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How Spotify chooses the price it’s willing to pay for success

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had this to say during a company wide town hall about the Joe Rogan controversy:

“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”

The crucial word in this statement is “if”. It’s a choice. In many ways. You choose your goals (what Ek calls “ambition”), and you choose the conditions which you are not going to sacrifice to reach the goal (in other words: the price you’re willing to pay to reach the goal).

For Spotify, the ambition Ek is speaking of is named later in the meeting (emphasis mine):

“So I think ultimately, this really comes down to two things. First, do we believe in our mission: 50 million creators and 1 billion users? And finally, are we willing to consistently enforce our policies on even the loudest and most popular voices on the platform? And I’m telling you, I believe both.”

Their mission is “50 million creators and 1 billion users”. That’s the goal they’re trying to reach. That’s the ambition that motivates the company. Together with the first quote, it’s clear that the policies are a servant to this mission. They are designed so that they get out of the way of reaching the mission as much as possible. For example, the policies ensure legality, not pride.

That is a valid stance and Spotify is free to choose that stance.

But the takeaway here is that it is a choice. Spotify can choose to have different policies, e.g. policies that ensure that they would be proud of any content that’s on Spotify.

Spotify can also choose to have a different mission, e.g. related to the quality of the content, the kind of content, the kind of relationship they have with their customer, or a vast number of completely different takes.

They choose to make their ambition purely about numbers. As a price to achieve this mission, they choose to accept to be associated with content that many will “not be proud to be associated with”.

Knock, knock! Here’s your passion!

For most people, passion is not something that just comes along and says “hello”. It’s not something you wait for and suddenly, it’s there and you’re going to lead a fulfilled life ever after.

Passion is a process. You become passionate about something because you do this thing, learn more about it, share what you’ve learnt with others, dig deeper, discover something other’s haven’t discovered, yet, get frustrated with it, pick it up again, discover yet another new corner you haven’t explored, …

The more it becomes a part of your life, the more passionate you become.

There are very few people like filmmaker Werner Herzog who calls filmmaking an uninvited duty that gave him no choice other than to become passionate about it.

For most people, passion grows out of curiosity and play.

If it doesn’t, then change a thing or two and watch what happens. Repeat.

PS: There’s no law of nature that requires you to have a passion as strong as music was a passion for Mozart or football is for Messi even if motivational coaches try to make us believe otherwise. If you don’t have that passion, you still have a life. And that is quite something.

Pitching to the masses

With Apple’s massive success over the years, it’s easy to miss that Apple’s greatest pitches were not to the masses.

Quite the opposite. Many observers dismissed the iPod initially (“A Firewire interface?”). Many ridiculed the iPhone initially (“No keyboard?”). Many laughed at the MacBook Air initially (“No DVD drive?”)

Steve Jobs embraced that fact. Knowing that he couldn’t sell a billion iPods right from the start, he didn’t even try to.

He didn’t speak to the masses. He spoke to the people who got it. Those who care for the same things Apple cares about.

That’s a crucial insight to understand the “reality distortion field”. This term was crafted by people who “didn’t get it” to make fun of the people who “did get it”.

Of course, what really happened was that Jobs intentionally resonated strongly with what mattered to the latter while – again: intentionally – dismissing the rest.

Jobs didn’t bother to make everyone fall in love. He gave the fans a reason to love the new product. He gave them a reason to be a proud early adopter. He gave them the feeling that Apple understood their struggles and built a solution that smoothly solves them.

And then, the fans spread the word. Slowly. The iPod took years to become a mass phenomenon.

What matters to your fans and how can you speak their language so clearly that it appears to outsiders as a reality distortion field?

The complete picture

Many communicators struggle with the challenge to convey a complete picture of their topic to their audience. After all, it’s quite a complex topic to understand if you care for the details. Also, your product is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.

Yet, the actual challenge might be much simpler than that.

Because effectively, all you need to do is to tell me one thing that makes me curious to hear the next thing.

When you’ve achieved that, all you need to do is to tell me one more thing that makes me curious to hear the third thing.

Step by step.

When you do this repeatedly, eventually you’ll have told me everything but it doesn’t feel nearly as tedious as we’re used to from the usual approach to communicating.

When you want me to understand the complete picture of your idea, the challenge is not to tell me everything.

The challenge is to figure out what’s the one thing that makes me want to know more.

If you want me to get the complete picture, get me to want the complete picture. A much simpler approach. And much more related to what matters to your audience rather than to yourself.

5 new clients every week

It’s easy to speak with clarity.

What’s hard is to speak with clarity about the things we deeply care about.

“This program will bring you 5 new clients every week.” is about as clear as it gets. This statement is also really easy to come up with if you don’t care about its truthfulness.

When you speak about the things you care about, you do care about truth.

… This new service you were building over the last three years. That product that demanded from your team months of blood, sweat, and tears. The lessons you’ve learned on your path to becoming the leader you are and that you want to share in a keynote. …

These things are complex. We know so much about them that we easily fall under the Curse of Knowledge. We struggle with what to leave out and what to focus on. We’re unsure about the promises we can confidently make. We use language and abstraction that might be hard to get for others. Ultimately, we are so deeply expert in our field that it’s hard to look with non-expert eyes.

And yet, it’s precisely these things that require clarity. If only because we must not leave the field to the bullshitters.

“I think; therefore I am right.”

That’s the sentiment we see in many public discussions where opinions are the premise rather than the result of a thinking process.

“I am right!” is a sentiment that you often find in people who believe that “being wrong” is a sign of weakness. Also in people who fear change and the consequences of not being right.

In the most extreme cases, it’s almost as if these people feel entitled to owning the truth. So that the truth would have to bend according to their opinion rather than the other way around.

“I think; therefore I am right.” is a huge stretch from Descartes’ famous original insight “I think; therefore I am”. Ironically, it was based on the insight that there’s really not much that he could be certain about.

It’s the doubt that opens up new ways and shows us new solutions to old problems. That’s why a better stance would be:

I think therefore I get it right.

8 million

Each year, more than 8 million children die due to poverty (source).

That’s a huge number. But how large is it, really? The human mind has no easy way to “see” that number. For our brain, it doesn’t make much difference whether it’s 8 million or 80 thousand. Both is basically “a lot”.

Things change when we translate the numbers into dimensions we can relate to. 8 million per year means that every 4 seconds a child dies due to poverty.

Basically, during the time it takes you to read this sentence, a child dies due to poverty.

4 seconds is an easy to grasp value. 4 seconds is easy to experience. It has a clear meaning in our everyday life and therefore, it makes the abstract specific. It’s still the same information, but it’s much more tangible – even more so when you support it with a finger snap.

It’s hard to see 8 million children, but it’s easy to imagine one – which is precisely what most of us do when we hear that finger snap. With each finger snap we see a child.

Translating difficult numbers into values that make sense in our everyday life also makes it a lot easier for our audiences to understand what the numbers mean. It makes it a lot easier to relate to the info we’re trying to convey.

If marketing was a bakery

We would probably hate cake.

As a baker, when your cake doesn’t taste great, the best thing you can do is to learn to bake a better tasting cake.

The default approach of many marketers is different. They will take the cake and decorate it beautifully. Invent a story about how the recipe is an ancient and long forgotten secret of someone’s grandmother. Throw some incentives in so you can get three if you buy two (although you might not even want one). And have a celebrity, who never tasted the cake, tell us how delicious it is.

And then, when you’ve tricked the customer into buying that piece of cake, trust erodes as the experience falls short of the expectation.

The first bite is with the eye. But sooner or later, the customer gets to experience the actual taste. If the actual bite isn’t great, that first impression will quickly be forgotten.

The default approach to marketing is prone to deception: Give me what you have and I will make it appear attractive and find ways to persuade a customer to buy it.

Lighting the path is different because it starts with a great cake. You decorate a great cake not as a means to hide a weakness but because it makes a great cake even greater. You don’t invent a story about the recipe to make it appear cooler, you tell the actual story because it’s fascinating, let’s say due to the breathtaking attention to detail in making the cake.

Now, when the actual bite confirms the eye’s bite, it builds trust. And we might fall in love with the cake. And buy a second one even without any incentive.

Avoiding your audience’s autopilot

Our audiences have a lot of bad (or good?) habits that affect us.

When they read a boring headline, the scroll-further habit kicks in.

When they see a PowerPoint deck, the boring-PowerPoint-lets-check-Instagram habit kicks in.

When they read a generic first paragraph of a blog post, the this-is-irrelevant-lets-just-skim-over-it habit kicks in (or maybe even the lets-check-my-phone-and-get-lost-in-social-media-instead routine).

Habits are a big deal because they take over our audience’s brains (more or less) automatically. Once someone experiences a trigger (e.g. the boring headline), the habit kicks in.

The most effective way to avoid this behaviour is to avoid the trigger. And that’s why it matters to a) find trust in your own voice and b) understand what matters to your audience.

If you speak about what matters to your audience in your own distinctive voice, the just-like-everything-else trigger doesn’t fire and so your audience’s attention remains with you.

Spread the Word

Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz