Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to this week's edition of the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast, not recorded live at the tune In
Speaker 1: studio in Venice, California, but if the Music Media Summit
Speaker 1: in Santa Barbara, California, back in May. My guest this
Speaker 1: week is Steve Boom, who's head of Amazon Music. The
Speaker 1: fact that you may not be familiar with his name,
Speaker 1: you're certainly familiar with the Amazon Music. You should check
Speaker 1: this out because it's a stealth operation and it's got
Speaker 1: a lot of customers. You should know what's going on. So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, Steve Boom is the Music Media Summit.
Speaker 1: Last time I got together with Stevie was so formal
Speaker 1: that I thought that was his image. Now we's so
Speaker 1: relaxed after we evaluate my perception. Anyway, we were at
Speaker 1: lunch and a friend of ours, the Worse for Concord Music,
Speaker 1: which now owns Razor and Tie, said that the number
Speaker 1: one streams music on your service is kids Bob. Is
Speaker 1: that correct? No? Uh, because I said it was Garth Brooks. Uh.
Speaker 1: Kids Bob's pretty up there. Okay, Uh, so's Garth Um.
Speaker 1: I think our service the number one artists I have
Speaker 1: to check, but most recently was Bruno Mars. Okay, stop
Speaker 1: is up there. We have a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 1: when you have an inexpensive device. A lot of people
Speaker 1: have put Echo dots in their kids rooms, and we
Speaker 1: family has always been a really important part of the
Speaker 1: Amazon customer base. So UM, I think we make up
Speaker 1: the converse of that, though, is true. I'm sure that
Speaker 1: we're the number one streamer four kids bop. If I
Speaker 1: looked across the different streaming services, I think that would
Speaker 1: be a runaway. Well. If you look at Spotify, where
Speaker 1: all everything is totally you can see the Spotify Top
Speaker 1: fifty very dominated by urban music. Okay, and Apple does
Speaker 1: not stop trumpeting how they're breaking records with their urban streams.
Speaker 1: Rumor has it that the complexion of music on Amazon
Speaker 1: that people listening to is different. Is that correct? That's
Speaker 1: not a rumor, that's fact. Absolutely. Um. If you look
Speaker 1: at if you just look at our charts, you would
Speaker 1: see a much greater diverse profile of listening. Um. Urban
Speaker 1: is important to our streaming service, like every other streaming service.
Speaker 1: It's kind of strange to kind of cran my neck
Speaker 1: here a little, but you'd see a much greater blend
Speaker 1: you'd see a lot of country songs, you te rock,
Speaker 1: you t pop, um, if you go down past the
Speaker 1: top fifty you might even see a classical track or
Speaker 1: two after Really yeah, Um, so you know it's it's
Speaker 1: it is very different. I think when we see who
Speaker 1: our customers are, you know, and we compare that to
Speaker 1: the charts and the other services, we feel pretty confident
Speaker 1: in saying that, you know, we're reaching new segments of
Speaker 1: the of the of the streaming addressable market and bringing
Speaker 1: those people into paid streaming. And a lot of people
Speaker 1: don't know a lot about Amazon, you zick. So if
Speaker 1: you have the Amazon Prime, what can you listen to?
Speaker 1: If you listen? If you have Amazon Prime, you get
Speaker 1: a catalog of about two million songs, But you get
Speaker 1: two of the three major companies for all three majors.
Speaker 1: Or you get all three majors. Now, when did the
Speaker 1: third major come on board? Oh gosh, two and a
Speaker 1: half three years ago, Yeah, quite a while ago. Um,
Speaker 1: you get all three majors most indies. Um, but it's
Speaker 1: a limited catalog. So you know, we launched Prime Music,
Speaker 1: and the whole premise back then was you have to
Speaker 1: remember dial back right. Spotify was much much smaller. Apple
Speaker 1: Music didn't exist. There was a bunch of startups who
Speaker 1: were offering ten dollars a month, and we knew we wanted,
Speaker 1: we needed to be in streaming. But we also knew
Speaker 1: from our own music store that back in very very
Speaker 1: few people were actually spending anything close to twenty dollars
Speaker 1: a year, which is what ten dollars a month adds
Speaker 1: up to. In fact, the bottom of our customers, we're
Speaker 1: spending about fifteen dollars a year a year, right, So
Speaker 1: our idea behind Prime Music was, let's put out let's
Speaker 1: give these people a lot of music. They're more casual
Speaker 1: music listeners, but let's take out all that friction that
Speaker 1: we talked to people. What do you not like about
Speaker 1: the free music services. I don't like the ads, I
Speaker 1: don't like the fact that I can't take it offline.
Speaker 1: I don't like the fact that I can have limited
Speaker 1: on my limited skips and all that stuff. So the
Speaker 1: idea behind Prime Music was, let's make a music service
Speaker 1: for everybody else because at the time, the only people
Speaker 1: who were interested in ten dollars a month. And the
Speaker 1: market has totally moved since then, um, but back then
Speaker 1: it was it was very It was a small sliver
Speaker 1: of people who wanted ten dollars a month, probably everyone
Speaker 1: in this room, but you guys aren't representative of the
Speaker 1: average consumer. And you know, out of the gate, the
Speaker 1: whole industry misunderstood it, um, but consumers didn't because it
Speaker 1: was adopted really really quickly. And yeah, so that and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of curation involved. You know, we have
Speaker 1: a team so that routine. How would you see the
Speaker 1: market today, Um, there's definitely been so that that whole
Speaker 1: segment still exists and is still growing rapidly. Um. And
Speaker 1: we always got to remember that of the US population
Speaker 1: or any other population historically hasn't spent anything on music
Speaker 1: Lettleon ten bucks a month. Um, there's two. There's just
Speaker 1: there's There's always been tress or radio, There's always been
Speaker 1: almost always been cable music choice and YouTube and all
Speaker 1: these other alternatives. Um. So that's still growing. But what
Speaker 1: seems to have happened in the last three years is
Speaker 1: a shift in mentality among consumers. I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's this greater awareness of how what a great value
Speaker 1: ten bucks a month really is for all that music.
Speaker 1: I think I think Netflix and Hulu and all these
Speaker 1: other services have helped. Right, people are used to subscribing
Speaker 1: to things and not thinking that as I'm paying for music,
Speaker 1: but I'm paying for entertainment. I think devices like the
Speaker 1: Echo UM lower the barrier because it's something you use
Speaker 1: so frequently and it's frictionless. And so we see that.
Speaker 1: You know, the projections that existed for the size of
Speaker 1: the ten dollar month market, um, you know those were
Speaker 1: those are wrong now. I mean, it's clear that the
Speaker 1: market's grown more quickly than anyone anticipated. And if the
Speaker 1: percentage is on your service you have baked into Amazon
Speaker 1: prompt you're not being charged per month you have are
Speaker 1: to listen on an Echo, you have essentially a ten
Speaker 1: dollar program to listen to Alla, Spotify, Apple Music. How
Speaker 1: do the subscribers or the listeners breakdown amongst those three choices? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so the three is really the same. It's
Speaker 1: we have two services, Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited.
Speaker 1: Prime is a limited catalog unlimited, as the name might suggest,
Speaker 1: a full catalog service. UM. But one of the innovations
Speaker 1: that we had was at launches, say, you know, can
Speaker 1: we we think the Echo is incomplete without a full
Speaker 1: catalog of music service. If you've ever used one. You've
Speaker 1: got an intelligent assistant. You want to ask her anything
Speaker 1: you know. And the analogy I always give people's imagine
Speaker 1: if you said, hey, Alexa, you know what's the weather
Speaker 1: in Santa Barbara and she'd say, well, I'm sorry, the
Speaker 1: weather in Santa Barbara is not included with your prime membership.
Speaker 1: I only have the weather in San Francisco and Seattle.
Speaker 1: Not a great experience, and so we are. We've always
Speaker 1: felt that for that device where it has no screen
Speaker 1: where you can ask her anything, she's intelligent and always
Speaker 1: getting more intelligent and you so you expect her to
Speaker 1: be able to give you what you want. That it
Speaker 1: demands a full catalog, and we took the approach of
Speaker 1: saying went to the labels and said, you know, we
Speaker 1: think there's a real opportunity here. Two for the first
Speaker 1: time have what a lot of people called a mid
Speaker 1: tier service, but not a dumb down service. It's a
Speaker 1: full catalog, has all the features and functionality. The one
Speaker 1: limitations that you're restricted to that single device. Um, but
Speaker 1: it is Amazon Music Limit. There's abolutely nothing different about
Speaker 1: it except that you can only play on that one echo. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's been really successful for us, and we've seen a
Speaker 1: pretty significant percentage of people who come on to that
Speaker 1: on ramp leave and go to the full price plan,
Speaker 1: whether an individual planks that would listen on their phone
Speaker 1: or a family plan because they might have multiple echoes
Speaker 1: and they like to have concurrent streams. Um. So Prime
Speaker 1: Music has been around. To answer your question more directly,
Speaker 1: I mean the Prime Music has been around for four years.
Speaker 1: Next in the month, next month, next in June. Amazon
Speaker 1: Music and Limited been around for eighteen months. Um. You
Speaker 1: know it's it's uh, not quite fifty fifty, but it's
Speaker 1: it's getting close. Um. And so Amazon Music Limb is
Speaker 1: growing really really fast. Um, and Prime Music continues to
Speaker 1: grow faster than Prime. So we're pretty happy there too. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back. You don't come from the music business,
Speaker 1: Uh No, although lass six and a half years I do. Okay.
Speaker 1: So for we always like to get where someone's coming from.
Speaker 1: We've discussed before. But for the people who are not here,
Speaker 1: you grow up a lot of places. I was born
Speaker 1: in New Jersey, grew up overseas and in New Jersey,
Speaker 1: um until I was twelve, and then moved to Houston, Texas. Uh,
Speaker 1: my parents are immigrants from Belgium, and so I spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time in Europe growing up, and uh
Speaker 1: then came out to California for college. And you know
Speaker 1: my adult life, have lived a bunch more places, so
Speaker 1: a bit all over. But after college you went to
Speaker 1: law school, yep, I did. And when you went to
Speaker 1: law school, what was your intention relative to practicing. So
Speaker 1: my original plan, because I was an engineering guy. I
Speaker 1: was an electrical engineer in college as well as a
Speaker 1: history major. And you know, the life plan was, oh,
Speaker 1: go work as an engineer for a few years, go
Speaker 1: get an m b A and do that. And I
Speaker 1: did work as an engineer for Compact Computer. If anybody
Speaker 1: remembers that brand, um, yeah, there's enough people my agent here,
Speaker 1: I certainly remember. Was I mean, I just was addressing Uh.
Speaker 1: I was Amazon's got a small offense in Santa Barbara,
Speaker 1: and I was going to talk to the people there
Speaker 1: before coming here, and I was like, I think I'm
Speaker 1: twenty years older than every single person in this room.
Speaker 1: But I realized I didn't really enjoy being an engineer,
Speaker 1: so I decided to go to law school. So the
Speaker 1: plan was always go practiced for a few years, but
Speaker 1: just take a different path to the same end point,
Speaker 1: which is to to get into the business world in
Speaker 1: one way or another. And what kind of law did
Speaker 1: you practice? Uh? Corporate law starting in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: And that was miserable. And then UM moved back out
Speaker 1: to northern California and met at my five year college
Speaker 1: reunion a partner in a very small tech law firm,
Speaker 1: and UH, by the end of launch, I was ready
Speaker 1: to come out and started there the day that Yahoo
Speaker 1: went public and it was in this company. This law
Speaker 1: firm represented Yahoo. It's a very exciting day at that
Speaker 1: law firm is one of you know, that was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the Internet. UM Netscape had gone public six
Speaker 1: months or year prior, and it was just a crazy,
Speaker 1: crazy time. So I worked with startups for about two
Speaker 1: and a half three years. And what did you actually
Speaker 1: do as the lawyer? UM? A variety of things. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you do finance work, work with the venture
Speaker 1: capitalists to raise money, take companies public, two mergers. But
Speaker 1: the fun stuff that we did was actually we really
Speaker 1: kind of acted as their outsourced general counsel, you know,
Speaker 1: because those are small companies. They may have money in
Speaker 1: the bank from Sequoia or one of these big vcs.
Speaker 1: But um so when it came to doing partnerships commercial
Speaker 1: partnerships with people, um we would get involved at a
Speaker 1: much earlier stage than you would normally associate with the
Speaker 1: law a legal team. Normally it's like, hey, we've negotiated
Speaker 1: a deal paper it. Uh, that's not how we worked.
Speaker 1: We were in there a lot of the guys and
Speaker 1: this was the early days of the Internet, A lot
Speaker 1: of the guys that were the busines, dev guys, the
Speaker 1: business own guys that these companies. I didn't know crap,
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about the Internet. No one did.
Speaker 1: But we actually knew more just because you know, we
Speaker 1: would represent ten companies, you would see ten things. All
Speaker 1: these people were straight out of business school and they
Speaker 1: were just in their little lane with their one company.
Speaker 1: So we got involved very early in hand in hand
Speaker 1: it was. It was a lot of fun. So you
Speaker 1: enjoyed that as opposed to working in Washington, d C. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it until I realized the learning curve started
Speaker 1: to flatten out, you know, and thinking any job you
Speaker 1: probably look up and say that the people you work
Speaker 1: for do I want to be that person? And as
Speaker 1: people I was would be happy to be them. They
Speaker 1: were really nice guys, but I didn't want to be
Speaker 1: in their job. I didn't want to be a partner
Speaker 1: at that firm. So, so how'd you segue into your
Speaker 1: next role? I reached out to some clients, and so
Speaker 1: you were actively looking to get out? Yeah, I decided
Speaker 1: I had one of those moments. I still remember it.
Speaker 1: I was at a wedding of a friend of mine
Speaker 1: back east, and uh, I was flying back with my
Speaker 1: now wife and we're sitting watching a movie and I
Speaker 1: just I wasn't watching the movie. My brain was just
Speaker 1: going a mile a minute. And I remember just out
Speaker 1: blurting out, I'm done. And she looked at me, she
Speaker 1: what'd you say? I said, I'll tell you later watch
Speaker 1: the movie. Um. Yeah, I just had one of those
Speaker 1: moments where like, I'm I don't want to do this anymore,
Speaker 1: And so I started reaching out to clients. Now at
Speaker 1: the time, was your soon to be wife. Was she working?
Speaker 1: So was there any issue of economic instability or you
Speaker 1: say I'm not leaving the law until I find another thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't leave until I found a job
Speaker 1: that was a lesson my My father taught me. It's like,
Speaker 1: I've got more leverage if you're still working. So okay,
Speaker 1: So you reach out your clients. What do you find
Speaker 1: a lot of interests, UM and I, you know, I
Speaker 1: talked to both startups and then I talked to Yahoo.
Speaker 1: And Yahoo at that time was a newly public startup. Basically, um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's hard a lot of people here are
Speaker 1: old enough to remember, but it was the hottest company
Speaker 1: in the world bar none. Um and UH. They were
Speaker 1: looking for someone at the time. They're starting to expand
Speaker 1: in Europe and they Europe generally was a couple of
Speaker 1: years behind the US from an Internet accepting except in Scandinavia,
Speaker 1: but in Maine, you know, Big five was kind of
Speaker 1: behind the US, and so there weren't They've been looking
Speaker 1: and it couldn't find anyone. And they're looking for someone
Speaker 1: to run business development, and uh, I have a European
Speaker 1: background and and and so that helped, and they said,
Speaker 1: do you want to give it a shot? And like,
Speaker 1: if you'll give a shot on me, I'll take it.
Speaker 1: And so we moved to London. And so if you're
Speaker 1: moving in London, you're you know, eight time zones away,
Speaker 1: so one would think you're pretty much running your own show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get a lot of autonomy. Um, you know, you
Speaker 1: you spend a lot of time back in California the
Speaker 1: company of that age, and doing business to all means
Speaker 1: like doing partnerships that doesn't mean selling advertising means like
Speaker 1: product type integrations, right and which means you need engineering support,
Speaker 1: which happens in California. So you spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time on Uh just say you get you get a
Speaker 1: lot of phone calls when you're ready to go to
Speaker 1: bed from people, right, and then you're bringing his firing
Speaker 1: and you can't go exactly, So I supposed loved it.
Speaker 1: It was a great four years in London and ultimately
Speaker 1: a success or a frustration in terms of executing on
Speaker 1: your role. Oh it was great. No, there were frustrations,
Speaker 1: but I haven't had a job that doesn't have frustrations.
Speaker 1: So but the net, the net output was great. And
Speaker 1: when you were done four years later, our Yang and
Speaker 1: his original partners still in charge. Oh yeah, yeah, Well
Speaker 1: Jerry was there when I left the company. He he
Speaker 1: had just become CEO. Um, we were at our second
Speaker 1: CEO and said Tim Coogel was the original CEO of
Speaker 1: of Yahoo and then Terry Simul had joined while I
Speaker 1: was based in London. Okay, so how do you decide
Speaker 1: we're at the end of Yahoo. Well, first they brought
Speaker 1: me back, got promoted, did a bunch of other things,
Speaker 1: spent I spent totally ten years there, first forward in London.
Speaker 1: Then I may maybe I misunderstood, I forgot. So the
Speaker 1: next six years, when you're back in the valley, what
Speaker 1: is your role? It evolved to be head of UM
Speaker 1: Mobile effectively, so I was the s VP of Mobile
Speaker 1: to date myself. This was mostly in the feature phone era.
Speaker 1: We did a lot of J two me apps, We
Speaker 1: used whap browsers. Um. Uh, it's like getting flashbacks. Um.
Speaker 1: The I left Yahoo two months after the app store launched. Okay,
Speaker 1: so so we were but we were there on Jerry
Speaker 1: was on stage with Steve when the iPhone launched. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who was a big part of that launch. UM Yahoo
Speaker 1: Mail was embedded in the service and to the Yahoo
Speaker 1: the stocks and weather apps, though they were called widgets
Speaker 1: back then by Apple. We're all powered by Yahoo. So, um,
Speaker 1: what's when we knew the world had changed? Like the
Speaker 1: first day when iPhones actually hit the market in June
Speaker 1: two thousand seven. You may remember this, but they went
Speaker 1: on sale at six pm, but six pm and each
Speaker 1: time zone. So we sat in California, they were on
Speaker 1: sale in New York on the East coast, and we
Speaker 1: just sat with the engineers and just watched the data
Speaker 1: of people using it, and it just it blew us
Speaker 1: away because you know, you were like for years the
Speaker 1: perennial question that someone to ask you. It's probably similar
Speaker 1: to what was going on streams, Like you could take
Speaker 1: this story and apply to streaming. But every year, you know,
Speaker 1: you have your business plan review and Jerry Yang or
Speaker 1: Terry selling, when is mobile actually finally going to be big?
Speaker 1: And you're like, it's two years away? Every years, two years.
Speaker 1: The analogy I always use is digital photography. We heard
Speaker 1: for ten years the digital photography is going to come
Speaker 1: in and kill Kodak, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: one year it happened everything and it's like wow, And
Speaker 1: when iPhone happened and we and we had you know,
Speaker 1: we've seen blackberries were the most used devices for mobile
Speaker 1: internet then, but they were really horrible for mobile internet.
Speaker 1: You know, they weren't designed for it, but but most
Speaker 1: people had them were being their companies were paying for
Speaker 1: their data, so you'd use it anyway. And then iPhone
Speaker 1: came in and despite their being you know how many
Speaker 1: few devices actually went online that day is like these
Speaker 1: spikes and we all sat around like the world changed,
Speaker 1: changed forever, and that, by the way, it's what changed
Speaker 1: for music as well. I mean the iPhone smartphones are
Speaker 1: really the foundation of a streaming of the streaming evolution
Speaker 1: over the last ten years. Okay, looking at Yahoo which
Speaker 1: has now been sold, what's it savable? And if it
Speaker 1: was savable, what should they have done differently? Was it savable?
Speaker 1: I don't think it was by the time. By the
Speaker 1: time it got to that point, I think Yahoo suffered.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that attracted me about coming
Speaker 1: to Amazon, um it never had the kind of visionary CEO.
Speaker 1: Jerry is an amazing guy, for he's never the CEO,
Speaker 1: never wanted to be, and he was only when he
Speaker 1: was forced to because there was no one else who
Speaker 1: wanted the job. Um he's an amazing guy, and uh
Speaker 1: had a good had a really good vision, but he
Speaker 1: he wasn't the CEO that could just galvanize the whole
Speaker 1: company behind it. And and yeah, who got stuck. Are
Speaker 1: we a media company or a technology company? And it
Speaker 1: was never never land Um had it decided that years before?
Speaker 1: Perhaps savable, but I think by the time Jerry became CEO,
Speaker 1: I don't think it was. And you could see look
Speaker 1: at the succession of CEOs after that, they all followed
Speaker 1: despite saying they were doing a new strategy, was pretty
Speaker 1: much the same strategy. And Terry Summel big mistake or
Speaker 1: nothing he could done. I love Terry, Terry is a
Speaker 1: great guy. I don't want to I'm not here to talk,
Speaker 1: you know. No, It's just interesting because we see this
Speaker 1: in the music business, both famously with Andy lack Now
Speaker 1: I was back in the news business. Came in and
Speaker 1: he really didn't understand the business. So we look at
Speaker 1: Terry Semmel, who came from enter Tinman. Was he a
Speaker 1: fish out of water and really did not understand the
Speaker 1: technology business? Um. You know, I think they're probably people
Speaker 1: who are in better position to answer that than me.
Speaker 1: To be honest with you, I didn't work that closely
Speaker 1: with Terry Um. I was off kind of doing my
Speaker 1: own thing in mobile and he was okay. So you
Speaker 1: wake up one day on a plane and say I'm
Speaker 1: done at Yahoo. Uh. It was coming for a while
Speaker 1: longer than that. You know, the company got bigger, and UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know, just I kind of had an itch
Speaker 1: to go do something smaller. I think politics had changed
Speaker 1: in the company. It wasn't as fun as it once was.
Speaker 1: Um and uh I kind of waited around, you know,
Speaker 1: because I remember Microsoft bid for Yahoo and a hostile
Speaker 1: takeover thing, and then carl Icon got involved. And that
Speaker 1: was a moment where you like, I never thought I'd
Speaker 1: worked for a company that carl Icon was making a
Speaker 1: bid for it. Just it just it was time. It
Speaker 1: was time to do something different. And the next step
Speaker 1: was so I went to a couple of different startups.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to be CEO of something, and so
Speaker 1: I went to one company that I stayed in the
Speaker 1: mobile world, and it was a social networking app that
Speaker 1: had taken off. I was on feature phones and um
Speaker 1: that was it was called meg thirty three, and you know,
Speaker 1: Android was almost non existent at this point. This is
Speaker 1: now fall of two eight, Um and Uh. It had
Speaker 1: taken off in places like Indonesia, India, Malaysia, a little
Speaker 1: bit in South Africa, and we ended up moving the
Speaker 1: company to Singapore because it was just I didn't move
Speaker 1: with it. Um. Well, it was the motivation. It was
Speaker 1: impossible to run a company in that part of the
Speaker 1: world from California. It was just happenstance that the customers
Speaker 1: were there. The r poo's out of those customers don't
Speaker 1: support California engineering costs. Um, you're not close. You know.
Speaker 1: The thing is, none of our engineers are. Probably people
Speaker 1: really used the product because it was a social networking thing.
Speaker 1: They're all on Facebook and there, so they don't know
Speaker 1: their own product in a way that you can only
Speaker 1: know you in the internet. If you don't, if you're
Speaker 1: not close to your customer, you're just not gonna have
Speaker 1: a successful service. And uh so it started to languish
Speaker 1: in terms of product innovation, so we decided to move
Speaker 1: it there. It ultimately Um that company ultimately got listed
Speaker 1: on the Australian Exchange and then got bought out and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what's going on with it, and kept
Speaker 1: up with it, um. And then I went to another
Speaker 1: company called Looped, which was one of the original apps
Speaker 1: around social location sharing and social location sharing, which ultimately
Speaker 1: got sold. Um. You know the name of that was
Speaker 1: that was looped l O O P T. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: ultimately got sold. Um mainly that the company had its
Speaker 1: moment in the sun, like internet companies do or consumer
Speaker 1: companies do, and they either kind of continue on that
Speaker 1: trajectory they flat line, it started to flat line, and
Speaker 1: it got it got bought out, primarily for the tech
Speaker 1: talent that was in the company. That's an Amazon called.
Speaker 1: We'll take a quick break and come back with more
Speaker 1: of my conversation with VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom,
Speaker 1: recorded live at the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara,
Speaker 1: California this week. I'm speaking with Steve Boom. Over the
Speaker 1: last couple of months, I've interviewed the lead singer of
Speaker 1: Free and Bad Company, Paul Rodgers, and social media expert
Speaker 1: at U t A. Kendall Lostro. We try to provide
Speaker 1: a balance of entertaining and informative content for you here
Speaker 1: on the Bob Left Steps podcast. Be the first to
Speaker 1: hear next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast on
Speaker 1: tune in, Apple Podcast or your podcast Apple choice. While
Speaker 1: you're there, please rate and review the podcast. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: get back to my conversation with Steve Boom, Amazon called
Speaker 1: you what was the gig they were looking for you
Speaker 1: to fill. Well, it's kind of a funny story, um,
Speaker 1: at least for me. Uh. They called said, well, we're
Speaker 1: starting to invest heavily in digital media. This is two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven and so um the Prime Video service had
Speaker 1: only recently launched and the Amazon Cloud locker had just
Speaker 1: recently launched and I and I remember reading about that
Speaker 1: because it caused a bit of kerfuffle in the industry
Speaker 1: because it was unlicensed, and I think that's why it
Speaker 1: made all the tech news. And they said, look, we're
Speaker 1: we're investing in digital media. We're looking for some executives
Speaker 1: to come build this out. And I said, well, you
Speaker 1: can see from my LinkedIn that I don't have any
Speaker 1: background in music or video. And the answer was, yes,
Speaker 1: that's probably that's probably not a bad thing. And their
Speaker 1: view was, you know, at a company like Amazon, you know,
Speaker 1: your traditional music industry exactly, the hit rate was going
Speaker 1: to be low for them to succeed at a company
Speaker 1: like Amazon. Um, they really wanted someone more with a
Speaker 1: more tech background because that the roles involved running engineering
Speaker 1: teams and product teams and someone maybe came from a
Speaker 1: more data driven background. And so what was your were
Speaker 1: your responsibilities when you finally got the gig and went
Speaker 1: into the building. Well before I joined, I thought it
Speaker 1: was gonna be all of music, including physical music. Um.
Speaker 1: But I had dinner with my boss a month before
Speaker 1: I joined, said, Hey, I just won't let you know.
Speaker 1: There's a re orc coming. The company's gonna split out,
Speaker 1: split the physical and digital businesses altogether, not just in music,
Speaker 1: but across the board. Just realize how fundamentally different they
Speaker 1: are other than the fact that your partners are the same, um,
Speaker 1: but from a running a business perspective, they're They're just
Speaker 1: totally different. Uh. And he said, I don't I doubt
Speaker 1: if you're too upset about not having to run the
Speaker 1: physical business. And I was like, you know, I'm just
Speaker 1: excited to be joining Amazon. Whatever, It's fine. So my
Speaker 1: when I joined, my my my role and was and
Speaker 1: continues to be to run Amazon's digital music business, um
Speaker 1: from soup to nuts. And that's the way the company
Speaker 1: organizes itself. It really has true general managers that have
Speaker 1: product and engineering and marketing and finance and business development
Speaker 1: and you know, licensing, label relations. All that stuff rolls
Speaker 1: up into a single leader and that's the way the
Speaker 1: company has always organized itself. Now there's a point where
Speaker 1: you go to Bezos with a pitch. Why don't you
Speaker 1: tell that story? Well, I mean we, um, you know,
Speaker 1: we Amazon had been in digital music since two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: it launched the MP three stores, the first first guy
Speaker 1: to launch with DRM. Without DRM, I should say, um,
Speaker 1: but you know, honestly, had had had modest success in
Speaker 1: in the download business, and um, it was clearly a
Speaker 1: segment that was being fairly well dominated by one player
Speaker 1: given the device ecosystem, we knew we needed to get
Speaker 1: into streaming. And the pitch was when I basically just
Speaker 1: you know, basically kind of described with Prime Music, which is, um, Jeff,
Speaker 1: we should get into streaming. That's where our customers are going.
Speaker 1: And they know Amazon everything is customer first, customer first,
Speaker 1: customer first. We saw what our customers were doing, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we had seen that Prime the Prime Video service,
Speaker 1: this is you know, this was now we're in early
Speaker 1: the time frame that I'm talking about, and and um,
Speaker 1: we could tell that Prime Video seemed to be getting
Speaker 1: traction and the company was starting to invest more in
Speaker 1: the Prime Video service and was really starting to put
Speaker 1: its weight behind it UM. And you know, Jeff, we
Speaker 1: we had talked to him before, like how do you
Speaker 1: consider what do you think about adding things to Prime?
Speaker 1: And you know, obviously the things you want to add
Speaker 1: to a service like Prime or things that have broad appeal,
Speaker 1: and what has broader appealed in music? Really nothing? And
Speaker 1: people have been speculating for a long time, when is
Speaker 1: Amazon going to add a music service to Prime? When
Speaker 1: you know it's got to be coming soon, and so
Speaker 1: we do what you do at Amazon. We spent several months.
Speaker 1: We have a certain process that we follow there which
Speaker 1: is different than another companies. And what we do is
Speaker 1: we write a press release, one page press release of
Speaker 1: explain to the consumer what you're about to launch, and
Speaker 1: you polish that because if you can't do that, then
Speaker 1: you don't know what you know, you haven't figured out
Speaker 1: what is you want to do. And then behind that
Speaker 1: one page press release UM, we call this document a
Speaker 1: p R f a Q. There's an f a Q
Speaker 1: Frequently Asked Questions section after that, and you write your
Speaker 1: own questions and answers, and then we call a meeting
Speaker 1: UM and there's then financial support and exhibits and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, and we call a meeting, and
Speaker 1: we called a meeting with Jeff um with our CFO
Speaker 1: at the time, um kind named Tom Scoot Tach who
Speaker 1: is not our Brian. ALSOFSKI is the currency, a CFO,
Speaker 1: and and a couple and several other you know, senior
Speaker 1: leaders at the company spent ninety minutes first thirty minutes
Speaker 1: of that meeting. You know, it's a bunch of middle
Speaker 1: aged people with reading glasses sitting around staring at this
Speaker 1: document and reading it because we don't we don't power
Speaker 1: point at Amazon. We don't believe in it. Except if
Speaker 1: I were, if I were giving you a speech, I
Speaker 1: would power point. But then what's the difference. Why no
Speaker 1: power point inside the building and power point outside the building? Well,
Speaker 1: because if you're if the purpose of a meeting is
Speaker 1: to to make a decision, power points are not a
Speaker 1: good it's not a good meeting is a good way
Speaker 1: to tell a story and present something, But if you
Speaker 1: want to make a decision, you know there's two things.
Speaker 1: One empower point. It's really easy to have bullet points
Speaker 1: and to b as your way through things, right, It's
Speaker 1: like try to do that when you have to write
Speaker 1: complete sentences in a paragraph form and make it a
Speaker 1: narrative that stretches over six pages. You find yourself testing
Speaker 1: your your own thinking is refined and refined and refined
Speaker 1: until it all hangs. The other part is when you
Speaker 1: give a presentation. If we were to try to decide
Speaker 1: something in this room, all of us together, some of
Speaker 1: you would know what I'm talking about before I even
Speaker 1: got up here, maybe more than I do. And then
Speaker 1: some of you would know nothing about the topic, and
Speaker 1: I'd be trying to give a presentation. Hands would be
Speaker 1: going up, and you'd be asking questions about slide twenty seven,
Speaker 1: even though on slide seven, and there's someone who's still
Speaker 1: trying to figure out slide three, and you have a
Speaker 1: complete mismatch of information. So the conversation is not even handed.
Speaker 1: And so what happens. The way we do things. You
Speaker 1: walk into the room, you hand out this, you make whatever,
Speaker 1: twin copies, twenty copies. However, however, many people are in
Speaker 1: the meeting, and we all then read. And the idea
Speaker 1: is when we're done reading, some people will still have
Speaker 1: more information than others, but everyone will have the same baseline,
Speaker 1: and that baseline should be sufficient to make the decision
Speaker 1: that we're asking you to make, UM, and so we'll
Speaker 1: all sit there and read it ahead of time. And
Speaker 1: I heard Jeff explain why don't you read it in advance?
Speaker 1: I think there's two answers, one as no one has time,
Speaker 1: and the other is and this I laughed when I
Speaker 1: heard this, because I was just listening to this um
Speaker 1: in some speech he gave recent. He said, because everyone
Speaker 1: in the room is really smart, and they won't read
Speaker 1: it ahead of time, but then they'll b as their
Speaker 1: way through it and act like they did. And so
Speaker 1: this way you're forced to sit there and you know,
Speaker 1: what else are you gonna do? You know, there's this
Speaker 1: thing in front of you. So we spent ninety minutes. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so once again, how long are do people spend reading?
Speaker 1: Thirty minutes? Okay? But I just remember, you know, like
Speaker 1: being in school, you're always uptight or you fast? Are
Speaker 1: you slow? You're gonna be ahead of this person. It's
Speaker 1: almost like you feel a pressure. You know, we're we're
Speaker 1: all friends and colleagues. So um, you know, you wait
Speaker 1: if your if it's your meeting, you kind of look
Speaker 1: around and you say, okay, it looks like does anyone
Speaker 1: need more time, or sometimes you'll say, look, we're gonna
Speaker 1: read for thirty minutes and then and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk after that, and yeah, if you haven't read every word,
Speaker 1: it's not the end of the world. And then we
Speaker 1: talked about it for the next I think it was
Speaker 1: a ninety minute meeting probably, and they asked a bunch
Speaker 1: of questions, talked about the numbers, etcetera, etcetera. The product
Speaker 1: that merrily and okay, let's do this. And you know
Speaker 1: that's for me pre remarkable. I've worked in a number
Speaker 1: of places and too. It was you know, we we
Speaker 1: had prepared. So it's not like we didn't come in
Speaker 1: half prepared, because that could have been a go back
Speaker 1: and think about this and that and the other thing.
Speaker 1: But it was, you know, we thought about it, thought
Speaker 1: it through and uh had a decision taken in in
Speaker 1: that meeting and lunch. You know, everybody at this point
Speaker 1: you talk about a CEO with vision at this point,
Speaker 1: with the death of Steve Jobs, in the retirement of
Speaker 1: other people, uh, the two people two people people focus
Speaker 1: on our elon Musk and Bezos. So of all the
Speaker 1: CEO as you've dealt with, what does Jeff do differently. Um,
Speaker 1: I think he's just is he very demanding? It's very
Speaker 1: great clarity. Uh, And I think he he talks the
Speaker 1: talk and walks the walk. So we we've set out
Speaker 1: broad principles that we we managed by at the company.
Speaker 1: He reiterates them, Um, explains them when he feels necessary.
Speaker 1: But mostly what I think he does that's great is
Speaker 1: he he lets his leaders lead. So if we were
Speaker 1: to get him on the phone right now and we
Speaker 1: were to talk about some details of Amazon Music, would
Speaker 1: he be familiar with those? He dives down into all
Speaker 1: the product verticals. So from the time you decided that
Speaker 1: you wanted to do this until you gotta yes, how
Speaker 1: long was that? Uh? Well, the time the yes was
Speaker 1: in that meeting, I don't know when I'm talking about
Speaker 1: from the time you said months, a few months, don't know.
Speaker 1: And then you built everything from scratch. You didn't buy anything. No,
Speaker 1: we haven't bought anything in music. But that's interesting because
Speaker 1: everybody else is buying services. You know, Apple bought beats
Speaker 1: and other things to give it leg up. Why do
Speaker 1: you decide with certain players in the marketplace that you're
Speaker 1: going to start from scratch. There's lots of reasons. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, well, now we already have an infrastructured so
Speaker 1: if I were buying something, it would be to buy subscribers.
Speaker 1: I haven't come across other than the biggest of the
Speaker 1: big I haven't come across companies that can that can
Speaker 1: really accelerate our growth. We're doing just fine, thank you,
Speaker 1: um and UM. But in the earlier days, look, it's
Speaker 1: you can spend as much time trying to integrate their
Speaker 1: systems into the Amazon systems as it will take you
Speaker 1: just to build it from scratch. And uh and you know,
Speaker 1: so we looked, we did look at companies and either
Speaker 1: the prices didn't make sense for what you were getting,
Speaker 1: or we didn't think the technology was all that great. Um.
Speaker 1: That happens a lot a lot of a lot of startups.
Speaker 1: You know, the biggest thing when you buy them. And
Speaker 1: I saw this at Yahoo all the time because y'aha
Speaker 1: yah who operated an incredible scale. UM. And we bought
Speaker 1: a lot of companies in the in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: and the first thing you'd end up doing half the
Speaker 1: time is having to rebuild half the technology because it
Speaker 1: just couldn't scale. It's a lot for now because everyone
Speaker 1: runs on Amazon Web Services, so thinks scale seamlessly. But
Speaker 1: back then that didn't exist. Um, you know some of
Speaker 1: the technology some of these companies that are trying to
Speaker 1: sell themselves, maybe their technology is just based on an
Speaker 1: older technology stack. You know, they've been around for a
Speaker 1: few years and they're using older technologies that, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to replace that. So what's the point. And
Speaker 1: do you hire outside people to build it or you
Speaker 1: have inside engineers the Amazon to build your music service? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Now we build it in house and we've we've staffed
Speaker 1: up our team, but we don't use out we don't
Speaker 1: use third parties. It's all it's all internal. Okay. So
Speaker 1: from the time you launch it, at what point is
Speaker 1: the Echo introduced? Um? Five months later? It turns out,
Speaker 1: so we launched in June two thousand fourteen Prime Music
Speaker 1: in the United States. The Echo launched on a beta
Speaker 1: invitation only basis in November or late October, early to
Speaker 1: mid November, somewhere in that range two thousand fourteen. And
Speaker 1: at what point did you feel this is the future?
Speaker 1: Probably March? And what was what was the lightbulb moment?
Speaker 1: There are a couple of lifebub moments, um, I mean,
Speaker 1: the first was just being consumers ourselves and being in
Speaker 1: the music game. So you know, we had echoes those
Speaker 1: some of us on the on the on the music
Speaker 1: team during the when no one knew this product even existed.
Speaker 1: But it's a beta product, it's an alpha product, and
Speaker 1: you know, it works and some days it works, some
Speaker 1: days it doesn't work, like any product that's in development,
Speaker 1: so you don't really get that full customer experience. The
Speaker 1: magic wasn't happening just yet. Um. But then you know,
Speaker 1: once it started shipping, then of course we all had them.
Speaker 1: And what I tell everybody is because we we've given
Speaker 1: a lot of people echoes, and you know, when we
Speaker 1: visit the labels like here, you should have one of this.
Speaker 1: And what I tell people is if I come back
Speaker 1: and it's sitting in your office, I'm taking it back
Speaker 1: with me. Put it in your house, because it's not
Speaker 1: meant to be in your Office's not that's not where
Speaker 1: I mean you can put on there. It's great, but
Speaker 1: if you want to understand the magic of a of
Speaker 1: the voice interface and you have to have it in
Speaker 1: your home, it has to be in a an area
Speaker 1: where you're going about your business doing other things, it's
Speaker 1: in a high traffic area, it's in a communal area,
Speaker 1: and so we started using them in our homes, right,
Speaker 1: And so when it was in beta, we weren't really
Speaker 1: using them in our homes because you never know who's
Speaker 1: gonna pop into your house that kind of thing. So, uh,
Speaker 1: part of this, we were just consumers and we started
Speaker 1: to understand the possibility. The other part was we started
Speaker 1: to look at data and we could see of the
Speaker 1: very few people that had gotten echoes in the very
Speaker 1: early part of two thousand fifteen because they were in
Speaker 1: very short supply, um, just how much they were being
Speaker 1: used for music, and the different ways in which they're
Speaker 1: being used for music, the ways the way people that
Speaker 1: the ways that people are asking to to have Alexa
Speaker 1: play music for them, in many cases very different than
Speaker 1: you would expect them to do if they had a
Speaker 1: visual app like an iPhone or an Android app. And
Speaker 1: that's when we kind of realized and put all that
Speaker 1: stuff together like this is this is profound. And I've
Speaker 1: been around the block a couple of times and I've
Speaker 1: seen these platforms shifts happen, and it was Okay, I
Speaker 1: remember the shift from you know, uh button to touch
Speaker 1: interface and and the impact that had fundamentally and mobile,
Speaker 1: and we just started to you know, extrapolate out and
Speaker 1: dream a little bit and say, you know, is voice
Speaker 1: that level of of of a shift in platform and
Speaker 1: the way people compute interact with computers, And you know,
Speaker 1: we thought it would be, and particularly we thought it
Speaker 1: would be for interacting with digital media, because we just
Speaker 1: once you use it, you're like, it's just easier, it's
Speaker 1: so much better. It's you know, there's so much less friction.
Speaker 1: The first time. I'm sure all of you guys have
Speaker 1: have you voice controls at some point, but man, the
Speaker 1: first time you show someone of any technical background from
Speaker 1: my mother in law to an engineer. She's not an engineer,
Speaker 1: by the way, so I mean like she's got the
Speaker 1: less technical background of those two people, and you just
Speaker 1: say Alexa play and name a song and it comes out.
Speaker 1: That's just magic. And the first time, now it's the
Speaker 1: best innovation seemed commonplace three or four years later, um,
Speaker 1: and like, well, of course, but I was not. And
Speaker 1: of course a few years ago and it truly that
Speaker 1: I remember showing to you know, record label executives. Their
Speaker 1: eyes popped out, you know, and and that magic. Once
Speaker 1: we understood that magic, we realized this is this is
Speaker 1: a great this is just the way that you can
Speaker 1: interact with digital media. It's just better. And do you
Speaker 1: think at this point the music industry is up to
Speaker 1: speed on what a huge breakthrough this is at this
Speaker 1: point now and the eighteen Oh yeah, totally. Do you
Speaker 1: think people understand that because there have been historically late
Speaker 1: to everything, whether it be file trading, digital download streaming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I gotta say I, you know you're right, And UM,
Speaker 1: I have to you know, I I'm not getting paid
Speaker 1: to say this, but I have to take my hat
Speaker 1: off to the labels because we went to go talk
Speaker 1: about Amazon Music Unlimited in the very beginning of two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen, so this is after the very first
Speaker 1: Echo Christmas, but it was a smallish Echo Christmas. The
Speaker 1: device was a year old, and you know, we went
Speaker 1: to go pitch them on the deals and we came
Speaker 1: with suitcases full of Echoes to hand out to everybody,
Speaker 1: and I gave my little speech. But what we found
Speaker 1: was that to a t or two to a person,
Speaker 1: rather they had all bought them already. They had gifted
Speaker 1: them to friends over the over the holiday they all
Speaker 1: were super up to date on it and understood the opportunity, so,
Speaker 1: you know, very collaborative conversations from the get go. It
Speaker 1: wasn't It wasn't I think what maybe conversations were in
Speaker 1: previous generations, and I think that's a lot of streaming
Speaker 1: obviously was advancing, and the label saw that, um, this
Speaker 1: was going to be their business going forward. And then
Speaker 1: they saw this device and I think they used it
Speaker 1: as consumers and they understood the power of it. Well,
Speaker 1: I just know this is one of the products that
Speaker 1: was sold by word of mouth. First of all, there
Speaker 1: was theoretically limited availability, but yeah, I was liking theoretically
Speaker 1: I'll tell you know, I'll tell you I So I
Speaker 1: had one, but I ordered it in November when it
Speaker 1: first came out in novemb It showed up on my
Speaker 1: doorstep in May the following year, so it really was limited.
Speaker 1: It started to be they ramped up production, you know
Speaker 1: that year at some point, well, Gary Dela bat I
Speaker 1: was talking to Me's really in the producer of the
Speaker 1: Howard Stern Show, and he's it was such zeal I
Speaker 1: had to get one, and it was sort of like,
Speaker 1: first of all, we're more of a software era than
Speaker 1: a hardware era. But his excitement made me feel that
Speaker 1: I wanted to get one same thing. In terms of
Speaker 1: Amazon Music Unlimited, doesn't seem like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: advertising outside of the Amazon ecosystem, but talk about the
Speaker 1: little triggers you have in your system to try to
Speaker 1: get people to upgrade. Yeah. So, um, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things we worked on for the launch was
Speaker 1: we wanted to make sure the subscription process was as
Speaker 1: as simple as possible. Um. We obviously, like one of
Speaker 1: our competitors have you know, customer, lots of customers, credit
Speaker 1: card accounts. People buy stuff from Amazon, that's what they do.
Speaker 1: We have a commerce space relationship with them, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, we wanted to make sure they could just
Speaker 1: talk to Alexa to subscribe, so you can do that,
Speaker 1: and um, we're pretty confident that that's the the if
Speaker 1: this is sounds like an oxymoron, but the most frictionless,
Speaker 1: the least amount of friction in any subscription that I've
Speaker 1: are seen. And so one of the things we do.
Speaker 1: You know, if you were to ask for a track,
Speaker 1: and say you're a prime member, if you were to
Speaker 1: ask for a track that's not in Prime Music, so
Speaker 1: it's not part of those two million odd songs. Um,
Speaker 1: you would hear Alexas say something like, you know that
Speaker 1: song is not in Prime Music. It's available in Amazon
Speaker 1: Music Unlimited along with tens of millions of other songs
Speaker 1: or something like that. Uh, free trial for thirty days
Speaker 1: after that as month, should I start your free trial? Yes,
Speaker 1: that's all you have to say, and music will start playing.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if it gets an easier than that.
Speaker 1: And so we do that. And that's that's very effective,
Speaker 1: you know, because you're it's always more effective to to
Speaker 1: get someone to upgrade to something when they're in the moment.
Speaker 1: Then they're already they're already so far down that funnel
Speaker 1: in consideration that it's it doesn't take a lot to
Speaker 1: get them over the last hurdle. If if you're having
Speaker 1: to spend you know, two or fifty million dollars creating
Speaker 1: a brand for yourself, that's just creating awareness. So once
Speaker 1: they're on the echo device, you know, we do that.
Speaker 1: We do things if um, if if you have multiple
Speaker 1: echoes in your home and say you're listening in one
Speaker 1: room and your kids listening and wants to listen, well,
Speaker 1: let's put the other way. Your kids listening in one
Speaker 1: room and then you're in the other room and you
Speaker 1: try to listen, and Alex will say, um, you know,
Speaker 1: because we're limit you're limited to one stream at a
Speaker 1: time and all these music services, that's that's a condition
Speaker 1: of the labels. She'd say something like, you know, music
Speaker 1: is playing on the other device. Um, but if you
Speaker 1: upgrade to the Family Plan, you can have up to
Speaker 1: six concurrent streams. And well, it turns out that's pretty effective,
Speaker 1: you know, um, because if you really want to listen
Speaker 1: to music and your time, and you maybe didn't even
Speaker 1: know the Family Plan existed, right, and now he's like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, well you have four echoes, I got three kids. Great,
Speaker 1: let's do it. And also, assuming someone's not asking for
Speaker 1: something that's not in the two million catalog you do
Speaker 1: have of periodic adds, shall we say them to upgrade?
Speaker 1: Well we we you know, we communicate with our customers,
Speaker 1: but Alexa doesn't run ads, so you're communicating saying, hey,
Speaker 1: this opportunity is here, um through normal like email and
Speaker 1: push messaging channels, but not there's you know, Alexa's personality
Speaker 1: is it's very it's it's very carefully guarded. She's not
Speaker 1: going to be you know, she's not meant there to
Speaker 1: hawk products, you know, and and she's not meant to
Speaker 1: be too sales. So if you're just you won't what
Speaker 1: you won't see is or here I should say. So,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to a playlist, you're not going to
Speaker 1: get interrupted in the middle in between songs and say, hey,
Speaker 1: by the way, there's this thing called am some music
Speaker 1: on Limit. There's no advertising on Echo and we don't
Speaker 1: advertise like that either. It's because it's just contextual. There's
Speaker 1: no pushing of the unlimited service on Alexa unless you
Speaker 1: ask for something that is not there. Yeah, unless you're
Speaker 1: unless you're really in the moment of wanting music and
Speaker 1: we think we can improve your experience. Okay, So, in
Speaker 1: the world today of selling music, not literally but marketing music,
Speaker 1: playlists are thought to be king. How does someone enter
Speaker 1: the Amazon ecosystem and get their songs heard? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, we have a team of programmers who
Speaker 1: are out looking for music and deciding themselves how many
Speaker 1: people are there? Tensa um and they're out and you know,
Speaker 1: they're in different cities and assigned to different genres. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, our country programmers are in are in Nashville,
Speaker 1: not a big surprise, and um, they're out doing what
Speaker 1: those guys do. They go out to listen to new
Speaker 1: bands play and new artists and they listen for music.
Speaker 1: We obviously meet with the record labels, we meet with
Speaker 1: artists management, and we get played a lot of music. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's ultimate editorial decision. You know, what
Speaker 1: is it that we want to what is it that
Speaker 1: we want to play? And you know, we'll promote music
Speaker 1: when it comes. If if there's an artist that we
Speaker 1: want to get behind, we work with the label to
Speaker 1: promote them. Um. But ultimately the decision of what and
Speaker 1: where to put something in a playlist comes down to
Speaker 1: the editorial team. Okay. But if you're a manager, there
Speaker 1: is someone you can meet with. Yeah, absolutely okay. And
Speaker 1: then you subsequently look at the data and there for
Speaker 1: a massage what gets played and what's not, What gets
Speaker 1: added and gets dropped from playlist based on the number
Speaker 1: of streams. Sure, sure, okay. And Amazon has seen someone
Speaker 1: of as a black hole. Now Spotify is now public,
Speaker 1: they're releasing a lot of information. First and foremost, if
Speaker 1: I am an artist on Amazon, do you have a
Speaker 1: dashboard where I can see all my data? Not at
Speaker 1: the current time. So well, we eventually we will. We
Speaker 1: just don't have it yet. We've been more focused on,
Speaker 1: you know, getting big enough that artists would want to
Speaker 1: come look at a dashboard on Amazon. Okay, And then
Speaker 1: you have Apple, as I say, trumpeting how many urban
Speaker 1: streams they have, And we don't really know what's going
Speaker 1: on in Amazon. The first question is what is going on?
Speaker 1: And second is there a way for us to find
Speaker 1: out on a regular basis. I can't come here every day. Sorry, Um,
Speaker 1: what is going on? Lots of lots is going on.
Speaker 1: But yeah, as a company, we tend to be more
Speaker 1: reticent to share data. Is just across the board. I
Speaker 1: value my job, so I try not to share too much. Um.
Speaker 1: Ultimately we we we will, uh created an avenue for
Speaker 1: for artists to see what's going on in real time.
Speaker 1: I mean, we obviously give reports to all the labels
Speaker 1: and so the labels know what's going on in our service. Um,
Speaker 1: but we we don't make it as public as some
Speaker 1: of the other services. We also don't just generally beat
Speaker 1: our chest as much and try to like you know,
Speaker 1: talk about how many streams x artists did in the
Speaker 1: first weekend just sort of not it's just not really
Speaker 1: what we do as much. We'll pause here for a
Speaker 1: brief moment and get right back to VP of the
Speaker 1: Amazon Music Steve Boom. As most of you know, I'm
Speaker 1: a writer and you can read my work at left
Speaker 1: sets dot com in addition to reading my commentary on
Speaker 1: music tech in the world at large. Will be the
Speaker 1: first to find out when we've published a new podcast.
Speaker 1: Go to left sets dot com and sign up for
Speaker 1: the news letter. Now more of the VP of the
Speaker 1: Amazon Music Steve Boom, recorded live the Music Media Summit
Speaker 1: in Santa Barbara, California. What can you say? We talked
Speaker 1: about this a little earlier, and I'll use the word counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: What do we learn about what's happening on the Amazon
Speaker 1: service as opposed to its competitors. UM, I'm not even
Speaker 1: sure how to answer. That's such a broad question. Specifically,
Speaker 1: are there different genres that are emphasized? Uh, yeah, you'll
Speaker 1: see different Like I said, you'll see different genres. Um.
Speaker 1: I can look at our charts. They just they look
Speaker 1: very different. They look wildly different. Would you say, therefore,
Speaker 1: that Amazon is reaching a different segment of the public
Speaker 1: or a more representative segment of the public. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: a tough question to answer. I think it's a broader
Speaker 1: cross section of the public. Um, if your goal is
Speaker 1: to be, you know, a service for the most popular
Speaker 1: music right now in terms of streaming, you know, then
Speaker 1: you're going to be focused on nothing but hip hop. Um,
Speaker 1: I think it's a more representative cross section of of
Speaker 1: the country. And you know, also, I can tell you know,
Speaker 1: if you think about Amazon and our customer base. At
Speaker 1: our core, we sell people things, and there were our
Speaker 1: average customer buys things. Therefore has disposable income and a
Speaker 1: credit card. So therefore our customer base excuse a bit
Speaker 1: older than the other guys. That doesn't mean it's old,
Speaker 1: It just means it starts more at a young adult
Speaker 1: and goes up from there. Right, we're we don't have
Speaker 1: a free tier, so well, essentially you do because it's
Speaker 1: baked into the now nine Amazon Prime that you have
Speaker 1: to be a Prime member and that's not an unlimited
Speaker 1: basil said, you know, they're a hundred million Prime members
Speaker 1: that global number. Yeah, right, Well, how many countries is
Speaker 1: Amazon Music in at this point around forty and you
Speaker 1: can get unlimited in all those forty countries, um, all
Speaker 1: but one, but that's coming yeah pretty much. Okay, So
Speaker 1: but essentially it feels free to the consumer unless you
Speaker 1: have prime. If you have prime, okay, we to of course,
Speaker 1: the original sales pitch is the two day delivery, which
Speaker 1: I think with its original prices seventy nine dollars was real.
Speaker 1: Now that it's going up, you're looking at the add ons. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what do you see right now? Despite protestations of
Speaker 1: the minor players, is essentially a three horse race between Apple, Spotify,
Speaker 1: and Amazon. What do you foresee foreseeing the future relative
Speaker 1: to the competition of those three UM, I can speak
Speaker 1: to us. I mean, I I like where we sit.
Speaker 1: You know, people, you know, we've we've grown pretty dramatically
Speaker 1: over the last uh two or three years and to
Speaker 1: the point where you know, it's it's it's quite clear
Speaker 1: that we're in that small group that you just mentioned.
Speaker 1: And you know, we think, we think we have a
Speaker 1: good trajectory and we have a pretty sound strategy. I
Speaker 1: think there's some secular trends that work in our favors,
Speaker 1: such as UM this plat form shifts to voice. So
Speaker 1: you know, we see ourselves continuing to grow pretty rapidly.
Speaker 1: I know there's this narrative out there that everything in
Speaker 1: the Internet is a winner take all um. I don't
Speaker 1: really buy into that when it comes at least to
Speaker 1: digital media. I can see that where there are you know,
Speaker 1: where network effects are the strongest thing in your business,
Speaker 1: like search, um or social networking, you know, arguably it's
Speaker 1: winner take all, even though there are many very successful
Speaker 1: social networking companies UM. I don't think that's the case
Speaker 1: of music. I do think it will be a small
Speaker 1: number continue to be a small number um of players globally.
Speaker 1: Is it those three? Is there gonna be a fourth? Ye?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. I
Speaker 1: know that will be up there if we look historically,
Speaker 1: you know, Google has se Search, Facebook, a lot of
Speaker 1: companies a dominant players of the marketplace because that's where
Speaker 1: all your friends are. There is a network effects thing.
Speaker 1: So I have all the services. I know how to
Speaker 1: share a song on Spotify. I don't know how to
Speaker 1: share a song on Apple okay, and I think, and
Speaker 1: then of course if I share it with someone who's
Speaker 1: not a member, they can't listen. So I think these
Speaker 1: are important factors moving towards dominance of one of the services.
Speaker 1: You don't agree. I don't agree that it's going to
Speaker 1: be a single No, I wouldn't be doing this if
Speaker 1: we thought the game was over. Well, I would think that,
Speaker 1: you know, from an outside observer, I don't mean this
Speaker 1: in a negative way. I would say that Amazon is
Speaker 1: the stealth player with both deep pockets, big ecosystem, the
Speaker 1: prime etcetera. They're the ones. It's they're frequently ignored. Like
Speaker 1: talk to Daniel Glass, you know, six or eight months ago.
Speaker 1: He says, you know, the sleeper is Amazon, and he
Speaker 1: talks about meeting with you with the other team and
Speaker 1: the people who have been at the forefront from way
Speaker 1: longer than six But the people have been the forefront
Speaker 1: have been in serious whatever they talk about Amazon being
Speaker 1: the sleeper. But by the same time that by the way,
Speaker 1: but as I say, it's hard to fathom. And one
Speaker 1: also would say that that's who we have to you know,
Speaker 1: Spotify as a standalone product. I don't see it as
Speaker 1: a standalone company. A long way down the line. What
Speaker 1: we look with the apples, they have everybody's credit card,
Speaker 1: but who do they market to after they don't have
Speaker 1: the free tier? And I always go back to the
Speaker 1: original example of A O L and MSN Network. Everyone
Speaker 1: thought MSN Network was gonna kill A O L and
Speaker 1: it did not. So the fact that you have a
Speaker 1: previous history does not necessarily mean success in the future.
Speaker 1: In addition, I don't believe there's a visionary leader at
Speaker 1: Apple where there is a visionary leader at at Amazon. Therefore,
Speaker 1: it's something I'm certainly paying attention to. But getting off
Speaker 1: of my little soapbox here, one of the things that
Speaker 1: amazed me when we met is that if I go
Speaker 1: on Spotify, which is the big huna this week, they
Speaker 1: break down the playlist down into certain things, but in
Speaker 1: reality it's more granular on the Amazon that what you
Speaker 1: can say like play rockets of can you tell the
Speaker 1: audience more about that? Yeah, And that's I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a that's actually what we saw customers doing. Right. So
Speaker 1: again when we looked at the date of what are
Speaker 1: people doing on Alexa, the way I think about is
Speaker 1: if if you have a visual app, your iPhone app,
Speaker 1: your desktop app, your Android app, it's very powerful, it's
Speaker 1: also very constrained, right, there's the product. Managers decided how
Speaker 1: you're going to listen to music, whether you realize it
Speaker 1: or not. There's a search bar, there's a browse hierarchy
Speaker 1: of how you browse through music, and they fill the
Speaker 1: buckets of content for you, and not much not suggesting
Speaker 1: that's a bad thing. It is what it is, though,
Speaker 1: and um, that's how you're going to listen to music.
Speaker 1: When you have a head lit what we call a
Speaker 1: headless device, just nothing. There's no screen on an Echo.
Speaker 1: You're completely unconstrained. The way you want to interact with
Speaker 1: music is limited only by your own imagination. And lo
Speaker 1: and behold. When people are unconstrained, they act in an
Speaker 1: unconstrained way, and they ask Alexa things. And you know
Speaker 1: what we saw was that. The way I like think
Speaker 1: about is if you read the reviews of the Echo
Speaker 1: in the early days and still today, you'd see people
Speaker 1: saying things like I love Alexa, Alexa is my friend,
Speaker 1: she's my best friend, Alexa is a member of my family.
Speaker 1: And so we tried to translate, kind of translate that
Speaker 1: into music and say, well, it makes sense that people
Speaker 1: are asking for things in a much more natural way
Speaker 1: than you would get in and app because they think
Speaker 1: of her as a friend. So they're going to talk
Speaker 1: to her like you're talking to You're gonna talk to
Speaker 1: her like you talked to your friend about music. And
Speaker 1: so people were asking for things. They're asking for songs
Speaker 1: because they only know a few words to the song.
Speaker 1: They can't remember the title of the artist. So they
Speaker 1: asked for by lyrics, They asked for the by mood.
Speaker 1: They ask you know, play pearl jam from um, play
Speaker 1: YouTube from the eighties, or play me some sad country music. Um.
Speaker 1: Or I'm having a dinner party, Alexa, can you play
Speaker 1: me some music, some jazz? And it's that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff where it's like music becoming part of what you
Speaker 1: do and responding to how you think about music. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not always and and and As great as playlists
Speaker 1: are and I know they're the currency du jour and
Speaker 1: maybe for a long time to come, they're not the
Speaker 1: answer to every type of situation that you find yourself
Speaker 1: in wanting to listen to music. There's plenty of times
Speaker 1: you may uh not want to listen to a playlist.
Speaker 1: And so when you say, you know, play YouTube from
Speaker 1: the eighties, we just make a playlist on the fly
Speaker 1: for you. Um, there isn't We don't go deep into
Speaker 1: We didn't have programmers creating you know, all these things.
Speaker 1: We spent a lot of time cleaning up metadata. Um,
Speaker 1: with all respect to the my label friends here or
Speaker 1: who may listen to a recording of this. Um, metadata
Speaker 1: sucks and it's a known problem in the industry. It
Speaker 1: tends to be incorrect or incomplete and certainly insufficient to
Speaker 1: to to respond to the kind of request that people
Speaker 1: are asking for. Like, even if all the metadata from
Speaker 1: the labels were correct, they don't give us metadata that
Speaker 1: says this song is sad, or this song is happy,
Speaker 1: this is upbeat, um, this is this is suitable for
Speaker 1: a dinner party. Right, So that's that's metadata we have
Speaker 1: to go out and create, and we do that through
Speaker 1: a combination of brute force with humans and then deep learning.
Speaker 1: Pretty much every song has metadata beyond writer, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we've taken we've taken humans to to to to
Speaker 1: take sample data sets and then use machine learning algorithms
Speaker 1: to to learn and you apply that against the greater catalog. Obviously,
Speaker 1: with catalog of tens of millions of tracks, it would
Speaker 1: take humans years to go do this, Um, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't take machines years. But then we have human curious
Speaker 1: that checking in on the mic. No, that one wasn't good,
Speaker 1: And you're constantly improving the model, and that enables us
Speaker 1: to do more fun things when people talk to Alexa
Speaker 1: and make it more natural. And believe me, we've got
Speaker 1: a long way to go. I mean we've we've scratched
Speaker 1: the surface with what people want. Okay, So when I asked,
Speaker 1: like some rock music for sixty, it creates a playlist
Speaker 1: on the fly. There is no person existing there maybe
Speaker 1: there maybe one. But if there's a pre existing playlist
Speaker 1: that someone, you know, some curator created for something, we
Speaker 1: might pull from there. But we also know you're listening
Speaker 1: habits and um, maybe that's not the right one for you,
Speaker 1: So we'll create one on the fly, and then we'll
Speaker 1: personalize the sequence. So generally speaking, if I'm talking to Alexa,
Speaker 1: I can talk year, I can talk act, yeah, era,
Speaker 1: gen genre, moved, what else? Smooth activity? What are you
Speaker 1: doing right now? You know, go to yoga, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have a dinner party, studying. So there's enough metadata that
Speaker 1: it will then just pull on that metadata to make
Speaker 1: a playlist on the on the fly. And I only
Speaker 1: know this from meeting with you previously. How is anybody's
Speaker 1: supposed to know this or theoretically they're developing a new
Speaker 1: way to interact with Alexa and they're learning a new
Speaker 1: way of thinking about music. Well, the whole idea is
Speaker 1: to make it natural. So, like I said, we're most
Speaker 1: of what we're doing is stuff that people already wanting
Speaker 1: to do. Um. You know, we recently launched the ability
Speaker 1: for you to make playlists just using your voice on Alexa,
Speaker 1: and sure enough, I mean, people were trying to do it.
Speaker 1: It's a very natural thing to want to do in
Speaker 1: a music service. It's pretty complicated to to do by voice,
Speaker 1: but it works really well. And lo and behold, people
Speaker 1: are already trying to do it, so instead of failing
Speaker 1: it now succeeded and so millions of playlists are created
Speaker 1: really really quickly. Um. There are certain things, yeah, that
Speaker 1: you know, people have to learn as possible, but but
Speaker 1: the idea is that you know, by and large, people
Speaker 1: will stumble upon it when when that's how they want
Speaker 1: to listen to music, when that's how they want to
Speaker 1: ask for something. UM. I do think in over time,
Speaker 1: you'll see us another services probably get better at helping
Speaker 1: customers understand what features are available, but most of the
Speaker 1: stuff we've launched to date has been you know, that's
Speaker 1: just how people were already asking for. People were saying
Speaker 1: things like, you know, play me the song that goes
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, whatever the lyric is, and so we
Speaker 1: looked at that. It's like, well that people are failing
Speaker 1: because Alexa couldn't understand that. So we went out and
Speaker 1: created the ability to quickly look through lyrics databases and
Speaker 1: find that song or you know, play the new song
Speaker 1: you know by Mumford and Sons with Daniels here and
Speaker 1: hopefully they're gonna have a new album sometimes soon because
Speaker 1: we've been waiting for three years. Um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but I'm a big fan. And uh, you know, that's
Speaker 1: really easy to understand when it's the first single off
Speaker 1: the record, But when it's the third track off the
Speaker 1: record that Daniels promoting and that's one at radio right now,
Speaker 1: you know which song is still Alexa pull. They all
Speaker 1: have the same release date from the label. They're all
Speaker 1: have the same release date of the record of the album.
Speaker 1: So you know, we worked with labels and ourselves and
Speaker 1: created this concept of radio impact date in our in
Speaker 1: our metadata for songs, so that when I say because that,
Speaker 1: the whole idea is I was listening to the radio.
Speaker 1: I heard the new song by Mumford and Sons. Don't
Speaker 1: know the title, but it's the one that's on the
Speaker 1: radio that that that Daniel's promoting. Alexa played the new
Speaker 1: song by Mumford and Sons, She's going to know which
Speaker 1: one to get. And so our focus has been primarily
Speaker 1: on things that people are doing already. Um and there's,
Speaker 1: like I said, there's a lot more to come. You know.
Speaker 1: The ideas it should be as natural as speaking to
Speaker 1: your best friend about music. If you and I were
Speaker 1: to go have a beer and just talk about music,
Speaker 1: not about the music business, but about artists and songs
Speaker 1: and stuff. We want Alexa to be able to to
Speaker 1: to hang with you and to and to be your
Speaker 1: guide and to be your friend and to be able
Speaker 1: to respond to that. Well, some of this Stele stuff.
Speaker 1: I know that Randy arranged for us to get some
Speaker 1: echo shows, and I had the default service has Spotify,
Speaker 1: which sorry, most people don't really know how to change.
Speaker 1: But once you got the Echo Show, and it can
Speaker 1: show the lyrics made the default service Amazon Music, because
Speaker 1: I want to see the lyrics. We'll take a quick
Speaker 1: break and come back with more of my conversation with
Speaker 1: VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom, recorded live at
Speaker 1: the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. I hope
Speaker 1: you're enjoying listening to this episode of the Bob Left
Speaker 1: Stats podcast. If you want to listen to sound bites
Speaker 1: from the interviews and see some of my guests like
Speaker 1: Shirley me Instid of Garbage or Paul Rodgers of Bad
Speaker 1: Company and Free check it out at tune in on Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Instagram. Now more of my chat with the head
Speaker 1: of the Amazon Music Steve Boom on the Bob Left
Speaker 1: and It's podcast. At this point, why don't we open
Speaker 1: it up to questions? Sure people have certain things. Jim
Speaker 1: has the mic once again, Let's try to limit statements
Speaker 1: and make it more about questions for Steve. Here has Steve.
Speaker 1: My question is, as you talk about the ecosystem between
Speaker 1: the Amazon Music streaming service and the Echo do you
Speaker 1: you do you view it more as a feature or product. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we view Amazon Music as a service. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, Alexa itself is a platform that you can
Speaker 1: or you know, it allows you to have other services available.
Speaker 1: So um, and we Amazon Musics available on iOS, on Android,
Speaker 1: on web, on TV platforms. So you know, we're building
Speaker 1: a self standing music service. It just so happens. Our
Speaker 1: focus is to make it the best voice forward music
Speaker 1: service in the world. We've brought voice controls into our
Speaker 1: mobile phone apps, so on iOS and Android you can
Speaker 1: speak with Alexa. Um. That's how we think we really
Speaker 1: rise above the crowd. Um that it's a service onto itself. Yeah, Stephen,
Speaker 1: you know, Hey Shapiro, I mean, how does everybody's gonna
Speaker 1: mike here? It's a cousin of kind of your core business.
Speaker 1: But I know Amazon was looking at ticketing and ticketing
Speaker 1: in music, and uh maybe the only time Amazon had
Speaker 1: to pull back from entering a new vertical. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if you can give us color of the
Speaker 1: experience that Amazon happened had looking at going into music ticketing,
Speaker 1: and you had entered in Europe, I think, but now
Speaker 1: pretty publicly said hey, we're gonna pull back from that. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wish I could give you shed insight. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: we did have a small ticketing business in the UK.
Speaker 1: It really started in the West End with theater, dabbled
Speaker 1: with some concerts. Um I wasn't part of the decision
Speaker 1: process as to why the company pulled out, so I'm
Speaker 1: so I can't really tell you much. But one thing
Speaker 1: a g They had the Hyde Park shows they were
Speaker 1: tied in with his Amazon last summer and they said
Speaker 1: that Amazon sold tickets that they couldn't sell. That you
Speaker 1: reached people that they didn't reach. It was actually a
Speaker 1: benefit to it as opposed to people thinking, well, Amazon
Speaker 1: is going to come in and take our business. When
Speaker 1: Bob wants to replay his rock from does Amazon store
Speaker 1: that so that he could get the exact same playlist
Speaker 1: again or will it fabricate a new one. It's a
Speaker 1: great question. Uh the next time probably Fabrica knewhim. But
Speaker 1: when he's done listening, you could ask Alexa to save
Speaker 1: it as a playlist and then he would access it
Speaker 1: by saying I want my June playlist. When he creates one,
Speaker 1: Shell asked how to what what names? She will ask
Speaker 1: how to store to sign a name to it? Yeah? Nice? Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: Before we move on, how many people in the room
Speaker 1: have an echo of some stripe. Wow. Okay. How many
Speaker 1: people have a Google Home yea? How many people have
Speaker 1: a HomePod? Okay? Okay? Uh? Who has the bike now? Jim? Okay, Hey,
Speaker 1: how you doing um with everything going on with Cambridge
Speaker 1: Analytica and everything on Facebook? Now? You put a microphone
Speaker 1: in your house on all the time? Any thoughts on that?
Speaker 1: You know? I want to comment on that because this
Speaker 1: is the type of thing that makes me fucking crazy
Speaker 1: and that I hear I still, at this late date,
Speaker 1: gets saying I'm not gonna have streaming? What if I'm
Speaker 1: out of cellular service? Now for almost ten years they've
Speaker 1: had it, so it seeks to your phone, so you
Speaker 1: have to pay every month. They have ownership. You can't
Speaker 1: get that message through when it comes to the Echo
Speaker 1: devices until they hear a lection the code word the
Speaker 1: microphone is not on. Isn't that correct? That's correct. So
Speaker 1: there's a basically a small processor on the device that
Speaker 1: all it does is listen for ALEXA. It's not connected
Speaker 1: to the cloud. When it hears ALEXA, it opens up
Speaker 1: a connection to the cloud to capture what you say.
Speaker 1: Next converts that into wave file and then interpreted into
Speaker 1: text and it comes back down. Um. So the reason
Speaker 1: there's a blue light so you know she's listening. If
Speaker 1: you ever want to make sure that nothing like if
Speaker 1: one of the kids blurts out Alexa and you and
Speaker 1: you were on a super confidential conference call for work
Speaker 1: or something, there's a mute button which physically cuts the
Speaker 1: circuit of the microphones, physically impossible for any sound to
Speaker 1: get back to Amazon. So privacy has been thought of
Speaker 1: in the very design of the device from from day one,
Speaker 1: both in its construction of the device as well as
Speaker 1: the usual cues to let you know when Alexa is listening. So, um,
Speaker 1: it's something we take really, really seriously. I'm not the
Speaker 1: one in charge of that stuff, but it's something that
Speaker 1: I've heard described and it's it's as I described to you.
Speaker 1: It's something you know, Amazon the customer obsession and customer
Speaker 1: trust is at the center of our entire business. It
Speaker 1: has drilled into you from day one that you walk
Speaker 1: into the company, and we know that trust is something
Speaker 1: hard to earn an easy to lose, and it's not
Speaker 1: something that Amazon takes lightly. A lot of people have
Speaker 1: trusted us for years with purchasing a lot of important
Speaker 1: things in their lives, and yeah, we're not doing anything
Speaker 1: to mess with that. But having said that, the other
Speaker 1: half of his question is important. You have an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of data and knowledge of us. You know, as
Speaker 1: I say, on Google, they can literally they say you
Speaker 1: want to get someone you know, cough up something, just
Speaker 1: say you threatened them with release of their Google search history.
Speaker 1: But you literally have the purchase history. How do we
Speaker 1: know that you're not going to use that to our
Speaker 1: detriment or to brainwash us, or to get us to
Speaker 1: do something we don't want to do. That's a music conference. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm happy to get our public policy people here,
Speaker 1: but um, I think we're the most trusted brand in
Speaker 1: America for a reason. And I kind of would leave
Speaker 1: it at that. You know, I'm not I'm not here
Speaker 1: really to talk about data. Place say, I don't need
Speaker 1: to press his expecting answer. But I think the other
Speaker 1: half of the question, the non technical question, is something
Speaker 1: that's in everybody's minds that certainly needs to be in
Speaker 1: the marketplace, if not a chilling effect on the abuse
Speaker 1: of data. Not that Amazon has a history there, but
Speaker 1: we want to put that in everybody's mind. Jake, Um,
Speaker 1: you know Steve brought up something interesting, Steve about the
Speaker 1: other Steve about playlists. So Bob does a great playlist
Speaker 1: of rock from sixty nine, and uh, those of us
Speaker 1: really like Bob's taste, so we want to listen to
Speaker 1: Bob's playlist from nineteen nine. Does Amazon currently and I
Speaker 1: don't know or will it allow third party playlists to
Speaker 1: be made on the service where other people can go
Speaker 1: and listen to other curators beside your own playlists, I
Speaker 1: mean playlist sharing. Yeah, playlists sharing or for that matter. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if they're on your but Majestic Casual
Speaker 1: is a great example of people that make playlist They've
Speaker 1: been doing it for years. They started on YouTube. You
Speaker 1: you go into I go into my son nos playlist
Speaker 1: search and I do Majestic Casual and Deezer comes up with,
Speaker 1: you know, a Hunter playlists, and Apple Music comes up
Speaker 1: with a Hunter playlists, and Spotify the same thing, and uh,
Speaker 1: and they're just a playlist kind of brand. We have
Speaker 1: some of two questions. The first question is playlist sharing. Uh, yes, Um,
Speaker 1: that's something we either do or about to enable. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: we enable that with voice. We'll work through that. Okay.
Speaker 1: The second thing is third party playlists. Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: some of those brands in our serves. I don't know
Speaker 1: about Majestic Casual per Se, but I know that we
Speaker 1: have some of the other ones in our service. So
Speaker 1: so so one of the things when Troy Carter was
Speaker 1: here the other day, he said, you know, we concentrate
Speaker 1: mostly on our own playlists, and they're kind of pushing
Speaker 1: back against third party playlists because they're afraid of graft
Speaker 1: payola to get on those those bigger playlists. And I
Speaker 1: just trying to get your sort of take on the
Speaker 1: same thing. Troy is a really smart guy, and I
Speaker 1: agree with him. And you know, there's there's two angles
Speaker 1: to that. One is worrying about those types of things, um,
Speaker 1: but also you have to understand that we're a music
Speaker 1: service and in a in a world where all of
Speaker 1: us have very similar music alogues, we are going to
Speaker 1: differentiate ourselves through a variety of means, and one of
Speaker 1: those is our own curation. And so it's it's only
Speaker 1: natural that a music service would want to, you know,
Speaker 1: invest heavily in its own creation to make sure it's
Speaker 1: really great. But you know, and and we know that
Speaker 1: we won't be doing Payola and Graft and all that
Speaker 1: other stuff. So I don't know what goes on in
Speaker 1: the other companies. So that is a concern. Next person
Speaker 1: with the microphone. Yeah, so actually you just answered part
Speaker 1: of my question. Um, the question was my my thought.
Speaker 1: My my question is about where do you think the
Speaker 1: responsibility lies for actual curation and promotion on the platform? Um,
Speaker 1: specifically with with regard to Voice. Um, how much of
Speaker 1: it is or I know you don't like to share numbers,
Speaker 1: but how much of the traffic is organic, purely organic?
Speaker 1: I want to play this now, And how much of
Speaker 1: it is driven by your curation? And what direction is
Speaker 1: that moving? And how do you think about that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: a substantial percentage of our our of our listening is
Speaker 1: through curation. Um. I think Troy might have mentioned some
Speaker 1: numbers the other day or recently, and you know they
Speaker 1: seemed in line with what we kind of see at
Speaker 1: Amazon Music in that general range. Um, what we see
Speaker 1: in voice is interesting behavior that you see the same
Speaker 1: person will will Will go from a very casual lean back,
Speaker 1: just play me some music or play a genre playing
Speaker 1: artist whatever, to then like go straight deep down into
Speaker 1: the catalog and want that specific track and so just invert.
Speaker 1: But but of course by just sheer volume when you're
Speaker 1: in the lean back mode, you're going to hear more
Speaker 1: music than It's more tiring to say, play this track,
Speaker 1: play that track, but you know it takes you a
Speaker 1: long time to play. If that's fifteen requests you have
Speaker 1: to come up with to to listen to an hour
Speaker 1: of music. Um, so we do see invoice people tending
Speaker 1: to listen to more hours, longer sessions, and a higher
Speaker 1: incidents of curated music for sure. Now, my girlfriend always says,
Speaker 1: I do these back exercises and I have thirty second timers,
Speaker 1: and she says, well, you can set a series of
Speaker 1: continuous timers. I've yet have been able to do that.
Speaker 1: But can I load Alexa for your voice? Can I say,
Speaker 1: play the Rolling Stones, then play Jesus Jones and play Drake?
Speaker 1: Is there a way to do that? You mean a cue?
Speaker 1: I mean or just looking getting there but not yet? Okay,
Speaker 1: it's coming. And are there anybody else with raised hands here?
Speaker 1: Jim over here? Uh? In terms of statistics, how significant
Speaker 1: is music? Is a us A case for uh? The echo?
Speaker 1: In terms of versus other user activity like asking for
Speaker 1: the weather or recipes or podcasts, and where do you
Speaker 1: see those statistics going in the future. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: an extremely important use case among all things that people
Speaker 1: do on Alexa are on Echo. I like to remind
Speaker 1: my team that, you know, we sell a speaker that
Speaker 1: has an intelligent assistant in it who can do a
Speaker 1: lot of different things, but the main vehicle that we're
Speaker 1: delivering that intelligent assistant to the home is a speaker.
Speaker 1: And so not surprisingly, music is super important on a
Speaker 1: speaker because that's what people like to do on speakers. UM.
Speaker 1: So it's one of the top at all times. How
Speaker 1: do I see that evolving over time? I think that
Speaker 1: will stay the case as long for for devices where
Speaker 1: speakers are really the delivery vehicle for the intelligent assistant.
Speaker 1: I think if there are other devices that are less
Speaker 1: music centric than a speaker, I think that percentage would
Speaker 1: be different. Um. But in the smart speaker category, I
Speaker 1: expect music to continue to be up there no matter
Speaker 1: how many more skills are added to Alexa. UM. And
Speaker 1: it's the thing that you know, people use it not
Speaker 1: just a lot in terms of hours, but it's frequency
Speaker 1: and repetition and coming back to it. UM. It the
Speaker 1: only you know the other skills like that that you know,
Speaker 1: whether yes, smart home something, if you control your lights
Speaker 1: you know you do turn them off and on fairly frequently,
Speaker 1: so you'll repeat that. But music is has an incredible
Speaker 1: engagement level on the device now on the really regular
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime, the more people listen, it costs you more money. Okay,
Speaker 1: So is there any talk at the company of dissuading
Speaker 1: people from listening because you literally have to pay for that.
Speaker 1: Uh No, I mean our we we know the value
Speaker 1: that it generates for Amazon. You know, we know that
Speaker 1: our Prime members who use Prime Music are better Prime
Speaker 1: members and they they renew their Prime memberships at a
Speaker 1: higher rate, They come out of their free trials of
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime at a higher rate than than than do
Speaker 1: people who don't use Prime Music. And you know, we
Speaker 1: we carefully watch that and and understand the value that
Speaker 1: it's generating. And you know, we're not trying to dissuade
Speaker 1: people from from listening at all. And yes, um so
Speaker 1: serious sex sums done a great job of facilitating uh
Speaker 1: festival and concert live streaming. Red Bull TV has been
Speaker 1: doing it from a video perspective as well as others.
Speaker 1: All the Red bullis got out. Um, does Amazon have
Speaker 1: any intentions of getting into the live music streaming business, uh,
Speaker 1: via artists directly or festivals. Yeah. I mean I'm not
Speaker 1: going to talk about things here that we haven't done
Speaker 1: yet that we might do if we you know, this
Speaker 1: isn't the forum where I'm gonna disclose something like that. Um.
Speaker 1: What I would say is we've been doing some live
Speaker 1: broadcasts lately with working with some of the labels and
Speaker 1: doing some really interesting promotions around new records by Justin
Speaker 1: timber Lake, by Elton John just had these tribute albums
Speaker 1: as well as by you two in the in the
Speaker 1: in the Winter that are a combination of uh, interviews
Speaker 1: and music and and it's it's it's really kind of
Speaker 1: like a live radio show. Um. But in terms of
Speaker 1: whether we're gonna do live concert stream that's not This
Speaker 1: isn't the forum for me to talk about that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another question you were talking about, UM, some of the
Speaker 1: metadata that you have to create on your own and
Speaker 1: I've been recently reading articles about tags for your songs
Speaker 1: and like you know, I work with indie artists who
Speaker 1: work with tune Core and CD Baby in places like that.
Speaker 1: Are you gonna now go to some of these aggregators
Speaker 1: and potentially have a different metadata form for when you're
Speaker 1: submitting your music. You can say this is a sad song,
Speaker 1: this is an upbeat dance song, and those kind of
Speaker 1: tags to help you guys with your service. Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: been actually working with d dex um to try to
Speaker 1: update the DDX standard to include more fields that are
Speaker 1: relevant for voice and so that would be you know,
Speaker 1: it would be in the d dex standard. Okay, any
Speaker 1: other people with questions here, Okay. The thing about this
Speaker 1: is we've learned a lot about Amazon and as I
Speaker 1: even though I have the service, I'm still learning things,
Speaker 1: which speaks you know, we have the music. People say, oh,
Speaker 1: market the hell out of it, but it's a stealth
Speaker 1: operation and something you definitely have to pay attention. And
Speaker 1: thanks so much d for coming and sharing, Thank you
Speaker 1: for having me. That wraps up this week's episode of
Speaker 1: the Bob left Set podcast, recorded live the Music Media
Speaker 1: Summit in Santa Barbara, California, and produced by tune In.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with VP of the
Speaker 1: Amazon Music s feed Boom. I found it fascinating how
Speaker 1: Amazon Music uses data to its advantage. What part of
Speaker 1: the interview is interesting to you. Your feedback is always appreciated.
Speaker 1: You can email me at Bob at left sets dot com.
Speaker 1: Until next time, I'm Bob left Sets than reads. Don't
Speaker 1: know exactly must be out