Spotify Founder Daniel Ek Leaves CEO Role

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00:00The stock tells a story, it's down more than 5% on the news, but we gave the context after two

00:05decades, Daniel Ek is passing on the torch. Right, and a founder, so that's obviously always going to

00:11be big news and investors always have strong feelings about that, but the way they're portraying

00:14this is that it's kind of status quo. They're saying Alex and Gustav have been doing this work

00:20essentially since they took over as co-presidents and that Daniel's kind of the visionary and he's

00:24still going to be very hands-on. That's what they're telling everybody. But what's not status

00:29quo is the world of music and the way in which Spotify is trying to identify new ways of doing

00:34audio books and trying to galvanize people perhaps around AI development of music and whether or not

00:40they want to be paying actual musicians royalties. How will these two leaders navigate that?

00:46That's the big question. I mean, they're portraying this as a huge opportunity, right? AI music,

00:51huge new frontier, expanding to new markets that have never really adopted streaming or haven't in

00:55the same amount that the U.S. and Europe have. But these are also the big challenges. I mean,

00:59there's a world in which if everyone can create their own music, do they need to have a streaming

01:03service? So these are the big questions that Spotify and Alex and Gustav are going to have to

01:07answer. Can they actually bring the value of AI, get these emerging markets to pay more, and then

01:13from a video front, compete with YouTube? I think it's worth a health check on Spotify generally.

01:19At the end of 2022, this was a $75, $80 stock. It's now $689. Clearly, something's going right

01:26there. I spend quite a lot of time on Spotify. I know Cara does too. They're still dominant in

01:32certain categories. How do you see them as the beat reporter? Yeah, no, they absolutely are the

01:36biggest music streaming service. So they have owned that category completely. Part of the reason the

01:41stock was down at that time was because they had been investing so much money in podcasting,

01:46yeah. And the investors didn't like that. Now, in this past year, I mean, they switched to a loss

01:51now, but they were profitable for a full year. They showed they can do this. Investors loved that.

01:56And so I think they just have this new confidence that they're going to spend their money more wisely

01:59and, if necessary, flip the switch to turn to profitability. Now, that was a big message from

02:04Ek himself. I leave it in profitable hands. I leave it on a high, basically. What's he leaving to do?

02:10Because he's staying on as chair. He's going to be there for strategy. But he has been active in

02:14Founderland building new companies and new ventures and backing defense ones, health ones.

02:19Exactly. So he didn't really speak about that. He really kept it focused on Spotify. But it does

02:24seem like he's going to spend more of his time in his investments, probably focusing on what they're

02:28up to. But he is, again, really saying he's going to be involved in the day-to-day with Spotify. He's

02:33going to be sharing his office as he does with Alex and Gustav as well.