Spotify: A Product Story Episode 6 - Transcript I’m Gustav Söderström. I head up product, engineering, data and design for Spotify. And you’re listening to Spotify: A Product Story -- the podcast that brings you the untold stories behind Spotify’s biggest product launches -- and the lessons we learned from them -- all in the words of the people who lived it and actually made it happen. Most music listening has always happened in the home -- but back in 2011 it was still really really hard to figure out how to play your digital music library over a decent set of speakers. Some tech geeks rigged up elaborate hacks: Thomas Cullen: We're starting to run, NAS drives in our house and all this kind of stuff and you know, we started to realizing that wow all this music sitting here just needs a line out, so now we're going line out from the P.C. into the stereo. And now you got this PC next to the stereo. And it was a pretty weird arrangement. But while most people had a really good set of speakers at home, they often settled for listening to their mp3s over crummy computer speakers or tinny little earbuds and saved their stereos for their CD collections. Mikael Ericsson : Computer speakers were enough to make some noise. So convenience over quality was definitely my personal stance there. On today’s episode -- Hardware is Hard. We’ll walk through how Spotify worked its way down to the very bottom of the stack on a quest to create the perfect home listening session, how we had to build a new media protocol in the process and ultimately found a way for users to pass something called: “The Beer Test.” (02:03) At Spotify, we’ve always been guided by the mission of giving our users “the perfect listening experience.” When we’re facing an important product decision -- or just envisioning what the next new feature might look like -- we come back to that idea of: how would this experience work if it were perfect? And then, we figure out how to get from here to there. 1 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 6 - Transcript Back in 2011, this led us to imagine a world where your music could just seamlessly flow from one device to the next as you go about your day, from your desktop to your phone to your home speakers -- like so many other advancements in tech, it seems intuitive and obvious now, but at the time, in a world of moving CDs and files around between devices, it was visionary. Unfortunately for Spotify -- unlike when we made the move to mobile -- software simply hadn’t “eaten” home speaker systems yet, so there was no platform for us to write software for. Instead, there were 100s of manufacturers making 1000s of speakers. Most of which were not connected to the internet, and relied on Bluetooth that at the time was super buggy, slow to connect, and routed everything through your phone or computer. There was only one company out there that shared our vision: Sonos. Thomas Cullen: We were sitting and meeting with you folks really early on about this subject. And I said, why don't you just use Bluetooth? And somebody on your team looked at me and he goes; because Bluetooth sucks. Thomas Cullen co-founded Sonos -- the high-end wifi-connected speaker system -- in 2002. Four years before Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon started Spotify. Thomas Cullen: You know, you spend a lot of your time just trying to explain to people what's possible, right? Using all these bizarre analogies like piles of cd's and all this kind of stuff. That really is a very separate problem from making a good product. You have to do this mass, mass habit change. And the questions people are asking you are constantly in the previous context. So you're trying to show them tomorrow and they're asking you questions using yesterday's words. How many CDs does it hold or something, you know what I mean, you’re looking at them like, what?! Like us, Sonos had started with the goal of providing the perfect listening experience. And they found their answer by connecting their state-of-the-art speakers directly to the internet. From a strategy perspective, partnering with Sonos to pilot our first home speaker integration was quite straightforward: 2 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 6 - Transcript Although Sonos’ connected speakers were too pricey for most of our users back then -- we were willing to bet that it was only a matter of time before Moore’s Law drove prices down enough that everyone who owned a CD player -- which meant literally everyone -- would leapfrog past the awkwardness of trying to play their mp3s over their home stereos using cables. Straight to wifi-connected speakers. Speakers that already had all the world’s music built in, through a seamless Spotify integration ready to go, out of the box. Unlike Bluetooth and Airplay, these new wi-fi connected speakers would pass what Thomas called “The Beer Test.” Thomas Cullen: There you are with a bunch of friends. You pull out your phone and you press play on your Spotify and it's playing on your speaker and you got Airplay going and it's great. And you're out of beer and a person goes hey, I'll be right back, and they head down the stairs, and the music stops. And everybody’s like, what happened? Well, it's because the music was coming from the Internet to your phone, to the speaker, even though the speakers are on the Internet, the phone’s on the Internet, the music's on the Internet. And all these devices are on the Internet. What the hell is that? Right? It made no sense. Partly because we wanted to see if our dream was even possible and partly because we didn’t know how to achieve it yet, when we first built the Sonos integration, we followed Sonos’ standard operating procedure for integrating Spotify into their user interface. Our engineering team had already pared down Spotify’s client desktop app into the absolute bare minimum -- a library we called Lib Spotify. So we worked hand-in-hand with Sonos’ engineers to translate Lib Spotify into code that could actually run on their speakers’ tiny little computer chips. Sonos users could then access their Spotify libraries through a one-size-fits-all UI that rolled all streaming music services into the Sonos app experience. But we pretty quickly found out that our goals were sometimes at odds with Sonos’. 3 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 6 - Transcript Thomas Cullen: Ultimately, as I look back on it, I think our biggest challenge was we had a fundamental disagreement on technology that I think over time, we just compromised our way to the middle. (06:51) The crux of that disagreement was about whether to optimize for the speaker UI or for the music service UI. And that’s because of our first product strategy lesson. Lesson #1: everyone thinks of the user as their user. If Sonos was betting on a future where they were the only stand-out speaker in a sea of music services, we wanted to be the exact opposite: the only stand-out music service in a sea of speakers. Thomas Cullen: We had this notion that the queue needed to be heterogeneous, meaning you should be able to load stuff in the queue from anything. And in the early days of Sonos, people used to have queues that had five songs from their library, their little local disk, and you could put a Google Play track, a Spotify track and a Rapsody track in our queue, and they would just play as if nothing happened. Right? They would play perfectly. We, I think, in retrospect, made a mistake. And the mistake was that we really thought that there would be thousands of services. And I think it turns out there's only 10 that matter in the world. Because we hadn’t moved into original content yet, we were essentially offering our users the exact same music catalog that they could get anywhere else. So we had to compete on experience. What music you got, and how you interacted with it. Which meant that we needed to have control over the experience. Although we both shared the ultimate goal and vision of providing a flawless listening experience -- Sonos understandably had no real incentive to maintain or upgrade any kind of custom Spotify interface in their app or custom features and code on their hardware devices. 4 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 6 - Transcript To be totally honest, this created some tension early on -- so I asked Thomas what it felt like on the other side. Thomas Cullen: We never had like an attachment to the app view as being important. Like, if you're a pure app company, then your app view is everything. Right? But our interface to the user, if people in Sonos, in my opinion, were being candid with themselves, was not an app or even a box, it was the sound flowing through the house. And so, you know, from my point of view, I always told people, look, if we ever get to the point where you think of it, it starts playing; we're done, we can go home. And so what happened -- I have this belief that companies need to understand what their natural role is.