Jarrod Dicker Is Thinking A Lot About ‘Web 2.5’

07/08/21 • 56 min

Means of Creation

You can watch this episode on YouTube or listen to Means of Creation on your podcast app of choice.

You can watch this episode on YouTube or listen to Means of Creation on your podcast app of choice.

Previous Episode

Inside Spotify's Vision for Audio Creators

Spotify is doubling down on investing in creators. Within the past week alone, the music giant both launched its own live audio app, Greenroom, to directly compete with Clubhouse and acquired an audio news feed app, Podz, to improve creator discovery. But while these moves might seem sudden, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström has been thinking about Spotify’s unique role in the creator economy for a while.

Gustav has been with the company since it was a 30-person team in Stockholm, and has a valuable bird’s eye view of the company’s product vision and strategy as a leader of teams across Product, Design, Data, Technology and Engineering. He also reports directly to Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO and co-founder.

In this conversation, we talk to Gustav about what he’s keeping a pulse on these days; NFTS? Interactive audio? Bundles?

We also talk about:

How he sees Spotify fitting into the creator economy through their Open Access Platform
- Why the Spotify doesn’t believe in taking an “App Store cut” from creators
- The company’s ethos around building “voluntary” features
- Why he’s excited about the business model of NFTs
- The demand for live audio and why it’s bigger than people thought

We hope you enjoy this conversation with Gustav as much as we did!

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Theme composed by Keizo Fish

Next Episode

Inside the Longform Content Game at Twitter

here’s a shift afoot at Twitter. The long-time microblogging platform has recently made a series of moves to position itself beyond just tweets, including acquiring the newsletter company Revue and introducing tools to help creators make money on the platform. When Twitter acquired Revue, the company declared that it was making a “better home for writers,” apparently doubling down on its mission to help people create and share content with a plugged-in audience. But are we ready for longform Twitter? Nick Sallon, Twitter’s Head of Longform Content, thinks so. We recently talked to him about all these changes at the company. We also discussed: Revue’s editorial philosophy Twitter’s value proposition to writers The archetype of a Twitter-native creator Twitter’s longform content strategy going forward We hope you enjoy this conversation with Nick as much as we did! Music composed by Keizo Fish