Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek introduced Sudden confession In a recent post to
Instead, he says, when the team came up with the idea for Discover Weekly, he “wasn’t sure about it.”
“I didn’t really understand why it was special,” Ek wrote on
Discover Weekly launched in 2015 to instant success as well as a major innovation in using algorithmic personalization to change the way users learn about new music and artists they enjoy while using Spotify. At the time of its arrival, Spotify had a total of just 75 million active users, and in less than a year, 40 million of them had engaged with the new playlist. In addition to being a popular discovery tool, the playlist also helped attract new streaming users at a time when many were still buying their music from iTunes.
In fact, Discover Weekly’s popularity grew so much that it led Spotify to develop a host of personalized playlists over the following years, including Release Radar, Daily Mixes, and others that aim to showcase tunes you’ve loved in the past, those designed for special situations like workouts or… Navigations, and more, including its popular end-of-year retrospective cover.
This trend towards personalizing the music experience has influenced Spotify’s latest developments such as the AI DJ feature and the AI DJ feature Redesigned home nutrition. It also pushes competitors like Apple Music and YouTube Music to rip off Spotify with their own custom playlists.
EK shared this surprising anecdote about not immediately understanding the appeal of what later became Spotify’s main feature in hopes of imparting advice to other founders about the power of listening.
“People often think that founders have everything planned from the beginning, but that’s at least not true for me. A lot of times, I rely on feedback from our team, our customers and our partners. And I change my mind every so often.” “My job is a bit like that of a curator “Or a producer — I’m putting the pieces of the puzzle together,” Ek wrote as part of his confession.One of the most underrated skills in our society is listening. “So I’m sending this tweet out into the world as a reminder to myself to work on becoming a better listener than ever before,” he concluded.
Ek has been posting on X in recent days to share his thoughts on being a founder, the choices he made at Spotify in the early days, and In other words live by it. For example, he shared how to use Spotify It landed on green for its brand identityhow is he Cuts down on screen-free time For his ideas, and more.
And in one of the posts, too He revealed his fears of being an “unreasonable” president., wrestles with his need to be loved. In the post, Eck referenced a quote by George Bernard Shaw that says: “The rational man adjusts himself to the world; As for the unreasonable person, he insists on trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The post received comments from Mark Cuban, Alexis OhanianAnd Elon MuskThe latter of whom joked that he “overcame the desire to be loved.”