100/264 With access to unprecedented amounts of data and insights, we’re building audiences for every kind of artist at every level of fame and exposing fans to a universe of songs. In this new world, music has no borders. Spotify enables someone in Miami to discover sounds from Madrid. It links immigrants in Boston to songs back home in Bangkok. We’re working to democratize the industry and connect all of us, across the world, in a shared culture that expands our horizons. With a catalog that grows by tens of thousands of new creative works every day, Spotify is like a flywheel. Creators and consumers engage and react to each other, building momentum. These reactions generate even more buzz, which we believe, in turn, fuels even more creativity. Now, we are going to take the lessons we’ve learned in music and apply them across culture. In the future, Spotify will strive to more meaningfully connect people to the cultural experiences they care about—or don’t yet know they care about—to fit the mood and moment they’re in. Today’s creators can collaborate with audiences across time zones. They incorporate video and interactive technology to create new and inspiring art, and more. They release their own work and directly make and reach fans. As we evolve, Spotify will meet creators where they are and empower them with even more tools to do what they love in their own authentic way, and reach even more people. What started out as an application and grew into a platform must now become a global network—one that recognizes and nurtures the interdependent relationships between creators, producers, publishers, labels, fans, and everyone in between. To get there, we need transparency. We need discovery. We need new tools of creativity. Artists’ greatest barriers to success are achieving exposure and earning money. That’s why Spotify wants to create a fair and open market, where fans can support the artists they love and creators can understand how they’re paid and earn a living. Musicians, for example, compete against the entire history of music and a daily flood of new content. The central paradox for fans is that access gives you everything—but everything isn’t enough. Discovery is hard without a compass. Unprecedented choice at an affordable price must come with effective personalization to help audiences navigate a sea of content, and to help artists directly reach a sea of listeners. With the right mix of data insights contextualized by human experts, Spotify reunites fans with old favorites, and lets them discover new ones. We intend to give the creative community the data, technology, and connections to not only make a living but also accelerate the exposure of their work. We believe that these tools we’re building will go far beyond music, building bonds between creators and consumers across every genre and form. And when we get there, the possibilities for culture will completely change. Again. Today, art has an even greater opportunity to be a transformative cultural force. And culture is the force that binds us all—no matter who we are or where we’re from—in a shared human experience. It’s what helps us understand one another across differences. It’s what breaks us out of isolation and brings people together. That’s why, everywhere I go around the world, I see artists finding inspiration across oceans, drawing on sounds born in one part of the world and making them their own—from punk music in Myanmar to rap in Mongolia. This is the future we envision; where artists cross genres and cultural boundaries, creating ideas that propel society forward; where fans can discover something they never would have otherwise; where we’re all part of a global network, building new connections, sharing new ideas, across cultures. We really do believe that we can improve the world, one song at a time. 93