The Present Future of Audio: Talk, Music, Video, Interactivity

I actually personally think that audio hasn't changed that much yet ... Discovery is still difficult. Search is still difficult. It's really like a one-way listening experience—you aren't interacting with other listeners; you aren't interacting with the creators. Creators still have to rely on very old business models for monetization.

We have a core belief that if Spotify can make you discover something that you wouldn't otherwise have discovered, it will be more important in your life. So, we really try to make sure that we measure and understand how many discoveries we generate for you.

Radio is the integration of both talk and music—they live very symbiotically together. And if you look at most podcasts, they have a music introduction already. There are sound effects in a bunch of them, too. So, this combination or this belief that normal talking can be improved with music or music can be improved with talking breaks has been here forever.

If you think about what algorithms do really well, they tend to scale really well. They tend to be able to personalize at an okay level to hundreds of millions of people. Humans don't do that really well. Humans are incredibly smart and creative, though, but they don't scale so well.

It turns out that your music listening is actually very predictive of your podcast listening.

If we use the cheat sheet of other media, I think audio is going to increase on the creator side just like the other mediums.