Bryan Goldberg: Okay. Next question from Rich Greenfield on audio books. Is audio books as a category working? Was it a mistake? And how has it impacted your thinking about new categories, some of those new categories you teased at the Investor Day?
Daniel Ek: Yes. I mean its early days on audio books. That’s kind of what I can say. We’re seeing some encouraging signs. We’re definitely seeing people take up the offering but we’re nowhere done from where we want to be and where we believe the category can be doing. But I would just — rather than perhaps giving any specifics here or preannounced things, I think that the most important thing I can do is kind of give a context in that there’s two types of companies. There’s the company that waits until it gets things perfect the first time and then it tries to launch something that’s perfect. And then there’s the company that releases something that it knows needs work and then rapidly improves from there. We’re definitely the latter.
It’s hard for people to understand when they’re looking at us because it looks like it’s an inferior product or an inferior strategy. We have the same notion around podcasting. How is this thing going to win podcasting these many years ago when we announced that and yet now four years later, we’re the leader in that space. So, I think as you’re looking at our strategy now, you shouldn’t draw any two big conclusions that we are — that’s our full intent of what we want to do in the category. So, we’re encouraged because we think fundamentally that audio books has a massive opportunity and that there are very few consumers that are currently participating in the ecosystem. And if you look compare to our other verticals, music and podcasting, we thought pretty much the same thing.
So, nothing has really changed when we look at the space and what the potential is, and now we’re just heads down focused on executing. And during 2023, you’ll see a lot of new things roll out in the audio book category from Spotify.
Bryan Goldberg: All right. Our next question is going to come from Deepak on user choice billing. Were there any noticeable benefits to subscribers from the rollout of Google user choice billing in the fourth quarter? And are you seeing any conversion uplift?
Paul Vogel : It’s still early days. So, it’s tough to really know. I would say, in general, I think we’re just overall, very excited about the opportunity. The join flow is better, giving users the choice on payment methods and how they want to work with us and purchase from us. And so, we’re excited about user choice building. We think it’s going to reduce friction and improve conversion over time. Still early days in terms of how it’s impacted at this point.
Daniel Ek: It is positive, though. So, it’s early days, but positive.
Bryan Goldberg: All right. We’ve got another question from Rich Greenfield on podcasting. Investors remain skeptical that podcasting is a good business and that it has meaningfully moved the needle for Spotify. Can you help them understand why you believe in the investment to date, especially in the context of your recent management changes?
Daniel Ek: Yes, I think the most important thing here is to kind of go back on context. four years ago, we entered into podcasting. The major player in podcasting had been doing it for 20 years and was considered the sort of unassailable leader. So, we wanted to tackle this heads on. And we realized, again, as I mentioned in my comments around audio books that this was a nascent space that was growing, albeit still was under consumed to what we believe the potential was in the industry. And we took the medium and pretty much have grown overall globally now the audience by a huge margin to what was true four years ago. So, it wasn’t just that we took audience from another platform, but we actually grew the pie meaningfully for podcasters.
