going to talk about what we’re up to right now. Which means, we don’t know how it’s all going to work out yet, or exactly what the product strategy lessons will be.

But we do know which bets we’re making, and why we’re making them. And we know how we’re applying the lessons we’ve learned since day one in new and unexpected ways.

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So, keep listening for our plans for the future of audio, the work we’ve been doing for years in order to lay the foundation, and the brand new formats that we’re launching today, to make this vision a reality.

(02:05) << Derry Connection: A Stephen King Podcast >> Maya Prohovnik: Welcome to the fourth episode of my Stephen King podcast. I am already mad at everyone. My name is Maya and I like to talk about Stephen King.

Meet Maya Prohovnik.

Maya Prohovnik: I run the R&D team for what we call the Podcaster Mission within Spotify. So I oversee the product, engineering and design teams who are responsible for building all of our podcast creator tools.

Now, we’ve already talked about how we’re investing in highly produced exclusive and original podcasts through acquisitions like Gimlet and The Ringer and licensing deals with celebrities ranging from Barack and Michelle Obama to Kim Kardashian. And we are obviously very excited to hear what these partnerships bring to the medium.

But what might be the most exciting thing of all is that that’s only one part of how we’re trying to push the boundaries of podcasting. Because we’re also creating the tools that regular people like Maya are using to launch their shows, and in the process making podcasting more accessible for everyone.

Maya actually has three podcasts.

Maya Prohovnik: As a product person, I always feel like I have to get to know the people who are making the -- whatever product I'm building and really understand their pain points. So I made -- I have many different podcasts because I wanted to experience all the different ways of creating.

First, there’s the Stephen King show you heard a minute ago, called “The Derry Connection”.

Maya Prohovnik: And that one I have -- I have a professional producer for and I do the whole -- I use a professional microphone. I get really impressive guests who are

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experts in Stephen King. So that's probably my most, like, serious -- well, it's a pretty goofy podcast, but that's the one that I try the hardest on.

And then, there’s “Time Share” -- a stream of consciousness podcast about Maya’s favorite book; an 800 page sci-fi novel called “Children of Time.”

Maya Prohovnik: Every single episode we make someone read the entire book. And it's cool because every guest has a different take on the book. It’s just one of those, like, people have very different perspectives on what it is trying to say.

And finally, Maya’s third podcast is called “Blood on Their Hands” and it’s a reality tv recap show that she hosts with her husband.

Maya Prohovnik: So that one we record entirely on our phones, it's all mobile, no professional microphones and no editing. So it's, you know, pretty -- pretty wild.

<< Blood On Their Hands: A Big Brother Fancast >> Maya Prohovnik: Hi Erik! Erik Price: Hi Maya! Maya Prohovnik: Should we tell them what we just said? Erik Price: Yeah. Maya Prohovnik: I said to Erik we can’t keep doing our same annoying intro every time because it’s going to scare people away and Erik said “it doesn’t matter”. It’s true -- our real fans get it, you know?

If you aren’t familiar with Big Brother -- it is widely considered to be one of the first, and by many one of the absolute worst -- reality TV shows of all time. Which of course is the basis of its appeal. I myself have watched my fair share of Big Brother over the years.

Maya Prohovnik: And we've built this really cool community of people from all over the country, who are into this stupid reality show. And so every week, not only are we talking about the eviction and the strategy in the House and what's going on, but we have this group of people who call in every single week with their own takes and sort of predictions. So to me, even though that's the least professional podcast that I do, that's the one that I feel like is closest to my heart. Because I think it really shows the value of, you know, getting to talk about something that you're passionate about, find other people who are passionate and want to not only hear you talk about it, but want

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to respond -- that's part of why I'm so excited about getting to innovate on the format of podcasting and give creators new ways to connect with and get to know their audiences. It's just something that's been really magical for me going through that experience.

You might be surprised to hear that Maya’s last podcast best represents where we think audio is headed.

It’s all driving towards less friction and more interactivity. And Maya’s team is leading the way by rolling out new features -- like in-app polls and Q&As -- that let listeners engage with the podcast creators directly.

Maya Prohovnik: Every time we talk to creators, it's very clear that no matter what tier or what type of creator you are, the most important thing is not just getting people to listen. Like you don't just want numbers in your analytics dashboard. You want to know who these people are and where they are and why they're listening and what they want to hear and what they think about what you're saying. So I think giving creators all of these different ways to get feedback from their audience is going to be really a game changer.

Because what Maya is describing -- the desire to turn podcasting into a genuine dialogue between hosts and listeners -- is something podcasters have wanted to do for a long time.

And over the years they’ve come up with some creative workarounds. Like how Maya slots voice messages from listeners into her show. But historically, true interactivity simply wasn’t an option with the tools available to podcasters.

You could even say that -- by definition -- interactivity has been impossible for podcasts. But as we’ll explain, we think all of that is about to change.

Maya Prohovnik: We're not necessarily just making podcasts anymore. We're making audio. And I think that's a whole new world of use cases and ways to express yourself that haven't really been possible before.

(07:05)

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The story behind the interactive tools Maya’s team is launching really begins in 2014 -- when not that many people even knew what a podcast was. And when Mike Mignano and Nir Zicherman started an audio company called Anchor.

Mike Mignano: My co-founder Nir and I had both loved audio and we felt like there was a gap in the market where it wasn't easy for creators to express themselves through audio, and it wasn't easy for consumers to consume compelling content via audio. Yes, podcasts existed at the time, but they were still small and growing. That was the big insight early on from Nir and me around Anchor. It was: let's just make this easier and let's put it in a place, a platform, where it wasn't constrained to the limitations of something like a podcast.

Because Mike and Nir didn’t want to just make podcasts. In fact, they were so adamant that what they were doing wasn’t part of the podcasting landscape, that they didn’t even want to call Anchor a podcasting app.

Instead, they had a very different vision for Anchor -- an ambitious vision for something that didn’t exist yet; a social audio platform.

Mike Mignano: So initially it was really about making audio really lightweight and interactive and shareable, similar to how people were consuming content on social platforms. Right? If you think about what it took to distribute a photo, all you have to do is whip out your phone, snap a photo and tap a button and boom, it's up on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or, you know, one of the other gazillion different places you can share a photo on the Internet. Audio didn't have that, and that just felt crazy.

And they weren’t content to just make the process of sharing audio simpler. They wanted to expand our ideas of what audio content could even be.

Mike Mignano: And we felt that actually creating a new format, that was easier to create for it, easier to consume, could actually push the medium of audio further and we could do different things to it. We could make it interactive. We could let your friends come in and contribute to it. We could make it really easy to share. Over time we could make it really easy to make it fun and bring in sound effects and bring in music. And again, just do everything we can to reduce the friction on sort of both sides of the equation, and make audio a channel that everyone could contribute to.

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But there’s a reason that Anchor -- as they imagined it -- didn’t exist yet. Because, technologically speaking, it couldn’t exist.

Nir Zicherman: People did not understand audio.

That’s Nir, Mike’s co-founder.

Nir Zicherman: Serial was the only podcast that anybody had ever heard of at the time, despite the fact that the medium had been around for 15 years before then. There was no such thing as a smart speaker. There was no such thing as a car with a native, you know, cellular connection in it that allowed you to stream content on demand.

By 2014, the technology underpinning podcasts had barely changed at all since it was first launched. In 1999. And, it hasn’t changed much since 2014, either. In fact, it’s still the primary way that most podcasts are distributed today.

This dominant format is called RSS -- which a few people say stands for “RDF Site Summary”, but most people agree stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.

And to give you an idea of just how simple it is -- it’s the exact same technology that bloggers use to publish their posts. From a technology point of view, RSS is really just a text file -- essentially a string of letters and numbers. But functionally:

Nir Zicherman: It is a contract that exists between the distributors of content on the Internet and the consumers of that content that allows for a fragmentation to exist in the market that otherwise would not be able to exist. So what I mean by that is -- just to use podcasting as an example; it does not matter where I create my podcast, it does not matter where I host my podcast, so long as the hosting platform that I'm using, whether it's Anchor or some other service, spits out an RSS feed and puts it on the Web and allows it to be crawled by a consumer platform, by some platform that you can listen on. As long as we adhere to the contract of what an RSS feed is supposed to be, then that content can be played. And what that means is this industry can grow despite the fragmentation that exists in the industry. Despite the fact that there are many different podcast players. Despite the fact that there are many different hosting platforms. Does not matter where as the creator I choose to

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host or where I choose to listen as the listener, it’s consistent. And that consistency allows this market to grow despite the fragmentation.

And -- like any contract -- RSS comes with rules.

Nir Zicherman: You include a title, you include a description, it's one directional, you include a single audio file per episode, you mark off whether those audio files are explicit or not. Like there are not many things you can do with RSS.

Unlike virtually every other form of digital media, audio distributed over RSS can’t be easily segmented, secured, expired, or personalized for specific audiences. You can’t even tell how much of an episode someone listened to, or if they listened at all. Just whether or not the file was downloaded.

Now, despite Nir and Mike’s frustration, there are some undeniable advantages to having such a straightforward, universal standard -- namely, the distribution Nir touched on, which is especially crucial when a new medium is just starting to gain traction. This consistency allows you to reach a broader swath of people, regardless of the platform. But that same openness also means that you can’t control where your podcast lives, or who’s profiting from it.

(12:34) And there’s another, huge downside to having to adhere to an industry standard like RSS -- it’s really, really difficult to innovate on top of it.

Take text messaging, for example. For a long time, text messaging was completely standardized as SMS. No matter what phone you had -- you could still send and receive text messages of up to 140 characters between different carriers and phone manufacturers. You had distribution that let you communicate with many more people, albeit in a more limited way.

Now that was great early on, to get texting off the ground. But when the phone industry wanted to innovate on the format of text messaging -- like, maybe, being able to send an image together with your message -- a fairly basic thing -- it took nearly 10 years to make that a universally accepted feature of the standard and get everyone to implement it! And this is how it worked, pretty much up until software based end-to-end messaging services

7 Episode 9 - Transcript like Snap, WhatsApp and iMessage came along. And with that suddenly came pictures, hyperlinks, emojis, read receipts and disappearing messages almost overnight.

The same goes for innovating on a standardized protocol like RSS. It may be widely used. But, when it comes to interactivity:

Nir Zicherman: It is purely one directional. It is meant to be broadcast out to the world. There's no way for people to communicate back to you. And typically, when we talk about format innovation in the world of audio, even within Spotify, the first thing that occurs to people is, well, I would love to be able to interact. I would love to be able to talk back. And yet RSS doesn't allow for that. There's no mechanism in RSS to allow the consumer of the content to send information back to the creator, which is what would be necessary to actually unlock creativity -- or unlock interactivity. Gustav Söderström: And it's hard to actually even think of another media format where the consumer isn't allowed to at least do a thumbs up or leave a comment or do something with the content, right? Nir Zicherman: That’s right. It wasn't an intentional decision to prevent that. It was just the reason RSS was created was to allow people to basically subscribe to news content. There was no need for you to communicate back with The New York Times and with CNN and with Fox News and all these people who are publishing news. That's not what the intended use case of this format was. It was that at some point in the early 2000s that somebody said; hey, this standard that already exists in the Internet, we could just use this for audio. And so I would say this is like an accidental constraint that exists in the market that wasn't actually ever intended. But as soon as the industries latches onto this particular protocol and starts using it and it gets widely adopted; now you can't change it, even if you stumbled into it by accident, now, you can't change the behavior.

That’s where Nir and Mike -- and Anchor -- hit a wall.

Nir Zicherman: If I as a creator in the space, then want to do something that deviates from that, I can either go outside the format, which, as we mentioned, I'm not going to want to do because then I don't get distribution, or I can find a way to do it within the format.

What Snap, iMessage, and WhatsApp all have in common is that they figured out how to wrap the whole chain -- from the creator of the message to the consumer of the message --

8 Episode 9 - Transcript inside one company, and more importantly inside one software stack. Each company runs their own protocols, which lets them add new features at a pace that was unimaginable in the standardized text model.

So, just like how Snapchat could never have existed if it were built entirely on SMS, it was impossible for Mike and Nir to create the kind of audio experience they envisioned using only RSS.

What’s more, if they went ahead and built a full-stack alternative of their own -- one that let them extend the RSS protocol with all their ideas -- they would still have to convince everyone to start using their app for both making and listening to podcasts, in order to create the end to end solution they needed.

With all of this in mind, Nir and Mike decided to go for it and “build for themselves first”. They knew there was an unmet user need because they were those users. They just didn’t know yet how many other Nirs and Mikes there were out there. So in 2015, they launched their social audio platform -- Anchor 1.0 -- using its own custom protocol.

It turned out, getting the creators on Anchor was the easy part.

Mike Mignano: We had a lot of success with the creator side. Pretty much immediately. We found that the mechanics we created and the friction that we removed made it such that people had no problem creating audio content with Anchor. And so we iterated on that, you know, we started adding tools. We gave people the ability to add sound effects and bring their friends in remotely and add music and things like this. And the quality definitely increased pretty quickly, actually, which was really cool to see that feedback loop of giving people new creative tools, and just like watching the median sort of quality bar rise. What became obvious, though, the more we invested in the creator side, was that it was really hard on the consumer side. The more and more we invested in the creator side, the more and more this content felt like a podcast. And I think the more and more creators had the expectation -- and listeners -- had the expectation that this content should sit on the same shelf as where other podcasts were sitting, which was not in the Anchor app. Right? It was in places like Spotify.

So, Mike and Nir did what good product strategists do; they listened to what their users were telling them.

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Their users wanted to use Anchor to make podcasts. And they wanted those podcasts to be available where everyone else’s podcasts were available. In other words, they wanted to use RSS.

Mike Mignano: And I think that's where we realized that, you know, to really deliver on the value we felt we could deliver on for the world, we needed to go all in on the creator side and actually use the existing channels of things like RSS to get the content to the places that people were listening. And then maybe, maybe sometime in the future, maybe we would have built up enough leverage in the ecosystem that we could come back to the consumption side, come back to the, you know, the listening side and resume our, you know, our hope that we could innovate on the format.

And so -- in 2018 -- Anchor officially pivoted. Mike and Nir put their users first and hit pause on their dream of building a social audio creation platform. They refocused their efforts and launched a suite of mobile-first tools that let people record, edit, and upload podcasts, using only their phones. But it was all built on RSS.

It was a true inflection point for the industry. Anchor’s software fundamentally changed what it meant to have your own podcast by making the entire medium vastly more accessible than it had ever been before. For the first time, anyone with a smartphone could launch their own show. By the end of 2018 -- less than a year after they decided to pivot -- Anchor was already powering nearly half of all new podcasts being created.

And yet, despite this astounding achievement, Mike and Nir still felt their work was unfinished.

(20:04) While Anchor was building its community of podcast creators -- we were busy turning Spotify into a destination for podcast listeners.

And -- in the process -- we found ourselves exploring what it would take to turn our app into a platform. Which just so happens to be the third and final phase in the strategic framework outlined by Matthew Ball in our earlier episodes.

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Matthew Ball: This industry has very quickly gone from a decade ago, solving for access. A few years ago, starting the shift towards content. And now today going into platform.

Matthew is a managing partner at Epyllion Industries, which operates a venture seed fund focused on media companies. And if you’re a regular listener to the show, you already know Matthew’s framework for the distinct phases media companies go through.

First, a company differentiates itself by giving users access to content in new ways; just like we did 15 years ago, when we started streaming almost all the world's music legally and for free on the first desktop app.

The second phase -- as the competition catches up on access -- is to compete with unique content.

Matthew Ball: As more and more people start to launch their own media service, their own media network, their own media company, we see that content oversaturate. We can think of this as the fact that a decade ago, there was 250 original scripted series in the United States, up from 100 a decade prior. This year we'll have more than 600. Lots of those are great shows. The challenge is not making a great show. It's making sure that consumers pick your show over others. And so as content oversaturates, the industry moves towards platform based competition or flywheels. And that is to say, rather than just being a single business, just being the business of delivering a show, a title, a product, you start to build out something more expansive.

And in the third phase, companies start competing as platforms, where the users go from only passively consuming content to also creating, uploading, commenting on, and sharing content.

Matthew Ball: One of the most important impacts of technology is actually not just how it's changing content itself, but how it is unlocking creativity in a way that the market previously was not arranged to support. What we haven't yet seen is this ability for millions of people to frictionlessly create and distribute their own audio, to cultivate their own audiences over time and to build a business of real value.

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And so -- just like Mike and Nir -- we realized that we only had half of the innovation equation, and we were going to need to look outside of Spotify in order to balance it.

Whereas Anchor had succeeded in attracting creators but hadn’t reached the critical mass of listeners it needed to innovate on the format. We had the opposite problem. If we rolled out a new format, it could immediately be adopted by hundreds of millions of listeners around the world. But if we built the creator tools ourselves, it would take us years to get them in front of the number of creators that Anchor had already reached.

By 2018, it was obvious to us that if we could just combine Anchor’s creators with our listeners and bring them all into one stack -- together we could revolutionize the industry.

What we didn’t know was how Anchor would feel about that proposition. So we -- and by we here I mean Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and I -- flew from Stockholm to LA to ask them over dinner.

Mike Mignano: And we had dinner, and the thing that blew my mind most about that meeting -- and Nir and I both reference this all the time -- was that we both unknowingly had the same vision for the future. And I don't know about you guys, we thought our idea was really unique and not common. So the fact that you guys had the same one from the other side blew our minds. We both wanted to build this full stack audio experience, this creator to consumer end to end experience where we could innovate on the format. And you guys said to us, we really want to do this. We have the -- we have the quarter billion listeners. We have the consumption platform. We don't have any of the creators. And we said we really want to do this. We have the creators, but we don't have the consumers. And I think for us, it was the first time that we truly got excited about the prospect of potentially selling Anchor and being acquired. You know, you try not to think about that too often as a founder. It’s bad, it’s bad for the business if you’re thinking about selling the company, right? But in that dinner, in that moment, I think that's when Nir and I first said; OK, like maybe we actually could accomplish our mission if we teamed up with Spotify.

Not long after that dinner -- in February of 2019 -- Spotify acquired Anchor, at the same time that we also started investing in content differentiation through original and exclusive podcasts -- simultaneously propelling us from phase 1 of Matthew Ball’s framework to both phase 2 and 3.

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Mike and Nir and their team -- including Maya -- joined Spotify to head up podcast creation and new formats for us.

And Spotify became a platform.

Since then, we’ve launched a number of products that couldn’t be done over RSS. There are the polls and Q&As that Maya was talking about at the top of the episode. As well as features that let podcasters play music from Spotify’s library in their episodes, without having to pay tens of thousands of dollars to license the tracks -- another massive pain point for the industry.

Mike Mignano: We've got access -- we’ve got access to this content in the hands of our consumers, we've got amazing content and we're going to continue to differentiate on the content side right, by doing -- by bringing more great podcasts and shows exclusive to the platform. But then by having this platform approach through tools like Anchor. We can effectively have these creators creating content that can really only exist on Spotify because of the features that we've layered on top of the experience. So now all of a sudden, you're seeing differentiation on the access side, you're seeing differentiation on the content side, and you're seeing differentiation on the experience through the platform, through this sort of end to end creator to consumer platform. So that’s really where I think Anchor kind of fits in -- it's by having this full stack creator to consumer plumbing on the platform, we're able to innovate on the experience such that it differentiates the platform from other platforms.

It’s important to note that -- this isn’t an either-or choice. While these tools won’t work outside of Spotify because RSS doesn’t support them, podcasters will still be able to send episodes that don’t use these features down their regular RSS feeds. It’s about adding interactivity to the podcaster’s toolkit, and creators will only use these tools if they want to, not because they have to.

(27:13) By joining forces with Anchor, we took a gigantic step toward making audio more interactive, more accessible, and more instantaneous. Just like every other medium had been trending for decades.

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If you think about what happened to other media spaces, you can basically summarize it as: the tools got easier to use and then more people participated. Like text, for example -- before the Internet, writing was something that journalists did. Then the Internet came along and it democratized writing, starting with blogs. Suddenly, anyone could start writing. And now, we have Twitter, where everyone writes something. The same thing happened with photos and videos. In the past, video and photography were left to the professionals. But with Instagram and YouTube, everyone does it.

Anchor had arguably done for podcasting what blogs did for writing. But it had stopped short of turning podcasts into imminently shareable, bite-sized audio that everyone can use with the push of a button.

It was another 2 years before we took the final step towards the social audio creation platform that Mike and Nir had originally envisioned, thanks to one of the newer members of Spotify.

I’ll let him introduce himself.

Howard Akumiah: Hi, I'm Howard Akumiah. I'm the founder and CEO of Locker Room, which is now a part of Spotify. And I work on live products here.

In spring of 2021 we saw the opportunity and decided to act quickly. Amidst a flurry of activity in the live audio space -- we acquired the live audio app Locker Room.

On Locker Room, sports fans gather to cheer on their favorite teams in real time or debate whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT. Imagine sports talk radio where anyone can chime in.

And interestingly enough for an app that delivers on the long-awaited promise of a social audio creation platform -- Locker Room actually arrived at the audio format by following one of our earliest lessons: convenience trumps everything.

Howard Akumiah: We started off using text to create a platform for fans to discuss with each other and realized that it was close. We had -- we found a way to get fans together and discussing, but it wasn't very efficient. It was difficult to type out all of your thoughts and your takes using text. And so we enabled audio on the platform because we thought, you know, there's nothing easier when it comes to creating

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content than just speaking. And that unlocked a whole new wave of communication that has sort of led to the growth of Locker Room as we know it.

Typing is pretty easy. But talking? That’s innate.

If you follow the trajectory of other media -- like writing and video -- and Matthew Ball’s framework -- audio will only continue to get much, much bigger and we’ll see a whole new class of creators come along.

Anchor made it so anyone with a smartphone could make a podcast. On Locker Room, anyone who can talk can have a room. It’s the ultimate form of interactivity.

Howard Akumiah: At Locker Room we're extremely excited about flattening the world of creation and sort of democratizing the notion of being a creator, especially in sports. We believe specifically about this vertical, that knowledge exists everywhere, expertise exists everywhere when it comes to sports. But unfortunately, for the past 40, 50 years or so, all of the distribution of that knowledge has sort of been reserved for the larger organizations that sort of serve as the arbiters of information in sport. But you know, just as well as I do that, you know, your buddy in your group chat, or your former boss, or even Daniel, who's a major Arsenal fan, you know, regular people that we encounter in our lives are huge experts when it comes to sports. And we can learn a lot from them and glean a lot through their analysis and their insight if we get the chance to hear from them. But, you know, most of those folks will never be hosts on ESPN. And so the beauty of Locker Room is that we've unlocked or democratized the ability for people to share their expertise about the things that they know about. And you don't have to be a professional to create content that people can consume. You can just get on the platform and people can find you because they understand your affinities and they understand the teams that you care about, which hopefully are the teams that they care about and they can tune into conversations and learn from you. Gustav Söderström: And the usual format of a podcast is you have a host who invites guests. Right? And often it's actually the guests that have the interesting expertise. And the host is sort of a mediator who draws out this interesting information from the different guests and they share it with the world. The interesting thing about live -- like Locker Room -- is as a guest, you don't actually even need a host to pull you in. You just go there. And maybe you're the host, maybe you’re the

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guest. It's unclear. Maybe you just talk to people. Right? So it removes a lot of the friction in just getting to share your expertise. Howard Akumiah: Absolutely. Yeah. We think we're flattening the hierarchy between the host and the guest, and creating situations that feel much more like round tables for every sort of discussion, which is exciting for fans and exciting for hosts. And I think is creating a lot more hosts, a lot more organic hosts, a lot more people who never would have taken on the mantle of doing the work of leading a show or planning a show, but due to the fact that they don't have to do any of that lead up work, they feel comfortable just kind of going. Gustav Söderström: How do you think about this notion of a creator curve in the future? Do you think people still have different roles and there are fans and creators? How do you think about that? Howard Akumiah: I think the format is going to expand to create space for multiple roles and multiple formats of content, you know, on live. There will certainly still be a world in which a traditional podcast host gets on stage and speaks to an audience that is largely listener-oriented, and largely passively receiving content. But the beautiful thing about live is that it also opens up space in which the host and the listener are on the same level and they're talking to each other in real time. You know, using the term feedback, which is something we've thought about a lot on our team. But in many ways, we're stripping away the notion of feedback because feedback almost implies some sort of time delay. I think live basically disguises the notion of feedback as just conversation. You know, the most efficient version of feedback is just live in reactive conversation with the person that you're talking to on the other end. And to the extent that you can get that feedback in public and sort of modify your conversation to please the public or please the audience, I think Locker Room specifically enables that by having things like the chat channel alongside the live audio channel. So, you know, the audience can also react to what you're saying and let you know how they feel about things. It's in my view the perfect place for a creator to hone and sharpen their content because it's just fast and easy to do it.

We like to think of Locker Room and live audio as the natural extension of the work that we’ve been doing all along. And so we’re broadening it from only sports talk to sports, music, and culture. And we’re calling this new live audio experience: Green Room.

When we first started looking into podcasts, there were about 200 thousand podcasts on the biggest podcasting app at the time.

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Because of Anchor, now there are at least about two million podcast creators. That’s a 10x increase. Who knows, maybe with Green Room that goes from 2 million to 20 million, or even 200 million. It may sound outrageous now, but it doesn’t sound quite so outrageous when you look at the precedent set by other media sectors.

(35:25) If you’ve listened closely, you might have noticed how we applied some of the lessons that we’ve learned over the years.

Like how we took a full-stack approach to set a new streaming standard, just like in episode 1 when we “broke the rules” and built our own proprietary stack.

Maybe you picked up on how we looked outside of Spotify to leapfrog forward, just like in episode 4 when we acquired The Echo Nest and Tunigo.

You might have heard how we’re following our own rule from episode 7 that “you’re always better off competing with yourself than with somebody else”.

Or you could have simply noticed how we keep seeking out those taller and taller mountains with greater potential for innovation.

Before we go -- we have a surprise for you. You heard about those interactive features that Maya has been working on, and now you can try them for yourself!

If you aren’t already listening on Spotify, just open up the app and search for “Spotify a Product Story”. Take a look at this episode, and you’ll see that we have a special Q&A section where you can let us know what you think of this show.

Which Spotify product launches would you like to learn more about? Did you have a favorite lesson? How are you applying it to your product strategy? Or maybe you have lessons of your own that you’d like to share -- whatever it is, we want to hear from you.

And, don’t forget to stay tuned to this feed for more developments and announcements in the future.

That’s our show! Thank you so much for being part of it.

17 Episode 9 - Transcript

Spotify: A Product Story is produced by Munck Studios for Spotify.

Veronica Harth is our in-house Spotify correspondent.

We’re edited by Frances Harlow and mixed by Joakim Löfgren, Viktor Bergdahl and Andrea Fantuzzi.

Our theme music was composed by Andrea Fantuzzi.

And I’m Gustav Söderström. Thanks for listening.

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