Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Speaker 2: chalk and it's just us streaming along merrily on our way, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: how it goes. This is off to a terrible, terrible start.
Speaker 2: Life is but a dream? Right, Yeah, but aren't they
Speaker 2: talking about a stream.
Speaker 3: Merrily, merrily and merrily ringer on the rosies pocket little No.
Speaker 2: No, that's not it. That's about like the Black Death
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's just move on.
Speaker 2: Okay. So we're talking today about streaming music. That's why
Speaker 2: I made that joke. I should make scare quotes for joke.
Speaker 2: We're talking about streaming music, the history of it, and
Speaker 2: I love this, Chuck, this is a great idea of yours.
Speaker 2: Was this your idea? Listeners suggested idea.
Speaker 3: No, this is just me. I was maybe waxing philosophic
Speaker 3: about I'm wearing with somebody, and then I was like,
Speaker 3: that would be kind of a fun episode.
Speaker 2: Well, you were right. And one of the things I
Speaker 2: love about this is this is history, like world changing
Speaker 2: history that we lived through and not like as kids,
Speaker 2: like this happened very much in like our adult lives.
Speaker 3: You know, Oh, yeah, for sure, just a seismic shift
Speaker 3: in how music was released and consumed and the finances
Speaker 3: around it. And yeah, I thought it was super fascinating
Speaker 3: that there was a point in history not so long
Speaker 3: ago where people were spending a lot of money comparatively
Speaker 3: on buying CDs and physical media until they just said,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm going to buy music anymore. I
Speaker 3: want it. I want it for free, like screw all
Speaker 3: those musicians and trying to make a living.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. And it's not so the musicians were
Speaker 2: caught in the middle. It was the labels that were
Speaker 2: the greedy fat cats that pushed it too far because
Speaker 2: it didn't matter whether it was the clunkiest album or
Speaker 2: the best that Richard Marx had to offer, both ends
Speaker 2: of the spectrum. You were paying nineteen ninety nine for
Speaker 2: that thing, whether you liked it or not.
Speaker 3: Was that how much they were?
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, I don't remember being that much. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: definitely were. I think they got down toward the end
Speaker 2: in maybe the twelve ninety nine fifteen dollars range, that's
Speaker 2: what I remember. They were very much nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: For a while, you paid it was like twenty bucks
Speaker 2: of CD like that was a birthday present, right there?
Speaker 3: One CD YAO who initially fought the big fight and
Speaker 3: refused to release a record unless it was I can't
Speaker 3: remember how much it was, but it was quite a
Speaker 3: bit less.
Speaker 2: Who Tom Petty baby Man, what a cool dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah, RP.
Speaker 2: So, like you said, people just kind of got tired
Speaker 2: of overpaying. But at the same time, this was a
Speaker 2: time where frequently albums were released where no one, even
Speaker 2: the band probably thought that more than one or two
Speaker 2: songs were worth The rest were just crud. What you
Speaker 2: didn't get burned time and time again buying an album
Speaker 2: and being like, I only like the two songs I
Speaker 2: heard on the radio. Everything else on this album is terrible.
Speaker 3: No, I was a little different. I wasn't a singles guy.
Speaker 3: I never bought a singles that was always an album guy, right,
Speaker 3: And so I would buy albums that were good and
Speaker 3: not albums that had one good song.
Speaker 2: But if that's that's what I'm saying, you didn't know
Speaker 2: how good or bad the other songs were until you
Speaker 2: got the album because you only had heard the one
Speaker 2: good song on the radio. So you would hope, hope,
Speaker 2: hope that the rest of the album was as good
Speaker 2: as the song on the radio, and it never was.
Speaker 2: There was like an avalanche of difference between the quality
Speaker 2: of how good the radio song was and how bad
Speaker 2: all the other songs on the album would be. That
Speaker 2: was my experience, at least.
Speaker 3: Well, I didn't follow as prey to it, I think
Speaker 3: because and I'm not like some snob or anything, but
Speaker 3: most of the albums that I would actually invest in
Speaker 3: buying because you know, I had a limited amount of money,
Speaker 3: we're like good, really great bands.
Speaker 2: Okay, whatever, let's move on. I think we've missed one
Speaker 2: of our famous stumbling blocks. I'll stick with my guns,
Speaker 2: you stick with yours.
Speaker 3: Well, I just didn't have the kind of dough to
Speaker 3: be like, Ooh, I like that song, I'll get that album.
Speaker 3: I like had to really know it was awesome.
Speaker 2: I didn't either, and that's why I hated it so
Speaker 2: much that I'm still upset about it today. Maybe I
Speaker 2: was better at it, Yes you were. I think that's
Speaker 2: ultimately the point you're driving. I'm glad you just came
Speaker 2: out and say it.
Speaker 3: So everything changed from the big Heyday leading up to
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties into the two thousand's when a teenager
Speaker 3: from Massachusetts, a hacker named Sean Fanning, got together with
Speaker 3: a finance partner named Sean Parker, who would later go
Speaker 3: on to be the very famously the first president of Facebook,
Speaker 3: got together and said, Hey, we got this new thing.
Speaker 3: It's a file software. It's a peer to peer thing,
Speaker 3: so you can get music for free, basically by trading
Speaker 3: it with your friends. And initially it was just I
Speaker 3: believe Sean Fanning was like, I just want to trade
Speaker 3: music with my friends who live on the other side
Speaker 3: of the country. Then they realized they could get investors
Speaker 3: make it into a real business, and that was Napster.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And one of the other things that was required
Speaker 2: for this to work were CD ripping program software that
Speaker 2: came out around the same time, where you could put
Speaker 2: in a factory made, label produced CD and rip all
Speaker 2: the music from it and turn it into MP three's.
Speaker 2: As you did that time and time again, your MP
Speaker 2: three collection would build up, and when you installed Napster,
Speaker 2: it would find all those MP three's and then you
Speaker 2: could trade them with other people like you were saying,
Speaker 2: And it was such a hit, Chuck, that within two years.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about Napster shutting down. It only lived for
Speaker 2: two years. Originally, by the end of two years it
Speaker 2: had something like fifty seven million users in.
Speaker 3: Two years, Yeah, I saw eighty million.
Speaker 2: That's I believe it. That it was sensational and the
Speaker 2: idea that it was a teenager that not only introduced
Speaker 2: this to the world but completely changed the way that
Speaker 2: music is made is just satisfying but also just mind
Speaker 2: boggling because things have been done a certain way for
Speaker 2: so long and the labels were so in control. The
Speaker 2: idea of this guy coming along, it's like the original disruption.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at the peak of Napster there were twenty seven
Speaker 3: billion transfers per month song transfers, So it's just incredible.
Speaker 3: And this is another great stat that LVIA found at
Speaker 3: one point supposedly sixty one percent of all traffic on
Speaker 3: college servers were people sharing MP three's.
Speaker 2: Totally by that too, man. So, like we said, musicians
Speaker 2: mostly got caught in the middle of this. It was
Speaker 2: the labels that were really taking the hit, and some
Speaker 2: musicians are like, this is great, this is a great
Speaker 2: way to spread music and awareness. Chuck d was very
Speaker 2: famous a proponent of it early on, but there were
Speaker 2: also the exact opposite. Some artists were like, to heck
Speaker 2: with that. I think it was a famous quote from
Speaker 2: Doctor dre And he ended up joining Metallica, A and
Speaker 2: M Records, the RIAA and started filing suits against Napster,
Speaker 2: and some of them, including the RIAA and Doctor Drake,
Speaker 2: started suing Napster users, that is, their fans for pirting
Speaker 2: their music, like suing them directly personally individually.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they went after them under the Rico Act, the
Speaker 3: Racketeering Act. Metallica was specifically seeking ten million bucks. And
Speaker 3: what they didn't realize was this was, you know, this
Speaker 3: was an online thing, so you could get another software
Speaker 3: program like if you know. What they ended up doing
Speaker 3: was they ended up getting a list of more than
Speaker 3: three hundred thousand in it's like three hundred and thirty
Speaker 3: something thousand who had shared Metallica's music and got Napster
Speaker 3: to ban them. And what they didn't realize was that
Speaker 3: all they had to do those users was get another
Speaker 3: piece of software to allow them to get into Napster
Speaker 3: under another name. And so it was a pretty quick workaround.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so Metallica got such a bad name for this.
Speaker 2: This is such bad pr for them. And I can't
Speaker 2: remember the name of their basis, their original basis or
Speaker 2: there maybe their second basis. He left in protest saying
Speaker 2: like this is wrong Newstead, but it was it new
Speaker 2: said okay, they they were there's still today people are
Speaker 2: like Metallica's who they're fans. They did not. They found
Speaker 2: the names of their fans and had Napster banned them,
Speaker 2: and there was a screen you would get that said,
Speaker 2: at the request of Metallica, you are not allowed to
Speaker 2: access Napster any longer. But they didn't sue any individual fans.
Speaker 2: The ria ir AA did, and so did doctor Dre
Speaker 2: And I read about one twelve year old girl, Brianna Gahara,
Speaker 2: who had to pay two thousand dollars because the RIAA
Speaker 2: sued her and she had to pay two grand a
Speaker 2: twelve year old girl. That's what it was like. That's
Speaker 2: how upset the labels were at this point.
Speaker 3: Well, she probably didn't think about that when she was
Speaker 3: getting two thousand dollars worth of free music.
Speaker 2: Well essentially it's what they were doing. But she still
Speaker 2: ended up paying like two dollars a song, which is
Speaker 2: really that's outrageous. Today in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's double yeah. At least so one thing this
Speaker 3: did was just you know, brought it to the news
Speaker 3: and a lot of people that weren't sort of on
Speaker 3: the on the front edge of that technology, we're like, oh,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, there's a site where you can just
Speaker 3: go get music traded. So it actually it was sort
Speaker 3: of like the barbar streisand effect it ended up creating
Speaker 3: more users. Napster tried to hang in there. There was
Speaker 3: an attempted acquisition at one point for ninety something million
Speaker 3: bucks that a judge shut down for some reason that's
Speaker 3: not worth getting into. But they tried to become like
Speaker 3: a legitimate player. They paid royalties, eventually about twenty six
Speaker 3: million dollars of royalties. They tried different models, they tried subscriptions.
Speaker 3: Nothing really worked, I think because that time. By that time,
Speaker 3: there were other like I mentioned LimeWire that was the
Speaker 3: one I used. I never used Napster, Kazah, frost Wire,
Speaker 3: these other ones. Competitors came along, and so Napster, while
Speaker 3: like completely changing the game because they were the first ones,
Speaker 3: didn't end up being some big huge They couldn't get
Speaker 3: some big acquisition for it.
Speaker 2: No, they just like you said changed the game. But
Speaker 2: one of the things that also was changed from Napster
Speaker 2: in its brief two years and then its follow up
Speaker 2: successors like kaza is the idea that, like, people aren't
Speaker 2: going to pay yeah, fifteen or twenty dollars or even
Speaker 2: twelve dollars for a CD anymore. It's not how we
Speaker 2: want to do it. That's ridiculous for not doing it.
Speaker 2: I would rather take my chances at getting sued by
Speaker 2: the RIAA and get music for free than pay for
Speaker 2: an album that I'm only going to like one song on.
Speaker 2: That's what I said. And it was just the everything
Speaker 2: was completely upended. And Apple came along in two thousand
Speaker 2: and three and brought massive stability to this huge c change,
Speaker 2: but it didn't go back to the way it was.
Speaker 2: They said, we're gonna we have a model here that
Speaker 2: can actually accommodate both in this new kind of environment
Speaker 2: of how music is created and delivered.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, I want to jump back a second. I
Speaker 3: wonder if because I think it's a real shame that
Speaker 3: you know, you know, maybe at fifteen dollars is too
Speaker 3: much for a CD considering how cheap they were to produce.
Speaker 3: But I think it's a real shame. People were like,
Speaker 3: I want to pay zero dollars for music now, like
Speaker 3: I think it should be free and screw everybody that
Speaker 3: makes a living doing this under if initially, if the
Speaker 3: record labels had immediately just gone down to like six '
Speaker 3: ninety nine for a CD, if that would have changed
Speaker 3: the game.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe. I think one of the things
Speaker 2: that did change attitudes like that was a general public
Speaker 2: awareness that was spread that the artists were being harmed
Speaker 2: by this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you're taking.
Speaker 2: Music did deserve you did deserve to be compensated for
Speaker 2: the music you made, like it shouldn't be free. Year
Speaker 2: So it was kind of like the It was like
Speaker 2: the pendulum of development, you know, but with music instead.
Speaker 3: All right, so I agree you mentioned Apple and specifically
Speaker 3: iTunes is what came out in two thousand and three
Speaker 3: and the iPod and they started selling songs for ninety
Speaker 3: nine cents. One thing we didn't mention was that if
Speaker 3: you had a PC and you were on LimeWire or napster, like,
Speaker 3: there was a decent chance you might get a virus.
Speaker 3: They were pretty rife with viruses, so you could you
Speaker 3: could avoid you could avoid that danger and you could
Speaker 3: pay ninety nine cents. You can get that single song.
Speaker 3: If you're if you're You, if you're Josh, and you
Speaker 3: don't want to take a chance on buying a full album,
Speaker 3: you could just get that single Richard Mark song it
Speaker 3: don't it don't mean nothing, and you would be super excited.
Speaker 2: Well that was the thing. Richard Marx is a bad
Speaker 2: example because I think his two major albums both had
Speaker 2: multiple hits on them. So all right, I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: say it. Well, let's go with UTAs Saints. They're a
Speaker 2: perfect example from roughly this era. They were I don't
Speaker 2: even know where they were from, maybe British electronic.
Speaker 3: I think I remember that that song, yes, because that
Speaker 3: was a.
Speaker 2: Song, right, it's samp something good. It sampled Kate Bush
Speaker 2: and they would say like you toss Saints. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: that song. So you bought that album. To the album,
Speaker 2: you would just be like.
Speaker 3: God, well that's your problem, you know, buy LP.
Speaker 2: I was big time into electronic music at the time,
Speaker 2: and people weren't coming out with albums like every week
Speaker 2: that were you know, electronic. It was still very guitar heavy,
Speaker 2: so I know you had to work with what you
Speaker 2: got and frequently get burned. Sorry Utah Saints if you're
Speaker 2: out there listening.
Speaker 3: So, overall, statistically, from and this is a pretty staggering
Speaker 3: stat from two thousand and one to twenty ten, when
Speaker 3: this first started. Over that next decade, physical music sales
Speaker 3: dropped sixty percent all over the world, about fourteen billion
Speaker 3: dollars in revenue loss. Digital sales rose about four billion,
Speaker 3: But that left a ten billion dollar annual discrepancy and
Speaker 3: what the music business was bringing in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If that doesn't get it across, I don't know
Speaker 2: what does.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, because at that point it's basically just Richard
Speaker 2: Marx keeping the music labels afloat. The fact that they
Speaker 2: had any money was essentially one hundred percent tributable to him.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what they say, It don't mean nothing
Speaker 3: until you sign it on the outed line.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's what he's talking about. My man.
Speaker 3: Should we take a break?
Speaker 2: Yes? Okay. So while Napster was like, hey, we're into
Speaker 2: file sharing, some other ones were as well. At the
Speaker 2: same time, roughly an alternative model was developing, and that
Speaker 2: was just streaming, right, So rather than like downloading an
Speaker 2: actual MP three that you would keep on your hard drive,
Speaker 2: you could burn onto CD do whatever. This was like,
Speaker 2: there were like music servers. This is this is crazy.
Speaker 2: To bear with me for a second. That would actually
Speaker 2: you would stream the music over the internet through like
Speaker 2: a player on your on your computer. Usually had to
Speaker 2: download the player itself. This is before they called them apps,
Speaker 2: and you could sometimes select songs and then other times
Speaker 2: it was more just like an f radio station where
Speaker 2: they would almost play it plates whatever, random songs that
Speaker 2: you had no control over.
Speaker 3: Right, well, you did have control in that you could
Speaker 3: skip songs and stuff. You just couldn't pick the songs.
Speaker 2: Sometimes though, you could only skip a finite number of
Speaker 2: songs before it's like nope, you have to listen to
Speaker 2: this CARDI one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that was the big problem with Launch Media
Speaker 3: that they probably could have gotten away with it if
Speaker 3: they didn't give you the ability to skip songs, right
Speaker 3: because it was a little more like radio. But because
Speaker 3: they had that fast forward button, the RIAA got involved
Speaker 3: again and was like, we don't like that because one
Speaker 3: thing I don't think we mentioned is radio. It was
Speaker 3: a way for people to listen to songs and music
Speaker 3: and get turned onto new stuff.
Speaker 2: It was a live transmission.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but what radio also was was a free advertisement
Speaker 3: for those bands. So you know, every time a song
Speaker 3: gets played on the radio, that's an ad to little
Speaker 3: Josh Clark, like, hey, mis Sucker, go out this album
Speaker 3: if you like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Utah Saints are great.
Speaker 3: This is this disrupted everything. The fact that you could
Speaker 3: skip songs. That's why the IAA got upset because you know,
Speaker 3: they're like, well, this is a lot like radio, but
Speaker 3: you can't skip songs of the radio. We want people
Speaker 3: to hear these songs because they're little ads.
Speaker 2: Right exactly. So that was a big problem. The streaming
Speaker 2: services were as big a problem, maybe not as big,
Speaker 2: but pretty close to the same amount of problem as
Speaker 2: file sharing services were, too. They weren't like any kind
Speaker 2: of solution as far as the music industry was concerned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and those were you know, like Launch Media, who
Speaker 3: eventually became Yahoo Music. Those again, though, were just playing.
Speaker 3: There was like a I don't know if it was
Speaker 3: a real person programming, but it was as if a
Speaker 3: DJ was playing music. The first legit on demand streaming
Speaker 3: surface was Rhapsody in two thousand and one, which started
Speaker 3: out as part of listen dot Com, was bought by
Speaker 3: a company called Real Networks, and then eventually, in sort
Speaker 3: of an odd twist, it bought Napster and in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: rhapsoly was rebranded as Napster.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Do you remember Real Player That was one of
Speaker 2: those that software you had to download to stream music?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 2: I went and looked at old real Player skins and
Speaker 2: it's just like, oh my god, those things were so ugly.
Speaker 2: But they I mean, they're super. They look super two
Speaker 2: thousand and five.
Speaker 3: Just seeing that little LimeWire lime actually gave me some
Speaker 3: feels because I was doing by the way, I was
Speaker 3: doing the same thing. I'm not saying, like when I said,
Speaker 3: it's a real shame that people just said I want
Speaker 3: my music free, like I was doing it too at
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well, I'm glad you said that.
Speaker 3: I was part of that, that real shame.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, great, LimeWire, I can trade music.
Speaker 3: But pretty quickly I was I mean, I kept buying
Speaker 3: CDs for a while of the bands I loved, and
Speaker 3: pretty quickly I was like, wait a minute, there's something
Speaker 3: about this. It doesn't feel right.
Speaker 2: Hey. One other thing that's occurred to me Chuck Is.
Speaker 2: I'm sure somebody's like, well, yeah, CDs might be like
Speaker 2: fifteen dollars a piece, but don't forget Columbia House, where
Speaker 2: you get like ten of them for a penny.
Speaker 3: I never did that.
Speaker 2: You didn't. Did I ever tell you my Columbia House story?
Speaker 3: You did, But I think people need to hear it
Speaker 3: if they haven't heard it. Okay, so told me last
Speaker 3: week at a Cubs game. Was it just that recent?
Speaker 2: Huh? And I got to work on my memory. I
Speaker 2: need some prevag in. So like you would send off
Speaker 2: for those of you who don't know, you would send
Speaker 2: like literally you tape a penny to a postcard and
Speaker 2: send it into Columbia House and you could you could
Speaker 2: check like what albums you wanted them to send you,
Speaker 2: and like magic, they would send you those ten albums
Speaker 2: for a penny, But then you were automatically signed up
Speaker 2: for their subscription service and they would send you albums
Speaker 2: that you didn't want it like two times the price.
Speaker 2: So it really wasn't a good deal unless you could
Speaker 2: get out of it with just those first ten albums.
Speaker 2: And I did exact factly that because when they sent
Speaker 2: me the first first handful of records that I didn't want.
Speaker 2: I sent them back with a letter explaining that I
Speaker 2: was twelve years old when I entered into this contract.
Speaker 2: There's nowhere in the United States that it's legal for
Speaker 2: a twelve year old to enter into a contract, So
Speaker 2: please stop sending me albums. And they did.
Speaker 3: I love it. Very precocious kid.
Speaker 2: Thanks. I like that story. So I was a little bastard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you mean like the rapper.
Speaker 2: No, that's old Dirty Bastard, right.
Speaker 3: I was thinking Low Wayne and Old Dirty Bastard got together.
Speaker 2: Right, little Bastard. That's my new rap name.
Speaker 3: Not tepid t all right. So Panta Pandora, not pantorra
Speaker 3: Pandora came along in two thousand and five. It began
Speaker 3: as Savage Beast Technologies, and they were founded on this
Speaker 3: idea of the algorithm to recommend songs to where it
Speaker 3: would curate like this is Chuck's station. And the way
Speaker 3: they did this was through something called the Music Genome Project,
Speaker 3: which I remember just thinking it was the coolest idea
Speaker 3: and thing ever back then, and it was a cool thing.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was basically that they would analyze four hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty unique attributes of every song that exists from you know,
Speaker 3: as simple as like what genre is it to like
Speaker 3: how nasally somebody's voice was.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Then they would evaluate it on a scale of one
Speaker 3: to five with half increments, and the end result would
Speaker 3: be the songs you know, quote unquote DNA. Initially, they
Speaker 3: had a musicologist that did this by ear in the
Speaker 3: hand and it took like fifteen to thirty minutes a song.
Speaker 3: Eventually AI took over, but it was that was the
Speaker 3: big attraction for Pandora was like this super cool project
Speaker 3: where they're categorizing music so specifically that it will start
Speaker 3: to learn what you like and you can curate your
Speaker 3: own radio station.
Speaker 2: That's nuts. I never heard of that music genome project before.
Speaker 3: Oh really, it was sort of all the rage at
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: Pretty groundbreaking. I mean, I'm taking it this is in
Speaker 2: the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: I mean it was when Pandora started. That was sort
Speaker 3: of the basis of how they worked.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So yeah, two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Okay, So Pandora also started to try a subscription model.
Speaker 2: Were they the first They may.
Speaker 3: Have been, Well, I think Naster tried it but it
Speaker 3: didn't work.
Speaker 2: Okay, So Pandora was the first I guess that was
Speaker 2: successful at it. It was I think three dollars a
Speaker 2: month for streaming music with no advertising, which sounds like
Speaker 2: a deal, But there are only like ten songs on
Speaker 2: the internet at the time it's it did, and they
Speaker 2: tried like ten hour free trials kind of like those
Speaker 2: AOL sample discs. Yeah, but only one. They only had
Speaker 2: like a one percent conversion rate.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why I think that doesn't
Speaker 2: get mentioned very often is that we're talking this is
Speaker 2: like the mid oughts two thousand and five. People were
Speaker 2: not at all comfortable with giving their credit card information
Speaker 2: out over the internet. Yeah, and that's the only way
Speaker 2: you could buy.
Speaker 3: Back then, Yeah, when it just seemed like the most
Speaker 3: like top secret thing you could even have as a
Speaker 3: part of your life, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I really truly think that that was one
Speaker 2: of the reasons why this got a slow start. People
Speaker 2: were just so comfortable with paying for things using their
Speaker 2: credit card over the internet. And that's I mean, how
Speaker 2: else you're gonna build some but you're gonna send them
Speaker 2: a physical bill for your online streaming service.
Speaker 3: You get a letter from a twelve year old after that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly imagine Pandora getting checks mailed to them every month.
Speaker 2: That'd be hilarious. But I mean, I guess that's what
Speaker 2: you'd have to do to get business going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you're totally right. Those early days of
Speaker 3: e commerce, I think a lot of us had some
Speaker 3: trepidation about entering those digits online, you.
Speaker 2: Know, Yeah, and it might become it might be is
Speaker 2: a confirmation bias where I, like, I was like that,
Speaker 2: so I just assume other people were as well. But
Speaker 2: most of the people I knew were not comfortable giving
Speaker 2: out their credit card info at that time.
Speaker 3: No, I think you're right on the money, no bias whatsoever.
Speaker 3: You're just right cool.
Speaker 2: So Congress got involved, actually in the United States at least,
Speaker 2: and they came up with the Copyright Royalty and Distribution
Speaker 2: Reform Act of two thousand and four. That's how disruptive
Speaker 2: napster was. Yeah, in four years, Congress had passed an
Speaker 2: act essentially trying to help smooth this over. I'm sure
Speaker 2: it was largely in the favor of the labels, but
Speaker 2: it set up the US Copyright Royalty Board where these
Speaker 2: these software companies and streamers would come and take claims
Speaker 2: or be taken to this board by music labels to
Speaker 2: figure out who owed who what.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, which was a big, you know, through a
Speaker 3: big wrench in the plans of a lot of these
Speaker 3: companies that were just emerging. I think the ones that
Speaker 3: were sort of smaller gave up pretty quickly because it
Speaker 3: was such a legal quagmire. Like Yahue Music wasn't even
Speaker 3: you know, a smallish one. They shut themselves down.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure. So again Apple kind of rides to
Speaker 2: the rescue. And in two thousand and seven they introduced
Speaker 2: the iPhone. Because I don't know if we said it
Speaker 2: or not. Before the iPhone came along, if you wanted
Speaker 2: to listen to downloaded music anywhere away from your PC,
Speaker 2: you had to buy an iPod or one of it's
Speaker 2: also ran competitors like Zoom or something like that, but
Speaker 2: you had to have like a physical device to listen to.
Speaker 2: When the iPhone came out, it was like throw all
Speaker 2: that crowd away. Now you can not only listen to
Speaker 2: your MP three's that you're buying off the iTunes store,
Speaker 2: you can listen to streaming music. You can do everything
Speaker 2: you can on the internet, you can do on your iPhone.
Speaker 2: So it provided a super stable, safe platform, not at
Speaker 2: all skanky. You weren't going to get viruses or anything
Speaker 2: like that from downloading apps from the App store. And
Speaker 2: Pandora actually saw the writing on the wall very early,
Speaker 2: and they had an app like I think the next
Speaker 2: year that was available for the iPhone that was a
Speaker 2: Pandora streaming app. And I think the first year, within
Speaker 2: nine months that the app that the App store came out,
Speaker 2: the Pandora app was on almost a quarter of all
Speaker 2: iPhones in the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this also brought back funny memories of this is
Speaker 3: kind of like when we were getting going with the
Speaker 3: TV show.
Speaker 2: Ish really at those twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm just talking about no, no, no, I'm not saying
Speaker 3: the launch of the iPhone. I'm saying the apps being
Speaker 3: like the end all be all. Like I remember very
Speaker 3: specifically in some of those TV meetings some of the
Speaker 3: guys on staff, like all they could talk about was
Speaker 3: apps and look at this new app and it does this,
Speaker 3: and it does this cool thing, and it does this
Speaker 3: cool weird thing, and it was just app, apps, apps,
Speaker 3: And it's just funny to look back how that is
Speaker 3: at least changed for me. I mean, maybe people still
Speaker 3: use all kinds of funky apps, but almost every app
Speaker 3: I have is utilitarian and serve some kind of like
Speaker 3: function for doing something right.
Speaker 2: But if you wanted to razzle dazzle a C suite
Speaker 2: executive who is like ten years older than you at
Speaker 2: the time, all you had to do is even let
Speaker 2: them know you were thinking in terms of apps, and
Speaker 2: they would just automatically promote you. I totally remember that time.
Speaker 2: We've survived a lot of weird times, haven't we.
Speaker 3: Hey we have, including the great stuff you should know.
Speaker 3: Fire of eight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, death of Richard Marx.
Speaker 3: Oh he didn't die, did he.
Speaker 2: No? Okay, that was a terrible joke. I'm sorry, Richard Mark, Sorry,
Speaker 2: Utah Saints, Sorry Richard Mars Right.
Speaker 3: Uh so we have to talk about Spotify. Should we
Speaker 3: do that or take a break?
Speaker 2: First, let's talk about Spotify, all right?
Speaker 3: Spotify comes along. They changed the game. Pandora was still
Speaker 3: trying to be you know, kind of like radio in
Speaker 3: a way. Spotify was like, know, we're really going to
Speaker 3: be on demand and this is kind of what everyone's
Speaker 3: been waiting for. It was a company out of Stockholm, Sweden,
Speaker 3: very famous for swedeness, for encouraging and supporting their tech industries.
Speaker 3: That's why there's somebody coming out of there. But they
Speaker 3: launched in two thousand and six, and then I think
Speaker 3: Weighted had to wait until twenty eleven to launch in
Speaker 3: the US because they had to you know, they were
Speaker 3: I guess smart enough early on to pre negotiate with
Speaker 3: record labels and kind of get all that settled, so
Speaker 3: they weren't just dragged into court right away.
Speaker 2: Right so early in their early years, even when they
Speaker 2: were just available in Europe, in Western Europe, they had
Speaker 2: ten million users and at one point six of them
Speaker 2: were already paying users. Right So before this thing even
Speaker 2: hit the US, it was valued at a billion dollar
Speaker 2: Spotify was, and when it hit the US, it it
Speaker 2: just reached this incredibly massive level. One of the things
Speaker 2: that Spotify did, I think today there they're at like
Speaker 2: six hundred and fifteen million active users something crazy like that.
Speaker 2: But one of the ways that they managed to kind
Speaker 2: of come in and be like, hey, peace everybody, was
Speaker 2: that they really paid royalties to the artists and the
Speaker 2: labels or whoever owned the copyright of that song. They
Speaker 2: paid like seventy percent of their revenues went to pay royalties,
Speaker 2: and so they have been losing money every year since
Speaker 2: at least twenty eleven, probably back when they debuted in
Speaker 2: two thousand and six and I think twenty twenty three. No,
Speaker 2: the first two couriers of twenty twenty four, yes, they
Speaker 2: they made record profits, and because they lost money every
Speaker 2: year up until then, a record profit for them could
Speaker 2: have been one dollar. But they finally turned profitable essentially,
Speaker 2: and they're saying, like, now we're going to be profitable,
Speaker 2: profitable from here on out. One of the criticisms they
Speaker 2: took is that they became profitable by going through massive
Speaker 2: rounds of layoffs and jacking up the price of their subscriptions.
Speaker 2: But the point about to know about Spotify is they
Speaker 2: created a new standard by saying we're going to actually
Speaker 2: pay real royalties to the people who own this music.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure. So I think we take that break.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 3: So twenty fifteen, a little several new players came on
Speaker 3: the scene. Title you might have heard a lot about
Speaker 3: at the time, all capitals TIDL. This was an artist
Speaker 3: owned alternative kind of like you know, United artists and
Speaker 3: movies back in the day. Like musicians actually got together
Speaker 3: under the guidance of jay Z to buy a company.
Speaker 3: Initially it was an Norway based company called a SPIRO
Speaker 3: that we're developing. It stood for wireless music player but
Speaker 3: the WIMP and it was higher bit rates, supposedly better
Speaker 3: quality and also like real human editors making music recommendations.
Speaker 3: So jay Z gets on board. He's like, man, we
Speaker 3: can't call it whimp in the United States. It's not
Speaker 3: tough at all. So they changed it to title, right.
Speaker 2: I read an interesting article. Also, big ups to Olivia
Speaker 2: for helping us with this one. But she found an
Speaker 2: article from Loud and Quiet dot com written by Stuart
Speaker 2: Stubbs called five years on a very silly launch of
Speaker 2: Title and if you like, just kind of laughing a
Speaker 2: little bit at the misfortune of super egotistical, wealthy people
Speaker 2: like that article a lot. Yeah, he just slams like
Speaker 2: this launch and I haven't seen it because I can't
Speaker 2: bear to watch it based on his description of how
Speaker 2: awkward it is. But apparently it was one of the
Speaker 2: most awkward star studded events ever held.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen it. It was awkward. It was just
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, Sometimes companies just screw it all up,
Speaker 3: you know, right.
Speaker 2: I think one of the big screw ups was to
Speaker 2: basically tell the audience not to clap for anything, which
Speaker 2: I'm sure was a decision because you don't want it
Speaker 2: to seem like these stars showed up so that they
Speaker 2: could be applauded for everything they said. Yeah, but instead
Speaker 2: it made it super awkward and quiet. From what Stuart
Speaker 2: Stubb says, it is.
Speaker 3: Very weird for Madonna to walk out on stage and
Speaker 3: be met with silence. It was slightly surreal.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Titles Deal was another company obviously because they were
Speaker 3: artists that wanted to pay through pretty well and musicians
Speaker 3: got a seventy five royalty on each song. It wasn't
Speaker 3: too long after that they were being sued for underpayment
Speaker 3: and it ended up not being a financial success as
Speaker 3: a company, right. A bit of a mess, it seemed like.
Speaker 2: But it got bailed out by Jack Dorsey, the co
Speaker 2: founder of Twitter. He was leading a company called Block Inc.
Speaker 2: And in twenty twenty one he used Block Inc funds
Speaker 2: to buy an eighty six percent share in Title for
Speaker 2: three hundred million dollars. Yeah, and essentially the shareholders in
Speaker 2: Block sued. They sued Jack Dorsey for this because they're like,
Speaker 2: you did this as a favorite to jay Z. You
Speaker 2: can't do that to us. This is a terrible deal.
Speaker 2: And they actually had the lawsuit dismissed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think. I mean, if you want to compare,
Speaker 3: I believe that jay Z, what did they pay like
Speaker 3: fifty something million?
Speaker 2: Everybody chipped in fifty six million?
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so then flipped it for three hundred to
Speaker 3: his friend.
Speaker 2: But really it was probably worth half of the original
Speaker 2: price by this time because it was not a success
Speaker 2: at all, and even still today, I saw it has
Speaker 2: about five million users, it says, but that that's even
Speaker 2: disputed by people outside the company. And like I said that,
Speaker 2: judge dismissed the case against Jack Dorsey and he said
Speaker 2: that that there's nothing legally wrong in approving it, even
Speaker 2: though it was quote a terrible business decision.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 2: I was so mad.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I wonder if you've snuck up behind jay
Speaker 3: Z and looked at his phone what he's playing.
Speaker 2: With the real player he's ogreat I.
Speaker 3: Did look up that logo, by the way, and it
Speaker 3: was a wave of nostalgia. Might another one that came
Speaker 3: out in twenty fifteen. You might have seen Neil Young
Speaker 3: screaming at people on your television set right around then.
Speaker 3: It was Pono that was his this is actual device.
Speaker 3: It was a player, the Pono player, and it was
Speaker 3: a crowdfunded campaign that raised about ten million bucks. And
Speaker 3: the whole pitch here was from Neil Young, especially was
Speaker 3: MP three's are garbage and that compression stinks and this
Speaker 3: is all the night. Like Neil Young was much more
Speaker 3: critical and probably cussed a lot more, but he's like,
Speaker 3: the quality here is better, and this is the way
Speaker 3: music should be listening. It's a travesty how we're listening
Speaker 3: to music these days. And that company, I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess Neil Young failed to realize it. By and large,
Speaker 3: most people don't care about the quality to that level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people just can't detect it. It's
Speaker 2: not even that they don't care, it's that once you
Speaker 2: get to a certain bit rate measured in kilobytes per second,
Speaker 2: that's how much how many bits are being transferred per second.
Speaker 2: So obviously the more bits transferred, the more of the
Speaker 2: song that's captured, the better the sound quality. Somewhere outside
Speaker 2: of two hundred and fifty six kilobytes a second. When
Speaker 2: you start going over that, people generally can't tell the difference,
Speaker 2: especially if you're just using like earbuds or something like that.
Speaker 2: You know, we're just playing it through the speaker of
Speaker 2: your iPhone.
Speaker 3: Especially, Yeah, oh god, do people do that?
Speaker 2: Very obnoxious people do.
Speaker 3: Yes, A CD, just for comparison, is a little over
Speaker 3: fourteen high hundred kilobits per second. And you said two
Speaker 3: fifty six is where people can't tell much of a difference.
Speaker 3: That's like, that's like people with a good ear they say,
Speaker 3: if you're around ninety to one hundred and you're not
Speaker 3: the most discerning listener and you're not playing, you know,
Speaker 3: through something great, then you probably won't be able to
Speaker 3: tell the difference.
Speaker 2: Right. But again, if you're Neil Young, yes you're really
Speaker 2: upset about this, but it's a course. He really missed
Speaker 2: the mark by assuming that everybody felt this way about it.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean you can you can get just
Speaker 2: great quality of music from a fairly compressed rate. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 3: Twenty fifteen also, and this kind of surprised me. It
Speaker 3: felt like it had been around longer. But that's when
Speaker 3: Apple Music, not iTunes, but the Apple Music streaming finally
Speaker 3: was launched surprisingly late to the game, supposedly because Steve
Speaker 3: Jobs didn't like the idea. So Apple and Amazon, who
Speaker 3: had been selling MP three's just like Apple had, they
Speaker 3: launched about a year later. So they're both giants that
Speaker 3: were kind of late to the streaming game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Apparently Steve Jobs thought that it was basically piracy
Speaker 2: to make people rent music rather than own it, and
Speaker 2: that people didn't want to rent music, they wanted to
Speaker 2: own it, so therefore subscription streaming services were basically just
Speaker 2: taking advantage of their users. And he kind of said,
Speaker 2: if you pay one hundred dollars a year to listen
Speaker 2: to your favorite song over ten years, you paid one
Speaker 2: thousand dollars to listen to that song and you don't
Speaker 2: even own it, rather than just buying it once for
Speaker 2: a dollar or something like that. And he makes a
Speaker 2: good point, but he's also leaving out all the other
Speaker 2: music that you've listened to over that ten year period.
Speaker 2: It's a weird way to put it. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: little disingenuous, but he was very much opposed to it,
Speaker 2: and Apple was not about to get into the streaming
Speaker 2: game while he was alive.
Speaker 3: He's like, if you're wealthy like me, you'll pay for
Speaker 3: a different streaming subscription for every song you want to
Speaker 3: hear exactly, just to make it fair.
Speaker 2: And that's madness.
Speaker 3: Pandora, we should Mention was bought by Sirius XM and
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen, and we should, you know, talk a little
Speaker 3: bit about how the finances worked today, because it was,
Speaker 3: you know, there was a bit of a things have
Speaker 3: regulated just a bit. You know, things really went in
Speaker 3: the tank. I think that the twenty fourteen was that
Speaker 3: the lowest point in dollars for the music industry. They've
Speaker 3: come back now. In twenty twenty two, revenues hit twenty
Speaker 3: six point two billion, which is about a twenty five
Speaker 3: percent drop compared to when CDs died. But that's a
Speaker 3: seventy percent increase from where they were in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's a that is a low point
Speaker 2: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So they've sort of course corrected enough to where
Speaker 3: I think they're like, hey, it'll never be the heyday
Speaker 3: of CDs again, right, but not every Like people are
Speaker 3: actually paying for music now with these subscriptions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it does turn out that Steve Jobs will
Speaker 2: absolutely wrong. People are generally totally cool with renting their
Speaker 2: music through subscription services. I think eighty four percent of
Speaker 2: music revenue comes from paid subscriptions. Yeah that's a I mean,
Speaker 2: that's significant. And one two thousand and ninth study found
Speaker 2: that piracy had dropped because of the affordability of legal
Speaker 2: ways of consuming media, not because of enforcement, not the
Speaker 2: threat of being sued by Metallica, but just the fact
Speaker 2: that it was easier and by this time people got
Speaker 2: used to putting their credit card info on the internet.
Speaker 3: The threat of Lars Ulrich's coming into your room and
Speaker 3: speaking to you for twenty minutes. Yeah, that's enough right
Speaker 3: there for sure. As far as what they pay, I mean,
Speaker 3: Spotify's the biggest dog in the market. They have about
Speaker 3: thirty percent of the streaming market and like you said,
Speaker 3: more than six hundred million active users. But these royalties,
Speaker 3: Title pays the most at one point three cents, Apple's
Speaker 3: point seven, YouTube music point seven. Spotify pays point four
Speaker 3: cents per stream, same as Amazon and then Pandora's down
Speaker 3: to point one. You're obviously making a lot more money
Speaker 3: off of Spotify because they're the biggest player, so it's
Speaker 3: less per stream. But as an artist, if you're a
Speaker 3: hit on Spotify, then there's a lot of money to
Speaker 3: be made.
Speaker 2: Right Yeah. I think Spotify paid over nine billion dollars
Speaker 2: in royalties in twenty twenty three, three times more than
Speaker 2: they paid six years earlier. And there've been studies about
Speaker 2: how much money is actually made by the artists. There's
Speaker 2: sixty six thousand artists that make ten grand or more
Speaker 2: a year on the platform through music sharing, eleven thousand
Speaker 2: of them make more than one hundred thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 2: and then twelve hundred of them make a million plus.
Speaker 2: And of course most of the twelve hundred are names
Speaker 2: that you've heard of that are already making tons of
Speaker 2: money anyway. But you know, toward the lower end of
Speaker 2: that scale, there are indie artists that never in their
Speaker 2: life would have made a million dollars in a record
Speaker 2: label deal that are now like making producing, sharing their
Speaker 2: own music, running their own social media, and they're making
Speaker 2: a million dollars a year more from their music, which
Speaker 2: is That's one of the ways that this completely changed
Speaker 2: the game, not just in taking money away from the
Speaker 2: music labels, but also in making it easier for independent
Speaker 2: artists to just exist without the music labels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure, I got a couple of things
Speaker 3: for you here on that line, our beloved Pavement that
Speaker 3: we both love. Sure Harness Your Hopes was a B side,
Speaker 3: kind of throwaway song, not throw away, but a B
Speaker 3: side from nineteen ninety six. It never made it onto
Speaker 3: their album. It went viral on TikTok last year. You
Speaker 3: know about all this, right, No, so the song goes
Speaker 3: viral on TikTok for some reason. And like huge Pavement
Speaker 3: for eight song from nineteen ninety six got one hundred
Speaker 3: and forty eight million streams on Spotify. Wow, which, if
Speaker 3: the math is right, close to six hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 3: just from Spotify from a you know, B side from
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 3: That's amazing. So that kind of stuff can happen, which
Speaker 3: is great. And then I looked up I was curious
Speaker 3: who the most stream like, the most streamed song ever
Speaker 3: on Spotify is. My guess would have been a Taylor
Speaker 3: Swift song. Believe it or not. Taylor Swift has the
Speaker 3: her highest charting Spotify as far as number of streams
Speaker 3: go is the forty second highest. What is it?
Speaker 2: Just so she has so many songs that that it
Speaker 2: counts for her streams, I guess because she has tens
Speaker 2: of billions of streams.
Speaker 3: No, that's for a song like one specific song.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, I see you're saying in dollar amounts and royalties.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, in streams like her. Her Her most streamed
Speaker 3: song is Cruel Cruel Summer, and that is number forty
Speaker 3: two on the list.
Speaker 2: First of all, that's Banana rama. And secondly, I think
Speaker 2: my point still stands. She just has so many songs
Speaker 2: and variations of her songs that when you put it
Speaker 2: all together, she has like thirty eight billion streams a
Speaker 2: year of Spotify. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's for her whole catalog, which is incredible.
Speaker 2: So who's number one? That she's way down at forty two.
Speaker 3: The weekend, which one his song Blinding Lights Wow, is
Speaker 3: the most downloaded song on Spotify And I did I
Speaker 3: think it was. I can't remember. I think it was
Speaker 3: like four or five billion streams. And I did some math,
Speaker 3: and I may not be right, but if I did
Speaker 3: my math right, it looks like that that dude has
Speaker 3: made more than one hundred million dollars on that song
Speaker 3: off of Spotify.
Speaker 2: That's just off of Spotify, right, Yeah, that's not including
Speaker 2: like YouTube music, Amazon music sales of the actual MP
Speaker 2: three year album.
Speaker 3: How many ways can I say? Only Spotify.
Speaker 2: In hindsight, even that doesn't quite make sense. I'm not like, ah,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. It's funny how the internet can do that.
Speaker 2: I would have guessed Gongam style, but that's a little
Speaker 2: little dated, I guess.
Speaker 3: I just like, if that math is right, that's that's incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. But that's the kind of money you
Speaker 2: can make off that. I saw Drake made like three
Speaker 2: hundred million dollars off of Spotify in a year recently.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and if you're again, indie bands are now
Speaker 2: at the table. They can do this all themselves. They
Speaker 2: can just split it among themselves as bandmates. And you know,
Speaker 2: if you just hit it just right, you can go
Speaker 2: viral like that Pavement song did and really make it
Speaker 2: not just money wise, but your career. You can expose
Speaker 2: yourself to so many people virtually on social media or
Speaker 2: streaming music, is what I mean. But also there's an
Speaker 2: other side to it as well, because record executives haven't
Speaker 2: gone anywhere. There's still plenty of them, and so when
Speaker 2: you do have a contract with the label. They'll very
Speaker 2: frequently be like, hey, this song has to have an
Speaker 2: amazing hook that's no more than ten seconds long because
Speaker 2: we want to get it viral on TikTok. Go make
Speaker 2: a viral video on TikTok. Essentially is what they're saying,
Speaker 2: and so that's shaping how artists are making music, and
Speaker 2: a lot of them are not happy about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's also reshaped, you know, the sort of the
Speaker 3: album era is kind of dead. I mean, there's still
Speaker 3: plenty of albums and still plenty of artists doing that,
Speaker 3: but it's almost, like Livia points out, it almost is
Speaker 3: like going back to the days of the forty fives
Speaker 3: in the nineteen fifties where it was you know, these
Speaker 3: singles are being released and that's interesting. I know that.
Speaker 3: You know, one thing we should mention is that there
Speaker 3: is they're trying to get it pushed through now the
Speaker 3: Living Wage for Musicians Act through the house, where they're
Speaker 3: basically saying, hey, minimum royalty should be a penny per stream. Like,
Speaker 3: I know, you make a lot more on Spotify because
Speaker 3: it's the biggest player, but they're paying four cents and
Speaker 3: like if everyone paid a cent, that would be a
Speaker 3: huge difference.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you're like I totally agree with that,
Speaker 2: you can go to Actionnetwork dot org and look for
Speaker 2: Living Wage for Musicians ACT. This morning, they only needed
Speaker 2: four hundred and thirty two more signatures to reach their goal,
Speaker 2: so apparently it automatically becomes law at twelve thousand signatures.
Speaker 2: If I'm not mistaken, nice work.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you put that out there.
Speaker 2: I am mistaken by the way. But yeah, there was
Speaker 2: one other thing I wanted to point out to the
Speaker 2: way that it's evolved. Because there's not a huge gamble
Speaker 2: in making music like there was when you have a
Speaker 2: whole production going on in a label and you're actually
Speaker 2: physically producing the albums. There's way more availability and potential
Speaker 2: for artists to explore genre bending, genre fusing all sorts
Speaker 2: of gambly risky new types of music that they would
Speaker 2: never be able to try if they had like a
Speaker 2: major album or a major major label contract and that
Speaker 2: label was not willing to take those risks. So that's
Speaker 2: another way that shaped it positively.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you and me could get together and
Speaker 3: put out a song and get it out there and streaming,
Speaker 3: like we could do that.
Speaker 2: Okay, what should we do? Should we call ourselves pendulum
Speaker 2: of development? And we're gonna play Both of us are
Speaker 2: going to play the mandolin, but neither of us know
Speaker 2: how to play the mandolin? Is the hook?
Speaker 3: Well, who's our slide whistle player? Jerry? Okay, sure, we're
Speaker 3: gonna cut her in on this.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I mean, but she can still be the
Speaker 2: slide whistle player. Oh okay, great, you got anything else?
Speaker 3: I got nothing else. This is a fun little trip
Speaker 3: down memory lane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was agreed. Good choice, And that's it. Everybody
Speaker 2: for streaming music, which means, of course it's time for
Speaker 2: listener mail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm gonna say this is we're sort of correcting
Speaker 3: our omission of our Minecraft episode when we couldn't think
Speaker 3: of the kid's name.
Speaker 2: Oh, Kober.
Speaker 3: It was a kid in the audience, and we could
Speaker 3: remember his name. So we got a letter from Boden's mom.
Speaker 3: Oh hey, guys, my son. Boden was the kid who
Speaker 3: asked about Minecraft at the Medford show. He was the
Speaker 3: one with the glasses who also made the joke about
Speaker 3: being a retired factory worker.
Speaker 2: Was so great.
Speaker 3: That'll make sense if you've seen this show. He didn't
Speaker 3: ask about mobs, and in fairness, there were probably ten
Speaker 3: other kids after him who also asked about Minecraft. I
Speaker 3: don't think that's true, so I'm not sure if he's
Speaker 3: the one you're thinking of. Well, he was, Sarah, but
Speaker 3: she says regardless, I'm pretty sure he considers this to
Speaker 3: be his greatest contribution to humanity to date.
Speaker 2: Man, that kid is so cool.
Speaker 3: Sincerely thanks from a very grateful parent. And that is
Speaker 3: from Sarah, so big. Thanks Boden. Yeah, and I'm glad
Speaker 3: we could get your name out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks a lot. Boden, was a great idea and
Speaker 2: we appreciate your mom writing in. That was Sarah.
Speaker 3: Yes, awesome.
Speaker 2: Well, if you want to be like Boden and Sarah,
Speaker 2: come to one of our shows and suggest an episode.
Speaker 2: You can also just make it easier on yourself and
Speaker 2: send it via email, Wrap it up, spank it on
Speaker 2: the Minecraft, and send it off to Stuff podcast at
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.