Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign I'm Dan runcy. Welcome to Trapital. Today we're talking all about SoundCloud. In recent years SoundCloud has been at an interesting point. They've explored new strategic options for the company moving forward, doubled down on their position as a two sided marketplace for both artists and fans, and rebuilt the leadership team and truly focused on growth, subscriptions and profitability. But at the same time the broader market has shifted fast. AI has completely revamped what can be possible for music creation and discovery and platforms are being forced to answer a big question. What role do they play in the future of this business? To break that all down and more, you're going to hear my conversation with SoundCloud CEO Elias Seton. He brings us under the hood and gives us the Latest on where SoundCloud is on the sales process, what the girl story looks like today, what the business looks like as well, how each part of it is set up and how it feeds into each other, where things are with superfans monetization, and why he believes that SoundCloud is well positioned for this AI era in music. This is a great talk and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Here's my conversation with Alaia. This episode of trapital is brought to you by Symphonic, where you can build your career on your terms. Symphonic empowers independent artists and labels to stay in control while building sustainable global careers. Symphonic provides the tools, technology and support needed to distribute music worldwide, manage catalogs, collect royalties and grow with clarity and confidence. From global distribution and marketing to data, insights and label services, Symphonic meets you where you are whether you're releasing your first track or scaling an established catalog. As a proudly independent, minority owned company, Symphonic combines powerful tech with human relationships, helping you understand options, protect your rights and make decisions that serve your long term goals. Learn more about Symphonic by going to symphonic.com or click the link in our show. Notes if you love listening to Trapital, I want to put you on to another podcast that I think you'll really enjoy. It's called One Song. It's hosted by Diallo, Riddle and Luxury. Each episode unpacks one iconic track. They break down the original musical stems so you can hear how the song was built while also diving into the creative choices and cultural forces that shape the song. If you're into how music, media and culture intersect, this show is very much in that lane. You'll hear songs you already love in a completely new way. Check out One Song wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are here with the CEO of SoundCloud Elias.
- [03:00]
B
Hey Dan, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much. Very excited to be here.
- [03:04]
A
Good to catch up with you as always. Last time we talked it was fall 2024. We talked to the Trapital summit. We were on stage there and I remember one of the big topics we had talked about was the news of the beginning of the year where Sky News reported that SoundCloud's investors were exploring a potential sale for the company. We talked a little bit about that then, but it'd be great to catch up and hear the latest. How's that process been?
- [03:30]
B
Awesome. Over two years ago there was news that we were going out to test the market and explore potential new capital partner or partners. By the end of 2024, we pretty much put away that process. It was extraordinarily valuable for us. For us, first and foremost, it was an opportunity to really test our story and we really had a chance to validate our story as a two sided marketplace, global scaled two sided marketplace with direct access to artists and fans, bringing them together and with a global brand that was very much synonymous with being artist first and focused on the creator. We were able to validate that story with some of the most sophisticated investors on the planet. But we didn't make a match on value. And I think what we had spent some of that time doing was really testing how our shareholders would respond to that. The company's never had a liquidity event. The tenure of our shareholders is anywhere between 7 and 18 years old. Ultimately, as we have rebuilt and revitalized the business, I think our shareholders have built more and more conviction now in the meantime, what it did was it really allowed us to double down on, on that validated story, that compelling story. And that's primarily what we've spent the last 18 months doing. And I think of that in three M's, the metrics, our management team and the market. With regard to the metrics, our entire operating business, pretty much everything is up and to the right. So fan subscriptions up into the right record fan subscriptions, our creator subscriptions up into the right record creator subscriptions. Revenues are growing nicely, margins as well. And we're cash flow generative, which is very freeing for the business. It's also obviously led to really increased conviction among our shareholders and obviously the team. The second M is the management team. We have spent the last 12 to 18 months recruiting a best in class team that I'm incredibly excited about. Incredible talent from big tech, from, from the biggest DSPs, from the majors, from independent Labels, an extraordinary talented set of folks who are in it to win it and build this story and define what's next in music. And then the third M is around the market. And think of how things have changed since your first capital summit and when we were sitting there on that stage. The advent of AI and music is changing the industry and the ecosystem rapidly. We're incredibly excited about how that enhances our product for creators, how that enhances our product for fans, but it also tells us just how important SoundCloud's position in the market is in an AI environment. In music, it's so important to have direct access to fans. It is so important to be a place where genuine artists break, where artists come to find one another, where scenes form, where new music is found. That's our DNA. And there is such value in cultural authenticity, cultural legitimacy. And we're incredibly excited about where we stand in that environment. And now the market has kind of converged to our own vision for where we're heading and that's an incredibly exciting place to be.
- [06:57]
A
So that framing the three M's and then thinking about that match in value that you said maybe wasn't quite there between you and potential growth partners. Do you feel like the market was the biggest reason why maybe there wasn't the match there? Or do you think more of it may have been like the first stem from a metrics perspective?
- [07:15]
B
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And more than anything, because the story was validated, I think maybe it was more just about how far along on that story we are or we were at the time. And in the subsequent 18 months, we feel like we've made a tremendous amount of progress, but ultimately, you know, we're not in this to sell the business. Our team has come here to build what's next in music. Folks from all these incredible places who share a vision for defining the future of music, which we believe will live on platforms like ours, global scaled platforms that connect artists and fans together directly, giving creators every opportunity to get heard, find their fans, build their fan base, get paid beyond streaming and giving fans access to new music, access to the artists and music that they love, building products that do that. Ultimately, we want to find the right long term partners who share that vision and want to help add fuel to that fire and help us build that story, either with capital or with strategic assets, or a combination of the two.
- [08:19]
A
And you mentioned creators, fans. I know there's a few different parts of the business give us a high level on what it looks like today, what are the biggest growth drivers. What are some of the emerging ones?
- [08:30]
B
Primarily the business is divided into two operating segments, what we call creator and fan. So the fan business, I think we're now well past 450 million tracks on the platform is the largest catalog of music on the planet. The business model itself on the fan side looks like a dsp. So there's an ad tier and then there are two paid subscription tiers. What we call Go and Go plus. Go is all the UGC content and some of the the major label and independent label content and it's ad free. And then Go plus is kind of the traditional standard streaming service that you would find elsewhere as well. Subscribers on the fan side have been growing rapidly. It's a very significant growth area for us. Anybody who studies this space knows what the margins of streaming business look like in music. That is not the biggest margin driver for the business, but it is certainly a helpful top line growth driver. We are monetizing in 20 markets, but we have organic usage in 193 markets. So this is very much a global brand and global usage, but not yet a global business. That's a major opportunity for us. 85% of the listening time is against that UGC content. So when you think about it, folks are really coming to find something that they aren't finding anywhere else. About half of our fans would be defined by media as superfans. They're spending three, four, five times as much time on music, as much money on music as an average fan. They're spending that in all different places and on all different platforms. But they're certainly coming to SoundCloud. So we are obviously very excited and charged up about the sorts of fans who come here. And that's always been the case. And then the other side of that two sided marketplace is our creator business. This is millions of artists who come to the platform to experiment and test their music, upload their music, begin to find their fans, engage with that fan base and then start to monetize that fan base. And obviously there's a free product there with certain amount of storage and quota and access certain products, tools and services and then two subscription tiers beyond that where you start to access the more kind of granular tools to find that fan base and build that fan base. Very important to that is a set of AI tools that underpin our get heard strategy. So we know from all the audience research we do that the most important thing for a creator is to find their fans and build their fan base. And we want to use our AI tools to help them do that. So we know everything there is to know about that track that's just been uploaded and we know everything there is to know about fan engagement on the platform, what people are listening to, what they save, what they skip, what they comment on, what they repost and like, et cetera. And we match them together. So we will find a subscribing creator, their first fans. And that's literally what the product is called. First fans make it simple. And then from there the creator product is really about sometimes leveraging third party partners, what we call our member benefits program where you get $2,500 worth of value and discounts and subscription trials to lots of different tools that help you actually make your music. And there are a lot of it great AI partners in, in that part of our business. And then in terms of finding your fans and engaging your fan base, building the right insights and tools around harnessing that fandom and, and knowing who's who, seeing who your top fans are, being able to access them directly. Just this past week we launched exclusive releases for followers. So Chris Stussy was a, He's a Dutch DJ who's been very prominent on the platform. Incredible artist. He's garnered thousands and thousands of new followers on the platform because he released his new music directly to followers on the platform. And then obviously to be able to distribute your music to other platforms beyond just soundcloud, once you're ready for that as a paying subscriber, that is certainly a tool that is important for any artist who's looking to really build their career and then to start to get paid. Taken together the creator and the fan businesses with profitable economics around them and growing quite nicely, they then form the foundation for what we really believe are the transformational opportunities. And that's when it comes to fan monetization and monetizing the engagement between artists and fans, which is so much part of our DNA.
- [12:47]
A
You had also mentioned the superfan opportunity, but I feel like you all sit at an interesting and unique vantage point just given the listener behavior and the type of customer user that is on the platform. And I wonder, is there anything that, that you all are doing that's a bit more unique or different or even insightful that you think could lay the groundwork for okay, this is what it could look like?
- [13:11]
B
Absolutely. As a starting point, I feel like we've got a great advantage, a great head start. The connection between artists and fans and their engagement beyond just listening to music is part of our founding mission. It's what the company was really founded to do. Our founders were really ahead of their time 18 years ago in starting to build that. One of the things that I think we've learned is there's not going to be a one stop shop for super fandom. I don't think there's going to be one, one store, one marketplace that I think probably creates an opportunity for us either which way. Here's how we think about it. We've got a creator who's come and they've uploaded a track and they've started to find their fans. Leveraging AI tools to find fans who are likely going to engage with their music. And then they can start to access products, tools and services to engage with that fan base, make that fan base part of their followership and then start to give them exclusive content or access to early ticket sales. They can then open up commercial opportunities such as access to merch sales or vinyl sales. They can open up fan support which is effectively tipping in exchange for acknowledgment from from that artist. They can start to put dollars on top of those kind of traditional forms of engagement on the platform. We already see that in monetizing fandom. This lives in different segments all over the industry. It lives in social. There's a D2C element, there's music creation, turning your fans into creators. They're probably four, five, six different segments where fan monetization is starting to live. And I think what we want to be able to do is build products that work for all different kinds of artists. Because for a DJ on the platform, they're going to want a certain way of engaging with their fans and monetizing their fandom that might look very different from an artist who's coming out of the DMV scene. What we can do as a technological platform is create products that match each of those different kinds of scenes and genres and kinds of artists. But ultimately, I think fandom and super fandom is going to be accessible in lots of different places. What I like about where we stand is that the engagement between artists and fans is the core use case. It's why people come to SoundCloud to begin with. It's just part of the DNA of the place. Starting with commenting on a track and reposting and liking and sharing and being part of a fan community and scene formation. We've tested a bunch of different things and we're going to continue to and I'm, you know, load to anchor to any one specific strategy. But for us, what we want to do is make our creator subscription as valuable as it possibly can be for paying our artist so they can be achieving so much of the value stack in being subscribed to us and in in having that subscription. Getting access to being able to do merch or sell vinyl or get fan support from an artist, or sell exclusive content to artists who follow them or distribute to other platforms. We're less concerned about the transaction that follows. We'd rather focus on building that value in the subscription and then let the artist keep 100% of the economics for each of those transactions. You sell a T shirt keep 100%. You distribute your music to all the other DSPs, you keep 100%. You get fan support from artists who you find on the platform. Keep 100%. As we think about the future, I'm more oriented toward that because I think that will strengthen our relationship with artists. You earn it, you keep it as long as you're a paying subscriber on our platform because we have a business grown too.
- [16:54]
A
You said you tested a few things here. I'd be curious to know. Is there anything that you've tested that oh, that exceeded our expectations. That worked better than we thought, Particularly around this topic of monetizing fandom. And then on the flip side, is there anything you tested that maybe didn't work out the best as you're trying to figure out the right mix?
- [17:13]
B
Pure tipping, it seems easy and maybe the instinct is that would work because fans want to support artists and artists who are getting their start need that support financially. But pure tipping is one sided. What's important is that they feel like there's something in return. So I think what we have found is pure tipping doesn't work quite as well as fan support where you have the opportunity to get acknowledged by the artist and then acknowledged on their artist page. And that's really what this is about. It's about building a fan community and for a fan to feel like they're part of something that is forming. We could spend some time talking about some of the new scenes in our music Intelligence report, but in the kind of eclectic new indie scene we've seen this happen with a number of artists who are starting to blow up off of the platform in, in this scene, they're getting discovered, they're signing to prominent labels, prominent indies, big majors. Obviously what we're seeing is that real fandom and fan communities are forming around them. And just as important as it is to identify the talent coming out of those scenes, it's just as important to identify the fans who are forming those scenes. So when we think about fan support, it's not just about getting a fan to drop a couple bucks in an artist's pocket. It's about planting the seeds for real scene formation. And that's what's ultimately going to drive the future scenes that are defining what's next in music and really move culture forward.
- [18:45]
A
And I think tipping as well can just be very oriented to certain cultures, certain parts of the world where that type of relationship is so much more common than how it may be in other places.
- [18:57]
B
Yeah, eventually, thinking longer term, where this is heading is a more gamified environment where the sort of commerce we're talking about is more micro transactions, more in app purchasing, and it is much easier to be spending a few SoundCloud pennies at a time on a certain thing like a virtual T shirt on your avatar. In that respect, some of these transactional dynamics might change, but in the world we're living in today, you're absolutely right. And really finding ways for artists to easily use these tools and for fans to easily know about them and access them, that's. That's the name of the game for us right now.
- [19:40]
A
Let's take a break for our chart metric stat of the week. Last weekend, Sabrina Carpenter headlined Weekend two of Coachella, where she was joined on stage by the one and only Madonna Madonna. And Sabrina sang Madonna's hit 1980s song like a Prayer Together on stage, which led me to look at Madonna's metrics, where her numbers have been Stable on Spotify, YouTube and other platforms. But on TikTok she's had some substantial growth, particularly for likes where she has surged by an impressive 43% year over year and now has over 43.9 million likes on the platform. It's another reminder that some of the biggest growth opportunities for established artists to reconnect with younger generations is to build up and put some effort out on TikTok and see what happens. Let's get back to the episode. Let's switch gears a bit. Let's talk about AI. What's SoundCloud's stance right now on AI? What does that balance look like for you all?
- [20:37]
B
Well, first and foremost, we're artists first. It's part of our DNA and we are always going to stick by that. We ensure that through content identification, we are obviously tracking what the content on the platform looks like. Any infringing content or anything that trips trust and safety guardrails is immediately off the platform and we're very focused on that. And that's all in an effort to protect human artistry and folks who are doing this right. And also building tools like a no AI tag so that if an artist is making music without using AI tools like they can make that prominent and have a badge around that and a fan who's interested in creating a playlist that will need that kind of music be able to do that. We want to make sure all those tools are available. All with an eye toward being artist first. Obviously we are never going to train an LLM on artist content on the platform. Like we are focused on using AI to enhance the artist experience and the artist product, make their journey easier, give them more control, more access to tools that let them take that journey and with us and AI products that enhance the fan experience and that we're incredibly excited about. So some of that exists on the platform today. You know I talked about the Getherd strategy and that first fans product. Like we use AI tools to understand a new artist on the platform, their new music and the fans who might like it based on those fans consumption patterns. That is an AI enabled tool that allows us to put an artist and their new music in front of their first fans. Assuming that works, we find them their next fans. So you go from your first thousand to your ten thousand and beyond using these AI tools. That is harnessing AI to empower artists to really be able to do it in terms of music creation. Partnering with ethically trained generative AI companies to help bridge the gap between the creation tools capabilities of those third party partners as part of our member benefits program and bring those artists and that music to SoundCloud to find their fans and take their next step. Really critical thing for us to do. But again it's always with being artist first very much central. And now when I think about what's coming next for creators, you know, we're excited about what AI can do given that kind of core use case for a creator. Creators have come to SoundCloud forever to experiment. I'm going to send this private link to my collaborators and my friends and family and test it out. I'm going to drop this single that's not yet ready for the rest of the world. I'm going to get solicit some fan feedback, see what's in the comments, see what sorts of DMs I get, see what the fan engagement is like. That experimental behavior is 18 years old on the platform. Now when you think about how AI can enhance that experience, that's incredibly exciting for what's coming next for us. So you can imagine an AI producer, an AI coach, an AI co manager who can help an artist test out that single or iterate on that track, or get immediate feedback from fans who are forming around that scene, who can help generate assets, who can do so much of the work. There's so much that artists have to do beyond just the actual creation the music which is their central love and passion, and creating these tools that that AI enhanced can help them is right down the power alley of why artists have come to SoundCloud since our formation. So we're incredibly excited about how I can help real live artists on the creator side of our business and on the fan side of our business. We recruited our new CTO from YouTube Music. He ran personalization, discovery, music intelligence and all the music engineering for for YouTube Music, and he's an AI engineer himself. The ability to bring hyper personalization and curation to SoundCloud fans who are coming for exactly that, they're not coming for that lean back experience. They are virtual crate diggers, they are tastemakers and, and AI can enhance that product and that core use case and revitalizing our home on the app. Every SoundCloud user has different home based on what you're listening to. But to have that AI enhanced curation and personalization based on what you're listening to, what you're skipping, what you're saving, what you're engaging with, your profile on the platform. Starting with that premise of being artists first and ensuring there are all these guardrails to protect artists. We are so excited about how AI is already transforming what the product looks like, let alone how we work. By the way, I worked with our chairman, Fred Wilson, founder of Union Square Ventures, one of the most prominent venture capitalists of our time. I got some great insight from him, which I followed up on to build like a parallel board. And it's an AI board. So I've got my incredible board of shareholders that Fred shares and they're awesome and they've got great conviction about what we're doing and incredibly supportive about where we are as a business, all that. And then I've got this AI board and I've trained a model on the writings and readings and speeches and thinking and careers of a lot of really prominent people who make up my dream board. And those people include some really incredible artists, you know, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Those people include some incredibly successful recording executives like Lucian Grange. Those people include tech executives who have been founders and CEOs of adjacent companies like Figma or Canva or businesses that have grappled with a lot of these dynamics that we're grappling with. This AI board includes some of the most prominent AI executives on the planet. And it includes some creators whose names you might not know. That is free of charge. What I can do is I can test decisions we're going to make and thinking around product features and positioning around the brand or new markets to go into or different ways of thinking about fan monetization tools. That's a whole new resource. I get to leverage these incredible brilliant minds who would be very expensive to go get access to, but I can harness them myself. We just wrapped six weeks of AI coding weeks where half our staff, our ENG staff folks, completely ramped what they are able to do to leverage AI tools to ship faster, play with new ways of developing features and advancing the product. This is so rapidly changing. We're bringing those coding weeks now to our whole staff because we want everybody on our legal team and our people team and our music team and our marketing teams, everybody to be using these tools. If we've got all everybody doing this, People's productivity can be 10x 2025 was a year of significant investment for us. We hired more people than we'd hired in our generation. Really upskilling the talent pool at the company. That was an incredibly important moment of investment for us. And now especially using these AI tools and harnessing all of that talent, we're really focused on delivery and a culture of delivery and performance and growth. If we get that right, I think we're going to be able to provide an even better product for, for our artists and even better product for our fans and help define what that future looks like.
- [27:54]
A
Let's go back to the AI board piece. Fascinating thought.
- [27:59]
B
You might like that.
- [28:00]
A
Let's say Hypothetically there is XYZ PE firm that wants to make a strategic investment in SoundCloud and you have a conversation with human board member Fred Wilson. You have a conversation with the AI version of Billie Eilish and Lucy and Grange. Do you find that those opinions tend to be aligned with what you would expect from knowing some of those people and having conversations with them? Does the human Fred Wilson take precedence because it is the human as opposed to. I'm curious how you navigate.
- [28:34]
B
Yeah, I mean one of, one of the beauties of that AI board is I was able to build it with this really 360 degree set of minds on it. There are folks who founded creator platforms, there are folks who build major consumer brands, there are folks who built International companies, there are folks who've been more focused in the US markets. There are incumbents from a label perspective, big DSP perspective, AI perspective, disruptor perspective, all of it. I can put a decision node in there and see the kind of crystallization of all those perspectives and it just informs what we do. It will never decide what we do. That ultimately is down to the management that's been tasked with running the business and the shareholders who, who we report to. We've got a real live fiduciary responsibility. But I would say that having that 360 degree set of perspectives is just arming ourselves with more information. It's an opportunity to get in everybody's heads in a way. Those tools, while they'll get better over time, aren't perfect, but it's certainly a nice resource to have.
- [29:46]
A
The other.
- [29:47]
B
I put you on my board, Dan. Okay.
- [29:49]
A
And then you can be like, okay, if I actually talk to. Does this line up with what Dan Rutsy would say? You also mentioned how it just makes your company itself more efficient and things you can do that maybe you couldn't do before. There was a recent report from Spotify where one of their co CEOs said that they hadn't written a line of code in months because of what they've been able to do with anthropic products. What does that look like for you on the product side? Is your product and engineering teams written less code than they may have in the past because of what they could do?
- [30:22]
B
Right. And just to ensure that all the listeners are on the same page, it's about, I mean, there's a tremendous amount of code being written. It's just being written by agentic AI software. And we similarly are doing these sorts of things now. And I think that's a major part of why recruiting our CTO last fall over from YouTube was so important for us. Somebody who could very credibly lead this transformation for us. And it's amazing how rapidly that is happening and how rapidly that's moving for us. And so some of that, absolutely internally and being able to work 10 times faster allow engineers to really think more holistically and more strategically rather than just simply writing the code. Different kinds of engineers, more kind of analog engineers, have never had to actually solder the wires together. They developed the architecture and that's what engineering meant. And then somebody else did the soldering. Why necessarily should software engineers have to also be writing the code? It's a huge unlock to be able to have agentic AI do that code Writing so that the software engineers can be thinking about more strategically about that product. It's massive. And then there are also the opportunities around third party partners. For us, we've been really focused on as we've been rebuilding the business these last 18 months and getting so much cleaned up and setting that healthy foundation. Customer service is on that list. We have a third party partner that is helping us to reset how we respond to tickets, especially on the creator side. That is going to be a major change across the next three, six months now that we're leveraging more of these AI tools. Somebody who's not on our ENG team just did a demo two days ago. Having built an AI tool that allows us to monitor Reddit sentiment among our creators, be able to respond to that sentiment in real time and surface concerns people have, whether it's bugs on the platform or other things going on, that's the sort of stuff that gets unlocked here. So if you're a creator who had to wait a day to have a certain something responded to, or God forbid, days and weeks, this is a way that AI is going to enhance that product and experience because you should be getting a response in real time and with a very good success rate. So incredibly excited by the exponential impact. Again, for the purpose of serving our artists and serving our fans.
- [32:38]
A
One thing to close things out. Whenever you and I talk, you're always good for having the big predictions on where things are going. What's your big prediction? You always have one for us. So yeah, where do you think things are going?
- [32:51]
B
I appreciate that. Yeah, I think it was now, several years back, that we had dinner on the Lower east side making predictions about the future. We talked a bit about fandom and fan monetization at the time.
- [33:03]
A
And if I remember yours specifically, you talked about AI and at that point there wasn't as much talk about the amount of tracks that are released on streaming as there are today. But you said something about how there's so many reports about 100,000 tracks being uploaded daily or however many the number was at the time. And you said once these AI tools kick off, that number is going to seem infantile compared to where things are going. Every head around the room was like, ah yes, that makes complete sense. Like that was spot on.
- [33:37]
B
Well, so we've seen that happen. Yeah, definitely. So as I think about the question we're increasingly seeing, especially with Gen Z and young Gen Z, this nostalgia for something real life. So this nostalgia for older brands, not necessarily analog, but sometimes analog, but ultimately I think we're going to be living in two different worlds. One is this hyper technologically advanced environment where AI does so much for us and we can do so much with AI. And then in this other world where we just crave real live experiences. And both of those dynamics, I think really benefit music and artists because artists will be able to do so much more with AI and with the tools and capabilities, but they will also be in a medium and creating content and. And they themselves who will be. They'll be craved for by. By fans who seek to be part of a scene and part of a community and have a real life experience engaging with artists and artistry and music that they love. That trend toward nostalgia is not going to replace or even interfere with the advancement of AI. I think it's going to live side by side and I think that that's going to be really powerful for music and for artists. And then maybe we'll kind of come back to this notion of super fandom and fan monetization which is. I think there's going to be fragmentation. I don't think there's going to be a one stop shop. The things that will matter most for a business, for an artist who's essentially an entrepreneur is having access to fans, access to audience, being able to touch them directly and have the tools to touch them directly to the ability to monetize that, to put monetizable opportunities on top of that, access to create commercial opportunities. And then the third is access to capital to be able to maintain both of those first two things, maintain that access to fans and audience and maintain the ability to develop products, build products that are really useful for both artists and fans. As I think about SoundCloud's position, I'm excited about where we stand in terms of our position to land the third over time for the next long term chapter in our history.
- [35:47]
A
Well, we'll definitely have to circle back for the next conversation.
- [35:50]
B
We have no doubt.
- [35:51]
A
Well, Aliyah, thank you. I appreciate making the time.
- [35:54]
B
Dan, thank you very much. Huge fan of yours in trapital as you know and excited to have been able to be here on the pod. Thank you, thank you.
- [36:04]
A
And that is a wrap for my conversation with Elias Seton. I am still thinking about that AI board of directors. I need to set one of those up myself. Thank you again to Alaia for making the time for this. Thank you to our audio and video producers G and Eric for everything that you do to help make this podcast possible. Thank you to the team at Gotham Podcast Studios for hosting us and most of the Most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy trapital and get a lot out of it, then send them a link to the show. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow and if you have some time, leave a comment, leave a review, let us know what you think of the show that helps the algorithm. Do the right thing and make sure that trapital gets in front of the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time. If you love listening to trapital and want to stay ahead in the world of tech startups and venture capital equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast has the inside scoop. Every Wednesday and Friday. They dive into the stories that matter most, from expert interviews to in depth discussions and roundtable chats with their team of TechCrunch reporters. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking for tips or just curious about what's shaping tomorrow's world, they've got you covered. Tune in to Equity wherever you get your podcasts.