Daniel Ek: Yeah, I mean, One of the things we talked about at Spotify is obviously the change is the only constant. It’s a sort of mantra I have internally. So that we’re changing is not perhaps something you as investors should be all that surprised about because that’s the only thing we pride ourselves internally with. And you can see that in some of my opening remarks too about sort of how we pivot focus internally as well. But I think, maybe to set context on the 2022 Investor Day, the 2022 Investor Day wasn’t as much backward looking, as it was forward looking. So what we tried to do then is to outline where we were going with the company. And some of those things we use both internally and externally, pretty much at the same time to kind of set the directions for the team.
And in there, we talked about the Spotify machine. And the Spotify machine being that this isn’t just a sort of one trick pony anymore, but it is actually multiple verticals working together to provide a consistent great story around just more and more choice for consumers that drives more and more engagement because you may come for the music and stay for the audiobooks and some consumers may come for the podcast and stay for the audiobooks. So this is just going to be more ways for people to interact with it. And the machine takes care of all the complexity on the back end to deal with, what was historically a very difficult problem to solve, which is multiple business models [in] (ph) one consumer experience. And so that’s the sort of key arc of what you’re seeing contributing to this story.
Now specifically related to resourcefulness, I do agree that we’ve made a harder pivot to that than we probably initially planned. But If you walk back to some of our comments, we did say that 2022 was an investment year and that we also would go back eventually to focus on something else. Obviously, that was a harder pivot in 2023 than we initially planned to do. And I think that served us well, but I would say, it’s really an 80%-20% story. 80% is pretty much the same, but we’re actually delivering on all the things we said in 2022. And 20% is there may be some added upside by us just being a more resourceful company. And I’m certainly surprised in a positive way by the resilience and the resourcefulness that the teams are showing on some line items like marketing and cost of delivery, just to mention two examples.
So I think we can be a better company than even what I said in 2022, but I think you shouldn’t see this as something very different than what we outline. It is pretty much the same but hopefully with a little bit crisper execution on it.
Bryan Goldberg: Okay, we’ve got a question from Rich Greenfield on TikTok. With the US Government, set to ban TikTok barring court intervention, how are you thinking about the opening that could create a music discovery in short form content tied to music?
Daniel Ek: Yeah, I’m not going to comment on other companies and related on their strategy, what may happen with their regulatory proceedings. But obviously what I can say is that we are focused on winning discovery and we’re going to add as many ways that we can to improve the discovery of Spotify. So you saw us in the quarter add music videos. You’re going to see music clips in a bigger way. You can already today, if you open up the apps, start seeing more and more videos on the music side where artists are engaging with fans. Those in a similar way, like a Reels product that TikTok did a few years ago. So I think the whole industry, TikTok and other companies have obviously improved the user experience that we’re all as an industry, learning about these trends and best practices and trying to improve our products.
So that’s what great competition does. It helps improve for everyone. And of course, we are not any different than anyone else in that we’re trying to learn from the marketplace. We learn what consumers like. We try to improve upon it and make the best possible user experience. So short form music content is a big focus of ours. You’re going to see more video on the music side, make its way into the product in 2024. And two other things, by the way, that you’re going to see is of course more AI products in the music side as well. And in addition to that, I believe you’re going to see an even more global music ecosystem than any time before in history. So we’re excited about all these sort of three core trends in music.
Bryan Goldberg: All right, we’ve got a follow up from Rich Greenfield on top-line growth. Daniel, in the short video you created on the quarter, you sounded very pleased with your 20% revenue growth rate. Premium has been the key driver aided by price increases. Curious, how should we be thinking about advertising growth going forward? Can it start to increase your overall growth rate and grow 20% plus?
Daniel Ek: Yeah, you’re right that our premium product was sort of the big driver of the quarter, and we felt really good about that. And Ben can add to this, but we saw a lot of strength in the quarter as well as it relates to advertising. You know, I think it’s a little bit early to say on my side, how the macro on the advertising side will develop, but I remain cautiously optimistic that we’re seeing some really good growth. But again, just to remind investors, the reality is even if advertising will become a better part of the story, it’s still a relatively small part of our overall revenue mix. So anything we can do on our subscription side will obviously materially outperform any improvement on the ad side. So don’t think I’m not excited about advertising, but it just happens to be that the subscription side obviously is the bigger part in order to get to the 20% revenue growth. Did I miss anything, Ben?
