Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech, and today I'm going to cover
Speaker 1: the story of Spotify, really the origin of Spotify, and
Speaker 1: then a bit about what it's been up to recently.
Speaker 1: And just for the interests of full disclosure, I feel
Speaker 1: I should point out that the company I work for,
Speaker 1: I Heart Media, is a competitor to Spotify. But don't worry.
Speaker 1: I'm going to cover this topic just like I would
Speaker 1: any other, as objective as possible, and maybe with some
Speaker 1: bad jokes and puns. And I think this will also
Speaker 1: help lead into a discussion about the way consumer media
Speaker 1: has changed significantly over the last couple of decades. That
Speaker 1: might actually be a second episode that I'll focus on
Speaker 1: a little bit later. The story of Spotify is tied
Speaker 1: very close with its founders, uh mainly Daniel Eck but
Speaker 1: also Martin Lawrenson. Those are two Swedish businessmen who set
Speaker 1: out to change how people access music, and while the
Speaker 1: service would launch in two thousand eight, the real story
Speaker 1: begins much earlier with Daniel Eck and initially in two
Speaker 1: thousand two, but we're going to go even earlier than that. See,
Speaker 1: Daniel K was an enterprising kid, like super enterprising, and
Speaker 1: an interview and the event that was called a Pando
Speaker 1: Monthly in New York City back in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: he talked about how as a young teen and I'm
Speaker 1: talking about thirteen years old, fourteen years old, he started
Speaker 1: making money by creating websites for local businesses in Sweden.
Speaker 1: He was interested in coding and he was getting into
Speaker 1: it and he started getting hired to make websites for
Speaker 1: for companies. And we're not talking about small amount of money.
Speaker 1: I mean his first job was about a hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: and then he went up to about two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: and it started going up from there. And according to K,
Speaker 1: at one point he was pulling down about fifty grand
Speaker 1: a month doing business. So imagine that being in high
Speaker 1: school and your side gig is pulling you down fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a month. Yikes. That was going pretty well
Speaker 1: until the Swedish tax Authority notified X that he owed
Speaker 1: the government a substantial amount of money to the tune
Speaker 1: of a couple hundred grand. X early fortune was pretty
Speaker 1: much wiped out, and he learned a valuable lesson about
Speaker 1: running a business, which is that you can't do it
Speaker 1: on the q T forever. Around two thousand two, X
Speaker 1: started thinking about the problem with digital music and piracy,
Speaker 1: and it was definitely a big problem. Services like Napster,
Speaker 1: new Tela, and kaza had been home to huge databases
Speaker 1: of pirated music since the late nineteen nineties, or had
Speaker 1: facilitated music piracy since the ninet Since not all of
Speaker 1: them were really databases, they were more like peer to
Speaker 1: peer networks. More on that in a little bit. So
Speaker 1: governments around the world were responding by creating some pretty
Speaker 1: draconian laws in an effort to curb online piracy. The
Speaker 1: governments were largely responding to big media companies that were
Speaker 1: putting a lot of pressure on elected officials to fix
Speaker 1: this problem. Everyone could see that the Internet was going
Speaker 1: to be an important component in all sorts of industries.
Speaker 1: Apple had already staked its own claim with iTunes in
Speaker 1: two thousand one, but there was a real concern that
Speaker 1: piracy essentially translated into lost sales. Now to that point,
Speaker 1: I want to acknowledge that it's not as simple as that.
Speaker 1: If I walk into an old fashioned record store and
Speaker 1: I shoplift an album, we're talking like old vinyl albums,
Speaker 1: and I grab a copy of uh, Phil Collins Greatest
Speaker 1: Hits because I'm real bad, and I slip it under
Speaker 1: my my jacket and I and I step out the door.
Speaker 1: That's a clear loss for the shop owner of that
Speaker 1: music shop, right, because I've taken one physical album. The
Speaker 1: shop owner has a limited number of physical copies that
Speaker 1: they have ordered from the record label, so they've spent
Speaker 1: a certain amount of money to get a certain number
Speaker 1: of copies of each title. I just took one of those.
Speaker 1: They can no longer sell that particular album, so they
Speaker 1: are out the cost they incurred when they ordered it.
Speaker 1: That's pretty clear, right, you can understand that's a direct loss.
Speaker 1: But with digital media it's different. Maybe I never intended
Speaker 1: to buy a certain song. Maybe I kind of want
Speaker 1: that song, but I don't want it badly enough to
Speaker 1: actually spend my money on it. So I decide I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna pirate a copy. The original song, however, still exists.
Speaker 1: The original copy of the song still exists. I didn't
Speaker 1: take anything physical. Nothing is stopping a vendor from selling
Speaker 1: just as many copies as they would have even if
Speaker 1: I hadn't taken anything. So for that reason, you can't
Speaker 1: really argue that stolen's songs directly translate into lost revenue
Speaker 1: in the digital market, because it could be that the
Speaker 1: people who downloaded songs illegally otherwise would have just never
Speaker 1: bought the music at all, so they may have just
Speaker 1: gone without. It's not a loss sale because it was
Speaker 1: never going to be a sale in the first place. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't want this to be one sided. While the
Speaker 1: people downloading music for free, we're circumventing the legal route,
Speaker 1: and they were effectively stealing music, whether you could argue
Speaker 1: that it was causing direct harm or not. The music
Speaker 1: industry wasn't exactly making a good case for purchasing music legally.
Speaker 1: The music landscape was fractured, with some record labels signing
Speaker 1: with certain online stores, other record labels would sign with
Speaker 1: other stores. Sometimes it was very piecemeal, where certain albums
Speaker 1: would be allowed and others wouldn't. And then there was
Speaker 1: the matter of digital rights management or d r m uh.
Speaker 1: This is a way of protecting digital property. Many companies
Speaker 1: have been putting restrictive DRM on music files. It's meant
Speaker 1: to prevent you from being able to make an infinite
Speaker 1: number of copies of a digital file, because obviously that's
Speaker 1: a downside to the digital format, at least if you
Speaker 1: are in the business of selling stuff, Right, if the
Speaker 1: thing you create it can be replicated infinitely by anyone,
Speaker 1: then all you have to do is sell one of those,
Speaker 1: and then immediately you never sell another copy because people
Speaker 1: just start copying them and then distributing them everywhere. So
Speaker 1: DRM was meant to be a counter to that. You're
Speaker 1: to prevent people from being able to copy indiscriminately in
Speaker 1: some way or another. But one of the nasty side
Speaker 1: effects of DRM is that it can impact the experience
Speaker 1: of legitimate customers. Right, So the purpose of DRM is
Speaker 1: to protect digital media so that people can't just steal it.
Speaker 1: But when that same DRM makes it harder to listen
Speaker 1: to legitimately purchased music, the people who are actually buying
Speaker 1: the stuff feel as though they've been punished for buying it. Right.
Speaker 1: If you if you bought a song and it turns
Speaker 1: out you can't listen to the song the way you
Speaker 1: want to, despite the fact that you've spent money on it.
Speaker 1: You're not, you don't have an incentive to keep doing that, right,
Speaker 1: You're You're You've got a bad experience. Meanwhile, pirates would
Speaker 1: spend some time and effort in order to strip files
Speaker 1: from the DRM, or rather DRM from the files, so
Speaker 1: that the versions that they would upload or allow to
Speaker 1: be downloaded from their machines would be DRM free. So
Speaker 1: you would actually have a better experience listening to the
Speaker 1: pirated music than if you were to purchase the legal stuff.
Speaker 1: So as a consumer, you had two choices. Essentially, you
Speaker 1: could jump through some hoops and deal with a crappy
Speaker 1: listening experience with official music that you pay for and
Speaker 1: it's got DRM and everything, so it's got all this
Speaker 1: baggage attached to it, or you could pop on over
Speaker 1: to a piracy site or service and then download whatever
Speaker 1: you want for free. Now, there always was a risk
Speaker 1: that you could also end up downloading some malware on
Speaker 1: top of the music files or whatever where it was
Speaker 1: you were after, but for many it seemed like it
Speaker 1: was worth the risk. So the whole thing was kind
Speaker 1: of a mess, and X thought there had to be
Speaker 1: a better way. There had to be some method to
Speaker 1: making music available digitally. That would remove the hurdles that
Speaker 1: the public would have to jump over to get to
Speaker 1: what they wanted. And if he could crack that, if
Speaker 1: he could build a real business out of it, then
Speaker 1: he could stand to really make some money. And he
Speaker 1: was thinking, there's gotta be a way to make the
Speaker 1: experience seamless enough where the legal route is preferable to piracy.
Speaker 1: That's the secret. If you can make it just as
Speaker 1: easy or easier to buy music as it would be
Speaker 1: to steal it, then more people are going to buy it.
Speaker 1: And the reasoning was that a lot of people want
Speaker 1: to actually spend money supporting the stuff they love. They
Speaker 1: just if you make it frustrating, they'll go around that,
Speaker 1: because who wants to deal with that kind of nonsense. Now,
Speaker 1: this was back in two thousand two, but would still
Speaker 1: be a few years before he would develop the idea further.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, he worked for a couple of companies,
Speaker 1: and he founded some other companies, including an online advertising
Speaker 1: firm called Advertigo, which he would later sell for a
Speaker 1: big profit. In fact, he ended up founding and selling
Speaker 1: four companies in a relatively short time. This was right
Speaker 1: after the wake of eBay purchasing Skype. It kind of
Speaker 1: opened up the mergers and acquisitions market in Europe at
Speaker 1: that time. And by then he was a millionaire, and
Speaker 1: he was considering retiring at the ripe old age of
Speaker 1: twenty three years old, but instead he thought about that
Speaker 1: music challenge again, also millionaire by twenty three. Way to go, dude, man,
Speaker 1: that that's some hustle right there. So Eck found a
Speaker 1: partner in Martin Lawrence n He was actually the guy
Speaker 1: who had acquired ad Vertigo from Daniel Eck, and that
Speaker 1: was ex advertising plat Form. The two began to brainstorm
Speaker 1: about making a legal music service that removed some of
Speaker 1: the barriers that other official stores had kind of been
Speaker 1: putting up. The reason that those barriers encouraged people to
Speaker 1: resort to piracy, and the music industry as a whole
Speaker 1: was hurting as and so something had to be done.
Speaker 1: But if you just made it easier to get that
Speaker 1: music you wanted legally, they figured people would do it,
Speaker 1: just like I was saying earlier. So they created an
Speaker 1: office out of a three bedroom apartment that was above
Speaker 1: a coffee shop, and they began to work on their design.
Speaker 1: Their plan was to leverage peer to peer networks to
Speaker 1: deliver streaming music. So what exactly is a peer to
Speaker 1: peer network and how does it work. Some of you
Speaker 1: might be familiar with peer to peer. It's something that
Speaker 1: was really big in the nineties. It's still quite big today.
Speaker 1: It's just not talked about as much. A lot of
Speaker 1: the conversation is shifted to cloud computing, but peer to
Speaker 1: peer is still a very important methodology. So here's a
Speaker 1: quick rundown. First, You've got a network of computers all
Speaker 1: right there. They're connected, perhaps over the Internet, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's a network within the Internet, it's not the
Speaker 1: entire Internet. So each of those computers could be owned
Speaker 1: by a regular person like yourself, and each computer in
Speaker 1: that network is what we would call a peer. Each
Speaker 1: computer on the network is running special software, which is
Speaker 1: what makes them peers. It connects them, it creates this
Speaker 1: network among all the peers on that particular connection, and
Speaker 1: peers can share files with one another without having to
Speaker 1: go through an intermediary server. So if I'm on the
Speaker 1: network and you're on the network, we could share files
Speaker 1: directly with one another. And typically the way this would
Speaker 1: work is that you would designate a special folder on
Speaker 1: your computer's hard drive to act as a share folder,
Speaker 1: and anything you would put in that share folder could
Speaker 1: be seen and copied by peers on the network, and
Speaker 1: the more peers who have copies of a file, the
Speaker 1: faster downloads go. As your computer can pull from the
Speaker 1: best connection available across the network, you can get bits
Speaker 1: and pieces from different computers and just download a file
Speaker 1: much faster than if it were dependent upon a single source.
Speaker 1: So the more computers on a peer to peer network
Speaker 1: that are hosting a file, the faster those transfers will go. Now,
Speaker 1: there's nothing illegal about this method of file transfer. It's
Speaker 1: a great way to disseminate large files across a network.
Speaker 1: It's efficient, and it removes the need for more hefty
Speaker 1: network servers. But it also allowed for people to share
Speaker 1: stuff illegally at a pretty alarming rate, at least alarming
Speaker 1: to media companies, and so selling the idea of a
Speaker 1: legal peer to peer network was a bit of an
Speaker 1: uphill battle. However, the actual implementation of a peer to
Speaker 1: peer network using Spotify service was a lot different from
Speaker 1: the napsters and kazas of the piracy era. The plan
Speaker 1: wasn't to allow users to build up an enormous library
Speaker 1: of songs in their personal computers, which they then could
Speaker 1: help distribute across an ever widening network and thus sap
Speaker 1: the music industry of its revenue. Instead, the plan was
Speaker 1: to use peer to peer relationships to create a good
Speaker 1: listening experience for users to sidestep another problem. That problem
Speaker 1: was if you wanted to create a centralized music on
Speaker 1: demand service, you'd be beholden to the Internet connections between
Speaker 1: your server, your giant music database, and all of your users.
Speaker 1: Now this wasn't as huge a problem in Sweden, which
Speaker 1: was a leading and still is a leading country when
Speaker 1: it comes to rolling out high speed broadband internet, but
Speaker 1: it would make it difficult to scale Spotify globally. So
Speaker 1: let's say that you did go with this method, where
Speaker 1: you went with a centralized approach. You have your big
Speaker 1: music database that's sitting in a data center somewhere on
Speaker 1: your property. If a connection were bad between a user
Speaker 1: and this database, the user might have to wait for
Speaker 1: a long time for a song to buffer far enough
Speaker 1: along to start playing. That's irritating, or worse, the song's
Speaker 1: quality might suffer in the middle of the song, or
Speaker 1: it might stop playing. That you know it might midplay
Speaker 1: through while the service tried to get the data from
Speaker 1: the server side to the user's device and restart the song.
Speaker 1: The peer to peer approach could help that. Now explain
Speaker 1: how it works in just a moment, But let's get
Speaker 1: back to the business side for a second. They met
Speaker 1: with a lot of resistance from record labels because they
Speaker 1: were going to have to get licensing agreements from those
Speaker 1: record labels in order to do this. But their arguments
Speaker 1: were persuasive. It took a long time, but they were
Speaker 1: making some pretty sound arguments. They laid out the challenges
Speaker 1: that I mentioned earlier with the older model of music.
Speaker 1: They stayed in their case in terms of business plans,
Speaker 1: and they said, are the licensing fees and royalties would
Speaker 1: provide steady revenue to the record labels and presumably too
Speaker 1: artists more than that in a second, But it was
Speaker 1: challenging to get the record labels to agree. It was
Speaker 1: also challenging to get investors on board because without the
Speaker 1: backing of the music industry, there was no business for Spotify.
Speaker 1: They had nothing to provide anybody, and many investors saw
Speaker 1: the idea as a bad bet, So Lawrenson would end
Speaker 1: up funding operations for a couple of years, just out
Speaker 1: of out of pocket. Now, gradually record labels began to
Speaker 1: come around, and they sort of had to because the
Speaker 1: music industry revenues had peaked in nineteen ninety nine at
Speaker 1: twenty seven billion dollars. That's a lot of cheddar, as
Speaker 1: Ben Bolan would say, but that was the peak. It
Speaker 1: went to decline after that, sales started flagging. This wasn't
Speaker 1: just due to piracy, although to hear the music industry,
Speaker 1: they would argue vehemently that piracy was what took the
Speaker 1: largest chunk out of their, uh, their revenue. I would
Speaker 1: say that there were a lot of different factors. But
Speaker 1: by a decade later, in two thousand and eight, the
Speaker 1: global industry was down to fourteen billion dollars. That's still
Speaker 1: a lot of money, but that's like half of what
Speaker 1: it was in nine and so it took Spotify about
Speaker 1: two years from conception to launch. It was thought of
Speaker 1: in two thousand two, it was seriously started in two
Speaker 1: thousand six, and it was launched in two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: in October two thousand eight, uh and launched in just
Speaker 1: a few European countries at the time. It did get
Speaker 1: the backing of the four major music labels. That would
Speaker 1: be Warner Music, Sony, E and My Music and Universal. Now,
Speaker 1: when we come back, I'll talk more about how the
Speaker 1: service works and how it's evolved since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: talk about the Spotify service. To access Spotify, you first
Speaker 1: need to download the client software for whatever platforms you
Speaker 1: plan to use. Now, originally this was limited to desktop computers,
Speaker 1: so your first step was downloading some software to your
Speaker 1: machine and installing it. This would act as your interface,
Speaker 1: allowing you to search for songs on the service, but
Speaker 1: it also served as the peer to peer software to
Speaker 1: make your machine part of the overall sharing network. This
Speaker 1: client can pull music stored on your computer into your
Speaker 1: Spotify library, assuming the music you have isn't stored in
Speaker 1: a protected M four P file. That's actually a little
Speaker 1: bit redundant because in four P stands were IMPEG four
Speaker 1: protected audio. Uh. This was a file extension that Apple's
Speaker 1: fair Play digital rights management system used. The format restricted
Speaker 1: the devices that could play the associated audio file and
Speaker 1: limited to authorized devices only, So if an device was
Speaker 1: authorized to play the file, it could otherwise it could not.
Speaker 1: Spotify just to sidestep any problems, said we can't handle
Speaker 1: any of those types of files. However, if you did
Speaker 1: happen to have songs in that format, Spotify would look
Speaker 1: to see if it had a license for those tracks
Speaker 1: on its service. So if you happen to have a
Speaker 1: track of an artist that was on Spotify, and that
Speaker 1: song was on Spotify, it would match the track with
Speaker 1: what was in your library and just go ahead and
Speaker 1: put that in your playlist. It's just you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: listening to the version that was on your computer. You
Speaker 1: would actually be listening to one that was on the
Speaker 1: Spotify service itself, and it would be a a non
Speaker 1: uh M four P DRM version. All other songs, whether
Speaker 1: in Spotify's licensing agreements or not, would appear in your library,
Speaker 1: assuming you have DRM free versions on your computer. So
Speaker 1: even if you had a whole mess of songs in
Speaker 1: your computer's memory, if it was in its hard drive
Speaker 1: that were not on Spotify. Let's say that you had
Speaker 1: all the Beatles albums, and Beatles was one of those
Speaker 1: groups that wasn't being carried by Spotify, it would show
Speaker 1: up in your library because you had them on your
Speaker 1: hard drive, but no one else would be able to
Speaker 1: listen to those using Spotify, you know, pulling it over
Speaker 1: the network. The format Spotify uses when streaming music is
Speaker 1: the Vorbis method of audio compression. Vorbis is an open
Speaker 1: source software project, and it uses the file extension dot
Speaker 1: o g g or og for compressed audio files. So
Speaker 1: you often hear people talk about as Aga Vorbis, which
Speaker 1: sounds like a character from Game of Thrones. Now, actually
Speaker 1: it does trace its name to a fantasy series, but
Speaker 1: one that's a little more lighthearted than George R. R.
Speaker 1: Martin's epic Saga because the name Vorbius comes from Terry
Speaker 1: Pratchett's fantasy comedy series Discworld, a fantastic comedy fantasy series.
Speaker 1: If you've never read any of the Discworld books, I
Speaker 1: highly recommend checking them out. But this name was specifically
Speaker 1: from the book Small Gods. Aug is also a name
Speaker 1: that shows up in Terry Pratchett's works, but that was
Speaker 1: just a coincidence. The uh the Age extension was not
Speaker 1: named after the Terry Pratchett character uh Nanny Ogg in
Speaker 1: the Discworld books. I've talked about audio compression before, but
Speaker 1: here's a quick reminder. The purpose for compression is that
Speaker 1: audio files tend to be pretty large, and the larger
Speaker 1: the file size, the more time it takes to send
Speaker 1: over a network, and that time is experienced by the
Speaker 1: user as a lag between hitting the play button and
Speaker 1: hearing any sound, or in the form of having a
Speaker 1: song stop part way through while the data transfer continues
Speaker 1: in the background, or having the quality of the sound
Speaker 1: drop in the middle of play through. So compression means
Speaker 1: you take these files and you make the file size
Speaker 1: is smaller and thus easier to transfer across a network.
Speaker 1: And there are two broadways to do this. There's lossless
Speaker 1: and lossy. Now, lossless compression means that you take a file,
Speaker 1: you squish it down, you compress it, and when you
Speaker 1: un squash it when you when you expand it back,
Speaker 1: you have the bit for bit identical file as the
Speaker 1: pre compressed version. So you have song file A, you
Speaker 1: compress it into compressed format B, and when you take
Speaker 1: it back out of compression is back to song file A. Again,
Speaker 1: this is not easy to do, and typically you only
Speaker 1: reduce the file size by a relatively small amount. Some
Speaker 1: files can only be compressed down maybe five cent, which
Speaker 1: does not save you a whole lot of space, and
Speaker 1: you might be able to get down as much as
Speaker 1: fifty with certain types of lossless compression. But if you're
Speaker 1: really looking at a high quality audio file and it's
Speaker 1: a large audio file, even the reduction is still still
Speaker 1: means you're dealing with a big file. It still might
Speaker 1: be too big for you to easily stream. Lossy compression
Speaker 1: can squish files down much smaller than lossless, but they
Speaker 1: do so at drumroll please a loss. Lossy compression ditches
Speaker 1: some of the data in the audio file during the
Speaker 1: compression process. Now, ideally, the information the compression format ditches
Speaker 1: represents stuff that you wouldn't be able to notice anyway,
Speaker 1: because human hearing can only pick up a range of frequencies,
Speaker 1: and typically we describe it as the average human can
Speaker 1: hear between twenty hurts to twenty kill a hurts. Anything
Speaker 1: that is above or below that range is outside what
Speaker 1: we could directly perceive. So if the audio file has
Speaker 1: any information about sounds beyond human hearing, then it might
Speaker 1: just sweep that stuff under the digital rug before compressing
Speaker 1: the rest. It might say, well, no one could hear
Speaker 1: this anyway, so there's no point in keeping it, and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna not include that information. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of different rules for compression and different codex to
Speaker 1: follow different philosophies, but they're all based on the psychoacoustic
Speaker 1: model of how we perceive sound. So if it determines
Speaker 1: that we would not have perceived that sound, it can
Speaker 1: go out out the door at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: If it's important, it's supposed to go into the compressed file,
Speaker 1: and if it's not, it doesn't. The question is who
Speaker 1: determines what exactly is important. That's what the different codex do.
Speaker 1: Moving on, so, Spotify chose the ag vorbis format because
Speaker 1: it represented a great return on investments. Plus, being open
Speaker 1: source and in the public domain meant that the company
Speaker 1: could use the format without worrying about licensing issues, so
Speaker 1: there was no fear that one day they would turn
Speaker 1: around and encounter resistance from some vendor that had them
Speaker 1: over a barrel by holding onto a compression license in
Speaker 1: return for more money. That no one's gonna say to them, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I see that you're doing really well now, so we
Speaker 1: want a bigger cut of the profits. Also, according to
Speaker 1: Kevin Goldsmith, who was the vice president of engineering at
Speaker 1: Spotify for several years. The ag vorbis format provided good
Speaker 1: audio quality relative to the bandwidth needed to stream the audio,
Speaker 1: so they just felt like they were getting the best
Speaker 1: results with it. The standard audio quality for Spotify's desktop
Speaker 1: app is one sixty kilobits per second. Now, technically that
Speaker 1: refers to the audio files bit rate, or the number
Speaker 1: of bits used per unit of playback time to represent audio.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, the higher that number, the better quality of
Speaker 1: audio you get. Essentially, you're saying you're using more information
Speaker 1: to to present that sound per unit of time. One
Speaker 1: sixty kill a bits per second is kind of in
Speaker 1: the middle of audio quality for streaming. If you were
Speaker 1: to upgrade to premium Spotify UH and more on that later,
Speaker 1: the bit rate would be increased to three killabits per second,
Speaker 1: so you would have higher quality audio files. The actual
Speaker 1: quality of the audio you would experience would be dependent
Speaker 1: not just on bit rate, but other stuff, sample rate
Speaker 1: and all that good stuff, plus the quality of the
Speaker 1: speakers you're using, So in some cases you might not
Speaker 1: really be able to tell the difference between hundred sixty
Speaker 1: killabits per second and three killabits per second. If you
Speaker 1: had really low quality headphones, for example, you might listen
Speaker 1: to the exact same track and not be able to
Speaker 1: tell the difference between the good version and the bad
Speaker 1: version quote unquote, or the good version and the better
Speaker 1: version if you prefer, uh, if your headphones are are crappy.
Speaker 1: So it's dependent on lots of different things. Plus it's
Speaker 1: dependent upon our perception, which is not reliable all the time.
Speaker 1: All right. While Spotify relied on DRM free Music to
Speaker 1: pull into the music library, the format Spotify uses to
Speaker 1: stream includes DRM, so that's also something to remember. In
Speaker 1: addition to the songs that you've already got stored on
Speaker 1: your device, you can search the Spotify service for specific tracks.
Speaker 1: So these would be things that you don't own that
Speaker 1: are on your hard drive, and Spotify has an agreement
Speaker 1: with whatever entity holds the right for that music, the
Speaker 1: track should pop right up. So let's say you play
Speaker 1: on a track that you want to hear. You you
Speaker 1: have decided you want to hear S O B by
Speaker 1: Nathaniel Rateliff in the Night Sweats, which is a phenomenal song.
Speaker 1: You don't have that song in your hard drive, though,
Speaker 1: so you open up Spotify and you type it in
Speaker 1: and you see that it's available there, Spotify serves up
Speaker 1: a streaming version of the song to you, and rather
Speaker 1: than serve it to you from a central server, it
Speaker 1: consults the network of Spotify users and it finds copies
Speaker 1: of the song on those peers, those users whose devices
Speaker 1: are currently connected to the network, and it sends the
Speaker 1: file to you streaming. By relying on this network, this
Speaker 1: helps ensure that you get an uninterrupted experience played at
Speaker 1: a decent sound quality. And while you're listening to the music,
Speaker 1: Spotify is actually storing the song in a memory cash
Speaker 1: on your computer, and that serves two purposes. First, because
Speaker 1: Spotify is staying a little ahead of you in your
Speaker 1: listening experience, you're listening to music that's stored on your
Speaker 1: device's memory, not pouring directly in from the Spotify feed.
Speaker 1: So as long as the data going into your memory
Speaker 1: is outpacing the playback speed, you won't have any interruptions. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, they're filling up the bucket faster than
Speaker 1: you can empty the bucket. But more importantly for Spotify operations,
Speaker 1: those songs that are stored in the cash memory of
Speaker 1: your device stay there so they can be used in
Speaker 1: the peer to peer sharing. I was talking about So
Speaker 1: the next time someone else in the network wants to
Speaker 1: listen to S O B, Spotify might be in part
Speaker 1: relying on your computer because you happen to have listened
Speaker 1: to that song earlier, and it happens to be stored
Speaker 1: in your cash, so your device helps keep Spotify's service going.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the cash material might cause some other issues on
Speaker 1: your device. If you've got an awful lot of stuff
Speaker 1: on there, maybe you don't have a lot of space
Speaker 1: on your device, and you might notice that things aren't
Speaker 1: running as smoothly as they normally do. So Spotify allows
Speaker 1: users to go into their settings and see where offline
Speaker 1: songs are stored. This would be the cash that they
Speaker 1: rely upon. You can then go to that folder and
Speaker 1: delete the files in that folder to clear out the cash.
Speaker 1: That's just for the desktop version. For iPhones, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit more of a pain. Spotify advises iPhone users
Speaker 1: to reinstall the Spotify app. You know, essentially you're taking
Speaker 1: it off your phone and putting it back on again,
Speaker 1: which will clear out the apps cash, but it will
Speaker 1: also log you out of your account, so you have
Speaker 1: to log back in. You have to re sink any
Speaker 1: offline music you have stored on your phone with your account,
Speaker 1: you have to reactivate any preferred settings you might want
Speaker 1: on there, So that's kind of a hassle. On Android devices,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit better. You can go into your library,
Speaker 1: mean you choose settings, select other in the options, and
Speaker 1: then delete cash and save data. It's not exactly straightforward,
Speaker 1: but it's perhaps a little bit better than having to
Speaker 1: reinstall the whole app. Now, I'm not surprised that it's
Speaker 1: a bit of a headache to clear out the cash
Speaker 1: because Spotify's operation depends upon this peer to peer infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and the songs in your cash are what help ensure
Speaker 1: a smooth experience for people in the network. So your
Speaker 1: device is effectively working for Spotify, which is why they
Speaker 1: probably don't make it super easy for you to clear
Speaker 1: that cash. Your device is effectively working for Spotify. Now,
Speaker 1: I've got a lot more to say about Spotify, but
Speaker 1: before I get into that, let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Okay, So Spotify launches in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight in Europe and uses this peer to peer
Speaker 1: technology to help deliver high speed streaming to users. The
Speaker 1: company had managed to make some deals with enough record
Speaker 1: labels to create a compelling but by no means universal
Speaker 1: music service, and it rolled out operations gradually, originally relying
Speaker 1: on an invitation only approach to adding listeners so as
Speaker 1: to guarantee a good experience and not get overwhelmed. Riyal
Speaker 1: the gate Plus they had two tiers of users. They
Speaker 1: had free users and premium users. The free users were
Speaker 1: the only ones that had to be invitation only if
Speaker 1: you wanted to pay for the service. They as many
Speaker 1: people could join as possible for that. They didn't want
Speaker 1: to limit that at all. Understandably, that's not snark, that's
Speaker 1: just I mean, that's just makes sense. Uh. The invitation
Speaker 1: served another purpose because it also gave the service and
Speaker 1: air of exclusivity. Nothing makes people want to try something
Speaker 1: out more than being told there's a limit to the
Speaker 1: number of users who will be accepted. And we saw
Speaker 1: the same thing when Google Plus launched. Each user would
Speaker 1: have five invites they could extend to other people, So
Speaker 1: finding someone on the service who hadn't already dedicated all
Speaker 1: five invites became a bit of a common pastime. You
Speaker 1: would look for your friends and say, hey, do any
Speaker 1: of you have an invite to Spotify? And like I said,
Speaker 1: the service did have two tiers. The free tier was
Speaker 1: supported by advertising still is supported by advertising. Um it
Speaker 1: has had a limitation on the number of hours that
Speaker 1: users could stream music per month, and the service also
Speaker 1: placed limits on the number of times you could listen
Speaker 1: to any particular track over a given amount of time,
Speaker 1: and those were really Spotify is way of of bowing
Speaker 1: to the music and the street to get these negotiations
Speaker 1: to work out. So if you listen to Spotify on
Speaker 1: the service, uh, you'd get a commercial between every few songs,
Speaker 1: and if you try to mute the audio on commercials,
Speaker 1: it would just pause the ad, so really you're just
Speaker 1: putting off the inevitable. The desktop application would likewise display
Speaker 1: ads over the user interface, so you could get both
Speaker 1: audio and visual ads to generate revenue for Spotify, and
Speaker 1: occasionally video ads playing as well. In addition, Spotify introduced
Speaker 1: a premium tier, so for a monthly fee which has
Speaker 1: changed a few times over the years, but for a
Speaker 1: certain amount per month, you could get unlimited access to
Speaker 1: the music that was available over Spotify. There were no
Speaker 1: monthly restrictions on use. You weren't capped at a certain
Speaker 1: number of hours and you also had no ads with premium.
Speaker 1: Premium users could also listen to Spotify offline. Obviously, that
Speaker 1: service would rely on the music stored on the device
Speaker 1: you're using, and you would get an unlimited number of
Speaker 1: skips of songs. If something was playing and you didn't
Speaker 1: care to listen to it, you could skip it, and
Speaker 1: then if you didn't like the next six songs, you
Speaker 1: could skip those as well, and you'd never run out
Speaker 1: of the skips. Oh and you would also get that
Speaker 1: higher bit rate for your audio files that kill abits
Speaker 1: per second. That was another benefit for the premium use.
Speaker 1: Still is another benefit I keep saying was, but this
Speaker 1: is still a thing. The company posted a four point
Speaker 1: four million dollar loss in two thousand and eight, But
Speaker 1: then it's kind of hard to imagine a scenario where
Speaker 1: that wouldn't have happened. The company had to deal with
Speaker 1: startup costs, all those music licensing fees, had to pay
Speaker 1: for operations, and had to pay out royalties. Spotify says
Speaker 1: they pay out seventy of their revenue and royalties to
Speaker 1: different music companies music labels, and it had only just
Speaker 1: gotten started. And it's also the sort of business that
Speaker 1: really generates serious revenue after its scales up. It actually
Speaker 1: is kind of a money losing venture on till it
Speaker 1: gets to a certain size, but turns out that the
Speaker 1: loss was just the first in a long series of
Speaker 1: annual losses. Spotify was starting to get investors, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't turning a profit. In fact, it wouldn't officially turn
Speaker 1: a profitable quarter until February two thousand nineteen, so for
Speaker 1: more than a decade Spotify lost money, though in one
Speaker 1: quarter in two thousand eighteen, it appeared profitable, but that
Speaker 1: was because of a one time tax benefit that Spotify
Speaker 1: received due to its stake in another music streaming service
Speaker 1: called ten Cent Music Entertainment Group out of China. Now
Speaker 1: that story gets a bit weird and complex, but it
Speaker 1: boils down to this. Ten Cent was going to hold
Speaker 1: an I p O in the United States. It was
Speaker 1: going to go public in the US, which meant as
Speaker 1: part of that process, it had to declare the company's
Speaker 1: value in an effort of going public. That also meant
Speaker 1: that Spotify had to re evaluate the value of its
Speaker 1: in sment Intencent. Because Spotify owned a percentage of stocks
Speaker 1: in the company, they had to reevaluate how much those
Speaker 1: stocks were actually worth instead of what was believed to
Speaker 1: be worth. That then led to Spotify being eligible for
Speaker 1: a big tax benefit, and that technically put them in
Speaker 1: the black in two thousand and eighteen for one quarter.
Speaker 1: But that sort of thing is obviously not replicable. It's
Speaker 1: not sustainable. It's no way to run a business. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't count on that happening every quarter or so.
Speaker 1: The transition to profitability in early two thousand nineteen is
Speaker 1: more of a good sign for the company, and it's
Speaker 1: also interesting because it's a company that's valued at billions
Speaker 1: of dollars despite having operated at a financial loss for
Speaker 1: nearly all of its existence. It's another way of reminding
Speaker 1: me that business is crazy. That you can run a
Speaker 1: business that is losing money year after year after year,
Speaker 1: and yet the value of your company that is not
Speaker 1: making money is going up and up and up to
Speaker 1: a point where you know, eventually one of two things
Speaker 1: needs to happen. Either your company needs to start making
Speaker 1: money so that all of that investment in that company
Speaker 1: is justified, or everything falls apart and everybody loses their
Speaker 1: shirt and a lot of people are out of jobs.
Speaker 1: I obviously prefer option A to option B. But it
Speaker 1: still blows my mind that companies like Spotify. Spotify is
Speaker 1: not alone in this Twitter is another great example. But
Speaker 1: companies like Spotify could operate for so long without making
Speaker 1: money and uh and yet still see the value of
Speaker 1: the company on the rise. It's crazy anyway. Jumping back
Speaker 1: to two thousand nine for a second. In February two nine,
Speaker 1: Spotify drop the requirement for invitations and launched registrations in
Speaker 1: the UK, so if you wanted a free Spotify account,
Speaker 1: you could sign up. If you were in Europe and
Speaker 1: no specifically in the UK, you could sign up for
Speaker 1: a free account right off the bat. It also launched
Speaker 1: the Spotify Mobile service. It was pretty primitive in the
Speaker 1: early incarnation, but it did expand its offerings to mobile
Speaker 1: phone users. I think this is a good time to
Speaker 1: mention it was sort of a serendipitous issue of timing
Speaker 1: for Spotify to launch in two thousand and eight because
Speaker 1: Apple had introduced the iPhone in two thousand seven, and
Speaker 1: Apple had effectively opened up the gates for an era
Speaker 1: of consumer smartphones, because up to that point, smartphones had
Speaker 1: largely been reserved for executives and for bleeding edge early
Speaker 1: adopters and no one else. The smartphone revolution really created
Speaker 1: a market for services like Spotify. People like having a
Speaker 1: portable music source. But Spotify executives would even admit later on.
Speaker 1: Daniel Eck admitted later on that the company was a
Speaker 1: little late to create a truly robust mobile app, that
Speaker 1: they were a little late to the game on that one.
Speaker 1: They still managed to capitalize on it, but they probably
Speaker 1: should have moved earlier than they did. However, even that
Speaker 1: early limited mobile service was a big hit, so much
Speaker 1: so that Spotify would actually close down those open registrations
Speaker 1: in the UK went back to the invitation only model
Speaker 1: back in September of two thousand nine, so users could
Speaker 1: opt for the premium service without the need for an invitation.
Speaker 1: Yet again and again, it makes sense Spotify wasn't going
Speaker 1: to say no, we're gonna limit the number of people
Speaker 1: who want to give us money. Meanwhile, Spotify was dealing
Speaker 1: with some of the other issues that tech companies have
Speaker 1: had to face throughout their own histories, like data security
Speaker 1: being a big one. In March two thousand nine, Spotify
Speaker 1: representatives announced that the security team at the company had
Speaker 1: detected a security flaw in the Spotify service, which could
Speaker 1: have meant that someone had gained unauthorized access to private
Speaker 1: account information for people who had registered before December nineteen,
Speaker 1: two thousand eight. Whether anyone had actually done that was unknown,
Speaker 1: but it was technically possible. Spotify patched that vulnerability. Also
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine, a guy named Mark Zuckerberg you've
Speaker 1: heard of it um, posted on a little platform that
Speaker 1: he had co founded called Facebook that he thought Spotify
Speaker 1: was quote so good end quote kind of like sweet Caroline,
Speaker 1: and that was an early hint of things to come
Speaker 1: in the United States. Would take a couple of years
Speaker 1: to come to fruition, but Facebook and Spotify would be
Speaker 1: BFFs at that point. Spotify also introduced a music purchase
Speaker 1: option in some markets in two thousand nine, which meant
Speaker 1: users in those markets could buy music tracks right off
Speaker 1: Spotify and use Spotify like an online music store similar
Speaker 1: to iTunes. That feature would stick around until early two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, and Spotify then discontinued it, but for a
Speaker 1: while that was another revenue source was acting as a
Speaker 1: servant online retailer. In January, Spotify had another headache to
Speaker 1: deal with the anti virus software Semantic identified Spotify as
Speaker 1: a trojan horse form of malware, which seems pretty harsh
Speaker 1: to me, but you can kind of understand it because
Speaker 1: since it used this peer to peer relationship, it meant
Speaker 1: that there was a lot of stuff going on in
Speaker 1: the background and that could look suspicious to an anti
Speaker 1: virus software if they thought, oh, it looks like some
Speaker 1: program is trying to gain administrative access or some sort
Speaker 1: of backdoor access to a computer. So it was proactively
Speaker 1: blocking Spotify from working. So users with semantic antivirus software
Speaker 1: found their Spotify programs were being nullified. So that was
Speaker 1: a big pain for a lot of people for at
Speaker 1: least a short while until it was all patched out.
Speaker 1: Two thousand eleven was when Spotify was finally able to
Speaker 1: enter the US market, So it launched in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight. People over here in the U S had
Speaker 1: heard about it, but no one was able to actually
Speaker 1: access it without using you know, VPNs or some other
Speaker 1: method to get around the that their computers were. In
Speaker 1: the US. It taken more time for the company to
Speaker 1: negotiate with music labels. Um they had to you know,
Speaker 1: every time they want to move into a new market,
Speaker 1: they have to renegotiate with music labels because the music
Speaker 1: labels want to be able to dictate how their music
Speaker 1: is sold in any given market, and the US is
Speaker 1: a particularly big market, so it took a lot of negotiations.
Speaker 1: Spotify said it has paid billions of dollars in royalty
Speaker 1: fees over the years that there have been some other
Speaker 1: stories that kind of raise questions about this. So, for example,
Speaker 1: one famous story that tends to get quoted all over
Speaker 1: the place, and I think it dates all the way
Speaker 1: back to two thousand nine, is that Lady Gaga's track
Speaker 1: poker Face had hit a few million streams early in
Speaker 1: Spotify's history, and yet generated only one hundred sixty seven
Speaker 1: dollars in revenues, hundred sixty seven thousand, just one sixty
Speaker 1: seven and a hundred bucks plus sixty seven more bucks,
Speaker 1: and that's it. Spotify doesn't have a stock per play
Speaker 1: royalty rate, but I've seen estimates of per play a
Speaker 1: track earning point zero zero six dollars, so point six
Speaker 1: cents to point zero zero eight four dollars or point
Speaker 1: zero eight four or point eight four cents, I should say,
Speaker 1: so not even a full penny per play, So you
Speaker 1: got to rack up a lot of plays to earn
Speaker 1: a dollar, let alone a hundred sixty seven. Now, that
Speaker 1: has led some artists to complain about Spotify, saying that
Speaker 1: this company is benefiting unfairly from the artist's work. And
Speaker 1: you can see where they're coming from. If they're saying,
Speaker 1: millions of people are listening to my music and I
Speaker 1: got a hundred bucks for it, that does seem to
Speaker 1: be pretty unfair. But then Spotify kept operating at a loss.
Speaker 1: The company itself wasn't making an enormous amount of money,
Speaker 1: and according to Spotify again, they were giving the vast
Speaker 1: majority of their revenues back as royalty payments to record labels.
Speaker 1: So maybe you could argue the record labels had some
Speaker 1: responsibility for this, since they were so vehement in their
Speaker 1: negotiations with Spotify, But I think overall, it really just
Speaker 1: points out what a complicated industry, the entertainment industry is
Speaker 1: in general. So Spotify partnered with Facebook for the United
Speaker 1: States rollout, and US users could download Spotify on their
Speaker 1: computers and uh they could create an account using their
Speaker 1: Facebook login information and automatically connect Spotify to Facebook. That
Speaker 1: helped drive adoption in the US. It also lead to
Speaker 1: some controversy. There was a two thousand eighteen piece in
Speaker 1: The New York Times, a report that found Facebook had
Speaker 1: some pretty liberal data sharing agreements with various partners, including Spotify,
Speaker 1: and that those agreements gave companies extensive access to user
Speaker 1: data and that included thing Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal
Speaker 1: Bank of Canada the ability to read private messages between users. Yikes,
Speaker 1: So why would they do that? Why would they give
Speaker 1: these companies the ability? Well, the thought was, at least
Speaker 1: for Spotify, that users could send updates on what they
Speaker 1: were listening to to their friends on Facebook. Through this
Speaker 1: messaging service, you could essentially say, Oh, I'm listening to
Speaker 1: Lady Gaga and my buddy Shay really loves Lady Gaga,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to remind Shay. Hey, hey, listen, I'm
Speaker 1: listening to Lady Gaga right now. Check it out and
Speaker 1: send her a message. Uh. This, by the way, was
Speaker 1: a messaging service that predated Facebook Messenger, the current version
Speaker 1: of Messenger that Facebook uses. But in order to do this,
Speaker 1: in order to activate this ability, Facebook had to grant
Speaker 1: some access to the messaging service to Spotify, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily intentionally awful, but it doesn't take a lot
Speaker 1: of imagination to conjure up how a system could be
Speaker 1: really badly abused in this way. But the idea was
Speaker 1: sort of similar to giving up the rights to a
Speaker 1: work so that it can be displayed on a on
Speaker 1: a cloud service. Right if you if you create a
Speaker 1: document on Google Docs, you give up some of the
Speaker 1: rights of that document. But it's not meant to transfer
Speaker 1: the intellectual property over to Google. Rather, it's to give
Speaker 1: Google their permission to show you that document no matter
Speaker 1: what computer you're using, because otherwise Google would effectively be
Speaker 1: circumventing those rules for intellectual property. That was the same
Speaker 1: idea with this, but you can see how it was
Speaker 1: not particularly well thought out. In two thousand eighteen, Spotify
Speaker 1: became the world's most valuable music company after its public
Speaker 1: listing on the New York Stock Exchange, which pushed the
Speaker 1: company to a valuation of twenty five billion dollars. And
Speaker 1: keep in mind that at that point the company had
Speaker 1: still yet to turn a profit. Unbelievable. Now these days,
Speaker 1: Spotify has around nineties six million paid subscribers, many more
Speaker 1: use the free option, and in early two thousand nineteen,
Speaker 1: Spotify made another big move by acquiring Gimlet Media and
Speaker 1: a company called Anchor, both of which are big players
Speaker 1: in the podcast world. Anchor is a company that creates
Speaker 1: tools for podcasters to build, monetize, and publish podcasts, and
Speaker 1: gimblet Media is a startup podcast network. Spotify plans to
Speaker 1: use those acquisitions to build out original programming on their platform,
Speaker 1: and the company estimates that in the future, non music
Speaker 1: media will account for twenty of all streaming on Spotify,
Speaker 1: and the company wouldn't have to dole out royalties to
Speaker 1: the music industry for podcast streams, so that reduces costs
Speaker 1: for that particular part of its business. As of this recording,
Speaker 1: Spotify plans to spend another half billion dollars on podcasting
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. Serious business. It remains to be seen
Speaker 1: how this will impact the podcasting industry as a whole,
Speaker 1: which obviously I am very interested in since I'm in
Speaker 1: that industry, But there's potential for some pretty big shake
Speaker 1: ups coming down the line. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: questions about how Spotify will handle its in house podcasts
Speaker 1: versus those from outside the company, as well as how
Speaker 1: it will handle ads that will play within podcasts. Any
Speaker 1: show that Spotify produces, they can probably monetize it any
Speaker 1: which way. For shows that they carry that are produced
Speaker 1: from outside Spotify, that's a little more tricky. Right, Like
Speaker 1: the shows I produce, we have ad breaks. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've noticed them. Obviously, we would want those ad breaks
Speaker 1: preserved if we were to have our shows on other
Speaker 1: platforms like Spotify, which we do, and that's important because
Speaker 1: if they were stripped out, then we wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to monetize those episodes, and somebody else will be making
Speaker 1: money off of our content, and it wouldn't be It
Speaker 1: wouldn't make our advertisers happy, it wouldn't make us happy.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a delicate thing. Presumably Spotify will preserve
Speaker 1: that they are currently preserving the ads from out of
Speaker 1: network podcasts, and then there are the Spotify exclusives that
Speaker 1: listeners will only be able to listen to if they
Speaker 1: happen to use Spotify service, and all of this, I'm
Speaker 1: sure is going to get hashed out over time. On
Speaker 1: one last thing, just before I finished the notes for
Speaker 1: this particular episode, some more news broke that Spotify is
Speaker 1: bringing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple in the European Union.
Speaker 1: The main charge that they are bringing is that Apple's
Speaker 1: policy is to take a thirty cut of app revenue
Speaker 1: and that this is specifically harmful to streaming services that
Speaker 1: compete against Apple, saying, well, if you take that cut
Speaker 1: for us to operate on your platform, then and considering
Speaker 1: how much revenue we have to spend for our our
Speaker 1: royalties and everything, Uh, it actually costs us money to
Speaker 1: work on your on your system. So what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you are discouraging other companies to compete with you
Speaker 1: on that space. So this is anti competitive and thus
Speaker 1: uh indicative of a monopoly. So that's where the charge is. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that's going to take some time to to suss out
Speaker 1: over in the EU, So I'm sure I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to do a follow up at some point. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more to talk about, but I'm going to save
Speaker 1: that for another show. I also plan on doing an
Speaker 1: episode that's sort of more philosophical, touching on some of
Speaker 1: the ideas I've talked about here about how our consumption
Speaker 1: of media has changed in my lifetime, how that has
Speaker 1: changed significantly, and what that has meant over the different
Speaker 1: eras of of media consumption. That I have seen, because
Speaker 1: it is a really interesting journey and it had as
Speaker 1: shape not just the technology we use, but the way
Speaker 1: we use it. So look for that episode in the
Speaker 1: near future. It'll probably be me being a contankerous old
Speaker 1: man saying in my day when we listen to podcasts,
Speaker 1: we had to do it uphill both ways, four ft
Speaker 1: deep in snow, or something along those lines. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: why not write me. The address is tech Stuff at
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Speaker 1: maybe just say hi and maybe say hey, could you
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