Jennifer Witz0:09
At SiriusXM, our vision is to shape the future of audio where everyone can effortlessly connect to the voices, stories, and music they love wherever they are. The enduring power of audio is centered around its ability to bring people together and to change hearts and minds. It's an innately personal medium. We're at a poignant moment in audio's history and also its future. The beauty of podcasting, which is still so beautiful, is anyone can do it. Audio is so unique in terms of the science, the intimacy, and the connection that it affords. Particularly with science and the way the brain processes sound, it can really impact everything from your mood to your memories, your breathing, or your heart rate. The pace of innovation has just been so rapid over the last two decades, and it's really across two primary areas: it's how we listen that's changed, and it's also how people create. It's just been amazing to see the evolution of how audio is delivered. It's much easier to create, market, and distribute—whether it's music or podcast or a show—and that affords so many opportunities for creators to build audiences. What's really special about SiriusXM is the hosts and the programmers we have who are experts in their fields, they love what they do, they love the genre or category of interest they focus on, and that shows up in the content. That's why listeners have built these real connections with our hosts. It's such a big part of who we are at SiriusXM to make sure that it's humans creating this content, curating it, and bringing it to our audiences.
We're in a world where we're just inundated with so much—headlines, clickbait, fast videos—and there are very few mediums where you get to spend time with the same person for hours a week, week after week, year after year. What we've built in podcasting is a relationship, a relationship with someone who has influence and an audience that is so different. It's the way you talk to your friends and trust their opinions. We've become these surrogate friends for people, and they've watched us grow up and change our minds and learn new things. I always say I don't want to be an influencer; I want to have influence, and I think the way you do that is through authenticity. That's the thing I've really been careful never to lose. So when I think about video for the content we're currently making, I want to give people the same experience that they had listening. We're focusing on our strengths rather than chasing trends. There have been many shifts from audio into video, like we talked about with podcasting, but also shifts into audio from other media—print, news articles, audiobooks. There's a shift into audio that is critical in terms of thinking about what should be audio first. The car is also the final frontier for advertising. There's an opportunity for us, particularly with the strength we have in the car, to provide other ad-supported opportunities within the car in a much more targeted way than AM/FM could. And there's another opportunity to look at creating snackable forms of content within SiriusXM to take advantage of the shift toward shorter form content.
We are using AI in really interesting ways—obviously in a lot of our IT and security—but what we've recently started doing is using AI to help us make the best experience for our listeners. I've always been very focused on the listener experience. We recently started using AI to aggregate the thousands of messages and comments we get after a single episode, and then we ask: what were they saying about this episode? What was the sentiment—positive, negative, neutral? What did they like? What are the elements they're talking about? So we can create a feedback loop into the content, extracting the key themes and what they're responding to positively or negatively.
I think you see this increase of technology and AI in creating content, but we are doubling down on humans creating content. We fundamentally believe people can tell the difference, and that is foundational to the connection that audio provides. Don't just create the thing that you like listening to; find uniqueness. As we keep talking about AI, uniqueness and that human factor is going to continue to be the advantage. For someone new coming in, it's fundamental to what we do every day at SiriusXM: find opportunities to bring storytellers, artists, and musicians to our listener base. One of the things that's really exciting is to be working with great talent like yourself, and have the opportunity to give you a bigger platform and get in front of the SiriusXM audience and our loyal subscribers with different forms of audio that make sense for our service. I think you and I can agree it's a fascinating time to be part of audio, and the future of audio is extremely bright.
