Spotify

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Another week is in wind-down mode. I hope your week was more productive and bountiful than my continued struggle with finding a writing rhythm. Despite my best efforts, I didn’t write much this week. I have been caught between the urgent requirements of work and a nagging (and now prolonged) writer’s block. I have a growing pile of proverbial unfinished posts — thanks mainly to shifting attention from one topic to another. It is an affliction that most of us suffer in today’s hyper-information environment.

I read that a crypto-billionaire is buying a big piece of Forbes’ for about $200 million, just ahead of its public offering. Forbes, where I worked, is not really Forbes, and it is hardly a magazine worth its name. It is nothing more than a marketing site for arrivistes and self-promoters to give themselves some imprimatur. I mean, it published articles from Heather Morgan, one-half of the $4.5 billion crypto-scammers. Weirdly, the dots connect. What was I going to say about this $200 million investment? I thought no matter the source, the new money is always used to buy things from the past — art, buildings, vintage cars, and vintage publications and brands.

Like it said, swimming against the tide of information is hard, and you tend to get swept away. When I mentioned this to my friend Pip Coburn, who is in the investment advisory business, he said when it came to making investing decisions, he doesn’t look at day-to-day gyrations of the stock price of the company he likes. He suggested a similar approach to information consumption — and as a result, I am trying to check Twitter, newsletter subscriptions, and RSS feeds at the end of the day. Hopefully, this would allow me to ruminate on topics and wake up with a spark for writing early in the morning.

The entire week wasn’t a loss. I read some good articles this past week that are worth your time.

February 12, 2022. San Francisco

Worth Reading

  1. The best way to prevent blackouts and save the power grid is by embracing the packetization ideology that is core to the Internet. [IEEE Spectrum]
  2. How Telegram became the anti-Facebook [Wired] This is a good story about chat-app Telegram, though labeling it anti-Facebook is lazy headline writing by the editors at Wired. The story, however, takes a look at the rise of this application and its growth despite the existence of WhatsApp. I was an early adopter, and I have found it to innovate faster than any other chat app.
  3. The rats nest that is the life of the couple that stole $71 million in Bitcoin now worth $4.5 billion. This story is crazy! Vice (Also, this isn’t the first or the last crypto-scam.)
  4. The web starts at page four is short personal reflection by a long time web developer who bemoans the web has morphed into a “consumption machine that creates bubbles and assumes new users to be incapable of making own decisions.” I was nodding my head in agreement when reading this piece.
  5. Why did Microsoft spend $69 billion to buy Activision? One-word: metaverse.
  6. Why Spotify needs Joe Rogan and podcasters. Ironically, the Spotify share price has halved over past 12-months and that makes it an acquisition target for a larger company.
  7. After reading his 24 points, I get a feeling Anil Dash is talking about Spotify, but in fact it applies to pretty much every major “platisher.”

Etc:

Apple now dominates the US headphones business. Talking about headphones, John C Koss, the man who introduced consumers to the idea of using headphones for music, recently passed away at 91.

Oh-oh! Solar storms can not only bring down the satellites but also the entire Internet. Light reading has the details based on research by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California Irvine. The full paper is available here!

Now that it has stopped growing in a few decades, it is very likely that there will be more dead people on Facebook.

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While I was away, Spotify released its annual “Top Songs of the year” list. I quite appreciate this feature from Spotify. Music, at least for me, reflects one’s state of mind, and the list gives you a window into your inner self. My musical tastes were biased towards jazz, blues, and electronica in the past. However, this year, my top songs list is dominated by what one would call “ambient music.” 

An unusually large number of pianists feature on this list, along with the likes of Mary Lattimore and Roger Eno. My top artist of the year is a Japanese musician (saxophonist and pianist) Akira Uchida, and other favorites include Rose Riebl, Nils Frahm, and Brambles. Uchida has 114 listeners on Spotify, which is such a shame. 

Why ambient? And why these artists? And what do they say about the year that was? After a challenging 2020, I thought of 2021 as a year of contemplation, paring down and stripping down life, ambition, and outcomes to bare essentials. Just as in winter, you let a field lay fallow; this is all in preparation for whatever is the next chapter in life for me. 

This continuous elimination of excess — whether it is superfluous ideas, possessions, words, or choices is reflected in my photography and writing (which has become more private and inward-looking.) The musical choices of 2021 created the soundtrack for this contemplation and this discovery process. 

Many of the artists I preferred in 2021 are “minimalists” and allow a handful of instruments to speak in a manner that conveys the feelings. I am grateful they created the music that helped my soul searching so pleasant. 

If you are interested, I created a playlist for your enjoyment. 

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Nothing is more frustrating to me than YouTube, which decides my front page based on my likes. It seems I can’t have multiple interests — variables — and thus, I must watch certain kinds of videos. In its infinite wisdom, Twitter believes that only the people whose content I like or share are the ones whose content I want to consume. And don’t get me started on online dating services — they could learn a thing or two from Sima Taparia. 

And that is because the post-social world of today is starting to coalesce around variables that are less humanistic and more biased towards corporate goals. “We live in a world that demands categorization,” I recently read in a newsletter, Tiny Revolutions. “We have to do some self-definition so the world knows what to do with us, and so that we can bond with others who share our interests, values, and concerns.”

While the writer, Sara Campbell, might have been talking about an individual’s desire not to be categorized, her words accurately describe our post-social society’s reality, dilemma, and futility in a handful of lines. 

Categorization is part of the human condition. Our brain uses categories to help us make sense of a lot of facts we experience. It is how we learn. As humans, we need categories to contextualize our world, and that includes each other. What is more important is the intent behind the categories. 

Categories, as such, have bias by intent. The bias allows us to ignore variables we don’t want to deal with and place boundaries around a category. It’s important because by ignoring them, we have to use fewer cognitive resources. The bias itself is not good or bad. It is the intent that leads you in different directions. That intent determines what variables we focus on and the ones we ‘choose’ to ignore. 

And a lot of that intent is determined by the human condition. For example, if you have grown up in a more traditional society, the category that defines you is your lineage for most of your life. The “intent” of that categorization is to find your place in the social hierarchy. Lineage isn’t a primary variable for Americans, but college and money are. That is why in more modern societies, such as America, the college you attend defines your place in society and the workplace.

Ever wondered why most conversations start with a question: what do you do? That question is not only reflective of our fading art of conversation, and it also is a way for us to define the variables and get a quick context on the person. By doing so, we quickly decide to assign a value-metric to the person who is the recipient of our attention. 

At best, in the pre-Internet world, categorization would rear its head in a social context, often giving us cues on how to engage with someone. An attractive single woman gets a different kind of attention from another woman versus a single man. Given the nature of modern consumerist society, it wasn’t a surprise that the emergence of databases allowed marketers to categorize us into “buckets” of those who may or may not buy some products. After all, the early usage of computers had been catalyzed by the demands from governmental agencies and corporations that wanted to use data to create categories. 

However, in our post-social society, these categories have become even more granular and metastasized. Just take Facebook as an example. School, location, gender, relationships, and many more variables have started to create a profile of us that can be bundled no different than the dastardly collateralized debt obligation (CDO.)

And it isn’t just Facebook that is alone in using so many variables. From online dating services to online marketing to banking, most of them feel both antiseptic and plastic. These data variables are what make up an algorithm whose sole job is categorization. At present, the algorithms are relatively simplistic. They lack the rationality and nuance that comes from social science.

The bigger question is, what if all these data variables picked by companies for their own needs don’t define you or your interests. I suspect all of us be trapped in a data prison — forced to live lives that an invisible black box algorithm will decide what is good for us.  

August 24, 2021, San Francisco

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Spotify continues its global dominance, adding 27 million net subscribers between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, more than any other single service. However, it lost two points of market share over the period because its percentage growth rate trailed that of its leading competitors.

Google was the fastest-growing music streaming service in 2020, growing by 60%, with Tencent second on 40%. Amazon continued its steady trajectory, up 27%, while Apple grew by just 12%.

Google’s YouTube Music has been the standout story of the music subscriber market for the last couple of years, resonating both in many emerging markets and with younger audiences across the globe. The early signs are that YouTube Music is becoming to Gen Z what Spotify was to Millennials half a decade ago.

MIDiA Research

Facebook might be the biggest social platform, but it is on the outs with Gen Z. I wonder if Spotify will find itself in the same place in a few years? Despite owning the iOS and Mac platforms, Apple Music is, at best, an average performer. It would be interesting to see how they eventually do in a few years. In case you are wondering, Others include Deezer, Pandora, Yandex, Netease, Tidal, Qobuz, and more.

Read article on MIDiA Research Blog

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Moon over San Francisco. Made with iPhone 12 Pro Max

While my week has been noticeably quiet here on my internet homestead, it has been quite the opposite for me out in the real world. 

I had to go to the dental surgeon to remove a couple of wisdom teeth that had become nuisances and were putting the entire neighborhood in distress. I recognize that it was a pretty minor procedure, but like any reasonable adult, I am scared shitless of visiting the dentist. I was in a state of panic for two days leading up to the event, unable to sleep and overcome with anxiety. 

On the day of the procedure, it all turned out to be relatively fast and straightforward — thanks in large part to the surgeon, who kept talking to me about photography and his love of Lindorf technical cameras. Of course, now he is a Canon man. (I wonder why the world still insists that dentists prefer Leica.) He gets full marks for keeping my focus on everything but the surgery as he extracted those getting the troublemakers out.

I was back home in just two hours, but that was followed by two days of pain. I used the prescription pills twice, but given their content (Hint: rhymes with “foxy”), I decided to switch to plain vanilla Tylenol. Between the headaches and the jaw aches, not to mention being restricted to eating only soft food, it hasn’t been fun. But I am feeling better today. Almost normal. I am even looking forward to eating a proper lunch. As I eat, I will likely mull over the question that’s been needling me: does wisdom go when the wisdom teeth do? (Let me know what you think, and the funniest answer will get tweeted on my Twitter.) 

One — and maybe the only — positive side effect of the surgery was that it gave me a lot of forced downtime to do a bunch of reading. I was able to get through both my Safari Reading List and my Pocket Reading Lists. I also got a chance to enjoy a handful of movies and some cricket. Given the mediocrity of the New York Yankees, cricket is proving to be a much-needed salve for my bruised baseball fandom. Due to injuries throughout the league, even my fantasy baseball teams are proving to be disappointments.

I wanted to share some gems I found on the Internet this week while laid out in bed, struggling to will away my aches and pains. These are some perfect time wasters:

Finally, here is what I said on Twitter this week: 

July 22: Washington often conflates “building more infrastructure” with “resilient infrastructure,” a risky proposition in a networked society, argues @ratulm of @intentionet, part of @trueventures community. @SenatorLujan should talk to experts like Ratul.

July 21: A team at Duke University implanted a new-generation artificial heart in a man, the first such procedure in North America. It is an implantable prosthetic that includes biological valves derived from bovine tissue & operates on an external power supply. https://buff.ly/36Rk6FK

July 20:  I wonder if Freud secretly haunts the corridors of Apple’s offices: space autocorrects to SPAC. 

July 19:  We live in a world where you have to (proverbially) scream to get attention & credit for your efforts. It is important to own your narrative. 

Jul 24, 2021, San Francisco 

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Happy Sunday, everyone! I have slowly (and unintentionally) slipped into “summer mode.” I have been working only a little and reading quite a lot. Last week, I also met Ken Kocienda, a former Apple software engineer and designer, to talk about art, life, photography, and watches. 

I didn’t spend as much time on Twitter (either perusing or tweeting), so there isn’t a “Tweek” wrap-up for the week. But several articles caught my eye that I probably would have tweeted, and here they are: 

Vinyl Is More Popular Than Ever. Surprisingly, That’s a Problem

During the pandemic, vinyl sales in the U.S. exploded, growing 28.7% in 2020 to $626 million, even beating out CD revenues of $483 million. Vinyl sales have been growing steadily over the years. Everyone (and I mean everyone) is making and selling vinyl records, including Target and Walmart. The annual demand for vinyl is between 320-400 million albums, while the total manufacturing capacity is 160 million albums per year. That is a problem for small labels. And to think, we are in the golden age of streaming — even hi-res streaming! By the way, streaming revenues were up 13.4% to $10.1 billion in 2020.

Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web – Jorge Arango

Indeed, the bad old days of browser wars and conflicting corporate interests are back. 

NFT sales volume surges to $2.5 bln in 2021 first half 

Yes, crypto is hot. NFT is hotter. So is the planet. 

You really need to quit Twitter.

You might have already read this article. It is excellent writing and a good post for everyone to share. It was hard, but I got off Facebook and Instagram, and I even managed to limit my Twitter usage to less than 30 minutes a day. If you are a grown-up (like the author of this piece seems to be), you need to know how to exercise self-control and fight off the addictive tendencies that drive so much social media usage. 

Individuals Now Spend More Time On TikTok Than YouTube, Facebook, Netflix

In a recent report, App Annie, a mobile research and analytics company, points out that the average U.S. android user spent 24.5 hours per month on TikTok, compared with 22 hours on YouTube and 17.5 hours on Facebook. Like I’ve said before, TikTok is coming for YouTube in a big way. 

So Much Money Everywhere

Dan Primack notes many all-time records set in techlandia during the first half of 2021: 

  • VC dollars invested: $288bn 
  • VC dollars invested in U.S. startups: $140bn 
  • Startups sold: $232bn 
  • 410 companies went public (Thanks, SPACs) 
  • 5,248 PE/VC funds looking for $900bn

[Actually, I did tweet this one 🙂 ]

Walkover

I didn’t think the principled India of 1974 described in this article ever existed. That’s just one thing that makes this story so incredible. 

July 11, 2021, San Francisco

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Twitter is going the way of subscriptions in 2021 — after buying Revue, the company today snapped up Scroll for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is a smart move — it allows Twitter to play to its strengths — media and media distribution. 

Scroll is a prix fixe media buffet –for $5 a month, readers can view articles, ad-free, from about 300 odd media outlets. The $5 a month subscription is then shared with the publishers. Good idea, but as Scroll founder Tony Haile points out in his blog post announcing the deal, “we’re not moving fast enough.” 

A lot has to do with the media industry and its bureaucratic disfunction. The fact remains that destination viewing of media is becoming a habit only reserved for a fading generation of readers. Discovery, distribution, and consumption of media have taken on a different meaning. And believe it or not — Twitter is smack in the middle of this Venn diagram. 

Twitter, just by incorporating Scroll, can increase its footprint and impact on the media business.

Last year, I wrote a piece — What Twitter could learn from Spotify. In my piece, I outlined a strategy that would help Twitter reinvent itself but also help provide a vital lifeline for not only establishment media but also independent creators. But in doing so, I reasoned that 

Twitter has to be “willing to rethink its entire core application, jettison the past,” and only then can it “create a more relevant, robust, and financially rewarding future.” (I don’t want to repeat myself, so you are better off reading the earlier piece at your leisure.) 

With Spaces, Revue, and now Scroll, Twitter has started to think different — though if it will be enough for the company to regain its mojo, remains to be seen. It seems the newest recruit, Scroll CEO Tony Haile, does see the bigger picture.

“When you see Spaces, Revue or Scroll, you see Twitter focused on expanding, not encroaching on the value it helps others to create,” he writes on the Scroll blog. “Twitter is marching to the beat of a different drum and knows success will come from a bigger pie not a larger slice.”

In his post announcing the deal, he points out what makes Twitter unique compared to every other big platform — read Facebook. 

“For every other platform, journalism is dispensable. If journalism were to disappear tomorrow their business would carry on much as before,” Haile writes. “Twitter is the only large platform whose success is deeply intertwined with a sustainable journalism ecosystem.” 

And he is right — it is not just journalism in the classic sense. Journalism, as we have known, is changing. Twitter can’t fall into the trap of the media’s past and almost always lean into the future. Whether it is live conversations, podcasts, video streams, photos, newsletters, everything that is media can benefit from Twitter’s taking a cue from that other content company, Spotify. 

PS: Being very self-referential today, I dug up this little piece from 2012: 

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information I have always believed that we’ve got to stop thinking of media as what it was and focus on more of what it could be. In the world of plenty, the only currency is attention and attention is what defines “media.” Zynga is fighting Hollywood for attention (and winning). Instagram is taking moments away from other media. They have attention. There are old companies that are dying and new ones that are being invented. 
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What do Nils Frahm, Anne Mueller, Jeannie Schulz, Mary Lattimore and Atli Örvarsson have in common? They are among three dozen artists whose albums I bought last year from Bandcamp, an Oakland, CA-based music service. It was my way of supporting these artists. As I wrote earlier, “we need to figure out how much we value the music and the musicians,” so that “we can use our dollars to encourage them to keep creating.”

And I am not alone. 800,000 customers spent $48.3 million on what Bandcamp calls Bandcamp Fridays — every first Friday of the month, Bandcamp forgoes the 15 percent cut of the digital sales (and 10 percent cut of the physical sales.) All money goes to the artists. Bandcamp Fridays started as a one-off feature on March 20, 2020, it has become a regular feature. In a year since the company has sent $148 million to the artists.

Their success is finally getting the attention it deserves. It has taken almost a year for the media to notice Bandcamp’s progress. There is a fantastic article in Billboard, and of course, much better is an NPR conversation with the co-founder and CEO of the company, my dear friend, Ethan Diamond. Shawn Grunberger is the co-founder and chief technology officer.

Bandcamp is the antithesis of streaming. The company’s value metric is based on helping smaller and independent artists create a way forward for themselves. In comparison, someone like Spotify’s north star metric is time spent on the platform. I am not saying Spotify (or any other streaming platform) isn’t essential — their clever use of machine learning and algorithmic discovery, access to music across devices, and all platforms make them worth using. 

The reality is that we are all addicted to convenience — and streaming platforms make it damn convenient for us to not think about the artists and how they manage to survive. As streaming becomes more pervasive, the sad reality is that every track, every artist, every album is reduced to just data, served up by the algorithm. It only continues to devalue our emotional relationship with the creators.  

For now, the least we can do is fight the good fight and support what you value — by buying music. It is way better than sending tips to artists via PayPal, as Spotify suggests as a way of support. That, to me, feels like digital panhandling, but that’s just me. Even if you listen to it on other platforms, buying music is a better way of expressing your fandom. 

Did you know that Nils Frahm has a new album, Graz? It is worth buying. 

Disclosure: * Bandcamp is backed by True Ventures, where I am a partner.