Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/23 - Jony Ive's Dream Phone Concept

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

YouTube TV goes nationwide, Jony Ive’s dream phone design, Patreon milestones and is Spotify killing music’s middle class? Sponsors: Joybird.com/RIDE ... Promocode RIDE Metalab.co Links: YouTube TV finally goes nationwide almost two years after launch (The Verge) Hulu drops to just $5.99 per month after Netflix’s price hikes (The Verge) Waymo says it will build self-driving cars in Michigan (Reuters) Xiaomi's flexible phone concept folds on both sides (Engadget) Meizu Zero debuts with no physical buttons, speaker or charging port (GSMarena) Millions and Billions | Celebrating Patrons, Creators, and Major Milestones (Patreon Blog) Digitimes: AirPods 2 launching in first half of this year, redesigned to support ‘health monitoring’ features (9to5Mac) Spotify Will Soon Let You Block Artists (Thurrot.com) The economics of streaming is making songs shorter (QZ) Is Spotify’s Model Wiping Out Music’s Middle Class? (The Ringer) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the tech meme right home for Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, YouTube TV goes nationwide, Johnny Ives' dream phone design, Patreon milestones, and is Spotify killing music's middle class.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Almost two years after launching YouTube TV has now gone nationwide, mostly. Google Today launched YouTube TV in 95. additional U.S. markets and claims that with these, 98% of U.S. households can now get YouTube TV. One tiny caveat, quoting Chris Welch in The Verge. But there's one downside to this availability expansion. Not all markets will be able to stream all four of the major broadcasters,

ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. YouTube says all YouTube TV markets will have live streaming access to at least three out of the four. I counted 19 markets out of 195, where one of the the four broadcasters is unavailable, so customers in most regions, over 90% of YouTube TV markets, will still be getting all of them, end quote. But YouTube doesn't care about your quibbles, quoting their blog post, just in time for the big game, you can now bring together some tasty game day snacks

with the full experience of YouTube TV. That's exciting news for living rooms, cord cutters, and cord nevers in neighborhoods far and wide, from Bozeman to Gainesville, Anchorage to Yuma, and Erie to Topeka. unquote. Reminder that YouTube TV lets you watch live TV without a cable subscription, 60 different networks, a cloud DVR with zero storage limits, and as you can imagine, the ability to watch TV on any screen you want, all this for $40 a month. Sounds like I did an ad for them there. I did not. But friends who do subscribe to this service do tend to swear by it. I try not to do, I told you so, segments, but,

But remember when I said people would start coming at Netflix on price? Yeah, Hulu today announced that it is lowering the price of its base ad-supported subscription plan to $5.99 a month down from the current $7.99 a month beginning February 26th. If you're worried that that means they'll just make up the difference with more ads, Hulu says no, they won't. So the cheapest plan is now even cheaper. Hulu's no commercials plan stays at $1199 compared to Netflix's recent price increase to $13 a month for its most popular plan and the $12.99 Hulu slash Spotify combo plan stays the same at $12.99 a month. Hulu did have one price hike to announce Hulu's live TV service

will now be $44.99 a month instead of the current $39.99. But that's not going after Netflix, right? That's going after our previous topic, YouTube TV. Still, people want you to compare prices with Netflix. As M.G. Siegler tweeted, when they go high, we go low, but also higher. Reuters says that Waymo is investing $13.6 million in a factory in Michigan, which will manufacture level for autonomous cars.

No, this is not actually a factory for Waymo, to build the cars from the ground up, but instead to make existing cars level four autonomous. Quoting from the blog post, Waymo develops hardware and software in-house so that our self-driving technology works as a seamless single system. A vital part of that process is integrating our self-driving system

into the vehicles we purchase for our fleet, including Fiat Chrysler automobiles and Jaguar Land Rover, end quote. So again, this is not going to be some big new factory churning out robot cars, but the relatively small size of the investment should have told you that. No, this is instead a further sign that Waymo does remain serious about actually building out a fleet of autonomous vehicles that it can deploy on real roads someday. Remember, Waymo has ordered all those Chrysler Pacifica minivans, 62,000 of them, to be exact. And soon, it will have a factory in place

that will be able to install all the sensors and gizmos that will make those minivans. autonomous. Keeping you up to date on the foldable phone trend, Zhaumee has released a video of its foldable phone prototype. If you click on the N-Gadgett link in the show notes, you can watch a video of the device in action, and probably watching the video is the best, but I'll try to describe it.

Man holding and interacting with an iPad mini-sized tablet in portrait mode. Man turns tablet to landscape mode and then folds both sides back to interact with the new smaller device like it's a smartphone. But remember, the weird thing about this design is that the screen tucks back behind the device. So it's almost like you can turn the whole thing front to back into one multi-sided screen. And if that doesn't float your boat, try this. Chinese phone maker Mizu has announced the zero. A smartphone with zero ports.

Zero physical buttons. Not even a SIM card slot. There's not even a charging or USB port. So the Zero uses 18 watt wireless charging. The only ability to do data transfer is over Wi-Fi or mobile networks. The lack of SIM card slot is made up for by using ESIM. Touch capacitive panels on the side replace the volume buttons. What about the speaker?

Get this. The zero uses a POSSI. hysioelectric transducer that is under the display. After all of that, it's still your basic 5.99 inch Android phone, Amel-led display, in-display fingerprint scanner, dual cameras on the back, 20 megapixel selfie camera on the front, and a Snapdragon 845. No word on availability or pricing, but a completely button and port-free phone. That sound you hear is Johnny Ive, somewhere eating his heart out. Patreon had some milestones they wanted to crow about,

specifically the fact that they're about to pass $1 billion paid out to creators since the platform began in 2013. Also, there are now more than 3 million patrons supporting more than 100,000 creators on Patreon, and things are seemingly going in only one direction. Patreon estimates that in 2019 alone, they will send creators more than a half of

billion. Quoting their blog posts, in just one year, the number of patrons around the globe increased from 2 million to 3 million. And the creators being supported include podcasters, illustrators, writers, musicians, and more. On track to pass $1 billion paid out to creators, Patreon is continuing to nearly double the amount of money sent to creators year over year, end quote. A bunch of outlets floated this one today. Digitimes has a report out saying that AirPods, two.

are definitely coming in the first half of this year, and when they do, they will for the first time include health monitoring features. Now, Digitimes has, let's be honest, a mixed record of accuracy, so let's weigh this a little bit. Again, health wearables seems to be a space Apple wants to lean into, but at the same time, earbuds are small. So what sort of meaningful health sensor could you even cram into those things? and limited battery in those babies,

so you'd want to reserve for its main use of playing sounds any sort of battery life you could without degrading performance. So I guess a heart rate monitor or something like that would be out. Not sure. Accelerometer to determine body movement, but again, that sort of always on battery drain would seem to me to be an issue. So file this away in the same place you would keep your salt. This is very interesting speculation.

I can definitely see them move. in the health monitor direction with AirPods, but take it with a grain of salt is what I'm saying. I've been sitting on a bunch of interesting Spotify tidbits, so what I think I'll end with today is just a sift-through-the-mall, sort of omnibus segment. First, I couldn't squeeze this news in yesterday, but Spotify is testing allowing users the ability to block specific artists.

Once blocked, you never need to ever hear that artist, again. They won't show up in Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, your personal library, even global charts. So if you want to pretend like Carly Ray Jepson or a Creed never existed, it sounds like maybe you can. If this new feature is live for you, you can access it from the dot dot dot thingy at the top. Do we even have a name for that like we have for the hamburger? Anyway, the dot, dot, dot, dot thing at the top on an artist's page where if you're lucky enough, you can tap and click, don't play this artist. Spotify has said before that they didn't want to add a blocking feature, even though it has been hugely requested. And this has not been officially announced

or confirmed, so maybe it won't stick. But there you go. If you want it, and you're one of the elect who has it, knock yourself out. Next, Quartz has an interesting piece up, noting that songs are getting shorter. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 decreased in length from 3 minutes and 50 seconds on average to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. And 6% of songs were 2 minutes and 30 seconds or shorter in 2018. That's up from just 1% of songs that were that short five years ago. Why? Well, you guessed it. Quartz is blaming Spotify, or I guess specifically streaming music more generally. Quote, payments from music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music made up 75% of all music revenues in 2018.

compared to just 21% in 2013. Streaming services pay music rights holders per play. Spotify doesn't say the exact amount. It pays artists for each stream, but reports suggest it is somewhere between 0.004 and 0.08 cents. Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West's 2010, 5-minute opus, all of the lights. It's the same payment as West's two-minute long 2018 hit,

I love it, end quote. So it's simple math. Artists are incentivized to get their songs played more. Three, three-minute songs make an artist more money than one 10-minute song, say. It's sort of like how if you release a three-hour movie, it's harder to make it a blockbuster because there are less times in the day that you can show it. Quote, there has never been this kind of financial incentive to make shorter songs, tweeted Mark Richardson, the former editor of the music criticism site pitchfork. Indeed, Usually technology incentivizes bloat, bloat to fill up the available delivery medium. In the 50s, most songs sold as singles.

You could only get three to five minutes on a side. Then the LP record came out, and artists could then conceive of albums, entire hour long and longer, as a coherent artistic work. That, of course, led to excess in the era of the CD when artists were incentivized to cram one or two good songs among eight or ten crap ones, all so they could sell you the CD for $20.

And speaking of the business model of streaming music, the ringer wonders if streaming is wiping out music's middle class. Again, artists only get paid a flat fee per play, but the pie doesn't get sliced up the way most people assume. If you did nothing but listen to Hootie and the Blowfish on repeat all month, that doesn't mean that Darius Rucker gets that entire $9.99 cents, or whatever it was you paid. Quote, instead of divvying up a given listeners $10 per month to the artist he or she streamed,

excluding Spotify's roughly 30% cut, the subscription money is put into a collective pool that is distributed by aggregate play counts across the platform. Think of it like having your paycheck fluctuate based not only on your performance, but on the performance of everyone else in your industry. The better your colleagues and competitors do, the less money you make. The average Spotify user streams about 25 hours of content per month. If you stream less than that, you're generating less money for the artists you care about than the power users who are listening to Spotify constantly. What we're saying is these folks that are streaming 24 hours a day are dramatically more valuable than I am, even though we're both paying $10, says Sharkey Liguana, a San Francisco-based musician and entrepreneur whose medium posts about royalty payments have been shared widely.

The solution, according to a growing number of proponents, is to switch to a user-centric model. In this system, a subscriber's monthly payment would be split among the artists whom that individual listened to. Light users would reward the few artists they regularly stream with greater royalties. Heavy users would have their subscription money split among a wide swath of acts. This would realign the streaming era more closely with the economics of the age of physical media when niche acts that managed to build a small but loyal fan base could make a living, end quote. Economists have been looking into the impact of all of this, and there has been debate about moving to some sort of new model for years.

Spotify hasn't commented on the debate, and probably the only way that any sort of change would happen is if artists banded together to make the change. Problem there is the old one of incentives. There are a lot of popular artists at the top for whom the current structure is working out just fine. Thank you very much. As always, the rich get richer. That's all for today.

I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. This podcast stands every day on the shoulders of the editors of TechMeme.com. So check out their 24-7 yeoman's work over there. And check out the podcast subreddit at R-slash-R-Slide Home, where you can discuss the stories on the show and post stories to put them on my radar so we can talk about them on the show.

Talk to you tomorrow.