Transcript Clubhouse Shopify Ceo Tobi Luuml: A transcript of a Clubhouse chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, and Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke about creator economy, Apple’s potential to disrupt the music industry and more.
“So we want to create this ecology where creators are empowered in every way.” – Daniel Ek
“The only way that you could ever be successful is by being authentic.” – Mark Zuckerberg
“If quality is not the result you want then you’re on the wrong product. I think you have to do a mix of things. You can’t just find one product that sits in the middle.” – Tobi Lütke
On how Spotify got started:
“Tobi and I used to play music for hours and hours on end so we had really good music taste. We were both in our mid 20s at that time so we were still pretty young. We were going through bands, we were going through songs, we were listening to days and nights and weekends. We would just talk about music the whole time. When I graduated in May of 2006 we started crunching the numbers, because we were thinking to ourselves “Why do people buy music?” You buy a CD and there’s a lot of plastic and it doesn’t even really sound that good. And then you get home and you find out your favorite song is actually track 10 on disc 3, so then you have to go back to the store. So we just started crunching data and we were looking at the fact that consumers buy music and what they seemed to want was access to it, because that’s what they told us they wanted. They didn’t actually want to own music anymore.”
We then just set out to build a service that allowed you to access your favorite songs on demand, we launched in Sweden in October of 2008 and in July of 2009 we launched globally. So really it was 4 years ago that this whole thing started.
On what Spotify’s mission is and building the creator economy:
“Spotify is all about making it easier for artists to connect with their fans. We want to give artists the opportunity to have a voice and have a say in how they would like to engage with their crowds and that’s why we started building this platform for them. We started thinking about how to build a platform for artists to really connect with their audiences.”
“What we’ve done so far is that we got this passionate community of fans. We now have 180 million users on the free ad-supported tier and 60 million subscribers, which is pretty amazing. They obviously love our music service, but they also love the fact that they can connect with artists directly through Spotify. So they find it very engaging to hear that an artist is playing in a town that’s nearby, or they’re going to be on the radio at a specific time. So we think that’s a really big part of why people are coming back to Spotify every single day and why they have such a strong relationship with artists.