AI Models, Consumer Apps, and Music’s Future

\"Unlike those domains where you're trying to just get more and more answers to objective problems... music is totally subjective. So scale is not the answer to all the problems.\"

• Recognize that scalability may not solve subjective problems.
• Develop techniques focused on understanding human preferences.
• Tailor AI solutions to the nuances of your industry.

\"So if you like, you can think it's not obvious how to tokenize audio, but if you spend night and day doing that and basically take everything from the open source text community for how to make and scale models, that's a pretty good recipe.\"

• Innovate in specialized areas overlooked by larger competitors.
• Leverage open-source communities to accelerate development.
• Focus on solving hard problems uniquely.

\"Knowing what gets people to subscribe is such valuable data that I don't know like how we would do this without it.\"

• Use monetization data to understand user value.
• Paying customers offer deeper feedback.
• Revenue models can guide product iterations.

\"Everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface, and it is for Chat GPT and it is incorrect for basically everything else.\"

• Don't assume popular interfaces are right for your product.
• Design interfaces that suit your users' needs.
• Challenge industry norms when they don't align with your vision.

\"Has there ever been a time where revenue focus has led to deprioritization of growth? No, because we've always prioritized growth on top of revenues. You know, this is like good people have the capacity to keep both things in their head.\"

• Strive to prioritize both growth and revenue.
• Understand that they can be complementary goals.
• Avoid trade-offs by aligning initiatives that drive both.

\"I did not appreciate just how much a good UI will totally change the experience for people... We released this web app... it takes 5 days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. There's no world in which you can say that I got that right.\"

• Invest in UI/UX early to improve user experience.
• Understand that different interfaces suit different products.
• Quick adoption shows the power of intuitive design.

\"It's a little bit depressing in some, in some way because I think there is a much bigger and brighter future of music to build together with the existing industry instead of kind of fighting it out and having the potential for this thing to just be net smaller.\"

• Engage incumbents early to seek collaboration.
• Lawsuits can hinder innovation and growth.
• Building bridges can create a larger market for all.

\"I don't know if this is special to us. I think it is, it's, it's focus. I think at any given time, there are 30 things that we could do that would be very impactful for the company and we have to choose 3 of them, and, uh, we have to choose carefully.\"

• Prioritize the most impactful initiatives.
• Resist the temptation to chase every opportunity.
• Focus ensures efficient use of limited resources.

\"We made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale.\"

• Early revenue signals product-market fit.
• Paying customers provide valuable feedback.
• Balancing growth and revenue can enhance product development.

\"Yeah, we don't pay millions of dollars. So how do we compete? There's a couple of things, you know, one is we're not in Silicon Valley... If you are interested in a different AI problem, in the problem of how do I align models not to objective truth, but to human taste. I think there's nowhere else to do it.\"

• Focus on unique problems that attract talent beyond high salaries.
• Leverage geographical advantages outside major tech hubs.
• Offer opportunities that giants aren't exploring.