The Press Box - Ep. 144: 'The Ringer Tech Pod With Molly McHugh and Victor Luckerson'

Episode Date: July 8, 2016

The Ringer’s Molly McHugh discusses some of the challenges of the digital music space with the founders of now-defunct services Turntable.fm (04:30) and Vivogig (13:30), and chats with tech reporter Victor Luckerson. Later, she brings on Scott Pinkmountain (22:00), a music analyst at Pandora, to share his thoughts on the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Ringer podcast, I'm still working on a name. Please give me more suggestions. It is brought to you by Seatkeek, our presenting sponsor and the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling sports and music tickets. Seatkeek makes buying tickets on your phone a total snap. With just two taps, you can instantly buy tickets to an event the same day. Have your tickets delivered straight to your phone and enter the event without ever having to print a ticket. And if you can't go to a game or show, you can sell your tickets directly from the app in less than 30 seconds. With Seatgeek, there's no guesswork.

You know exactly where you're sitting, what you'll pay, and whether or not you're getting a good deal. All right from your phone. So drop your old ticket app and experience buying and selling tickets the way it should be. To start using Seekek, download the free Seatgeek app or go to Seatgeek.com. Welcome to Channel 33. Today, we're going to talk about digital music and the music and internet and just kind of the way people have tried to make this thing work and how confusing it can be. We're talking to Billy Chasen, who created turntable.fm, maybe the most fun social music app that unfortunately is not around anymore, as well as Scott Pink Mountain, who works at Pandora as a music analyst. And then also Tanner Maylee, who created an app called Vivo gig, which was going to try and be the Instagram for concerts.

It did not work out, but he learned a lot of really interesting things about the music and internet industry and how it's all a really difficult landscape to navigate. But first, we're going to talk to Victor Lukerson. who works at The Ringer. He's a staff writer here. Okay, cool, Victor. Thanks for joining me today. How are you? I'm great, Molly. How are you doing? I'm good. I was just reading this article you wrote a few weeks ago, but it's really relevant to a lot of things we're talking about today. And it was about how Spotify kind of had to, since they couldn't get all these big names,

they kind of tried to win with an algorithm. Was there anything when you were reporting that that really surprised you? I guess maybe just the overall success they've had with the Discover Weekly, product. They have a lot of different algorithm of products at this point, but sort of the biggest one to discover weekly, which gives users 30 sort of computer selected songs every week. And they've actually managed to get about 40% of their user base to try out the feature. And of those 40 million, half those people are listening to at least 10 songs per week from that 30 list playlist. So that's like a lot of engagement that they found with a relatively new product. So I was really

honestly pretty impressed that they've been able to get so many people on board with this new feature. Yeah, I mean, so this year then, have you had the problem of like, do I subscribe to title or do I get an Apple music account? Yeah, I think at one point I might have had four music apps on my phone. That's kind of when I was like, this is ridiculous. And maybe that was like part of the inspiration for this story. But obviously we've seen this year a lot of the major artists sort of like picking their battle stations, whether it's title or Spotify or Apple music. So if you really want to be able to sort of keep up with all the major releases, and you want to be able to sort of be part of that Twitter conversation,

the day they come out, you really need to have like two, three, maybe even four subscriptions at this point, which kind of sucks for the user. It's so painful. But so one of the things that everybody that we've been talking to lately, one thing that they said that was really hard is the social element of music.

We've seen so many people try to do it. I still don't really know if there is a good way to make a social music app. Is there anything in your reporting on music in general that you've seen that, you think would make this finally succeed, or is it just, you know, it's just not going to happen? Yeah, I don't know. It's tough. I guess sort of, when I was talking to the gosh, when the Echonest and I work at Spotify, they were sort of talking about the idea of maybe some of these, like, algorithmic programs, sort of almost behaving the way that your friend

back in the day would have been when they made you a mixtape, like Discover Weekly in some ways because it's relatively short and discrete, and it's sort of very hand-tailored. It kind of feels like a mixtape that your friend made. So I guess in that way, that's one of these social elements that is being recreated. But I think that the sort of live music sharing experience, that's pretty tough. I mean, turntable was a great example of that. But I guess that collapsed just because of the cost issue. Right.

I wanted to know more about why exactly Turntable collapsed. So I spoke with Turntable co-founder Billy Chasin about the app. Hey, Billy, how's it going? Good. I think you're responsible for maybe 90% of my wasted time during a two-month period in 2011. For anyone who doesn't know what turntable.fm was, can you give like a very general description of the service? Sure. So Turntable, in its essence core, was a way to hang out virtually in the room with a bunch of other people and take turns playing songs for each other. And so it was kind of like a throwback to that. Like, can we get together and listen to songs together?

It was really competitive, too. At least with my group at my office, you would go on themes or something and see who could come up with the best. And you got really, I remember like spending a lot of time looking through my iTunes to then go back to turntable and find that song because I was like, oh, this is a great song. I'm going to look really cool. Did you get that kind of reaction from a lot of people? Yeah. You know, a lot of people would be scared to kind of get up on stage. It was almost like this stage fright that we would have in the real world actually happening in a turntable room, which I found very odd because you can't see anybody.

You're an avatar, but there was still kind of this fear of getting on stage. And I remember handholding several people, you know, it's okay, it's all right. You're not going to pick any bad music. Whatever you pick, people are going to like. and kind of getting people on stage to DJ. So did you know that on launch day this was going to be as big as it turned, as big as it was, that demand was just going to go crazy once you guys flip the switch on this? No, absolutely not.

In fact, I was preparing for what if nobody shows up. It's always a gamble. You know, I've thrown a lot of things out into the world. and I'm very surprised on which things don't work and which things do. What do you think it was that got people so excited and so quickly? Like sometimes something's around for a little bit and then maybe there's like a really good rash of media stories and everyone's like, oh, this really cool thing we didn't know about until we read about it is out there. Great.

At least for me with you guys, it was just suddenly there. Like all my friends were just like, hey, check out this amazing thing. It was super organic. Yeah, you know, this was before Spotify took over in the U.S. People were really only listening to things like Pandora. And there weren't a lot of options, especially socially, like how can I hang out with people? How can I share my music? There were only just a few apps that were kind of trying to skim the surface of that.

So it was just so uniquely different. And also, it looked incredibly different than all the other music apps. Most music apps are just kind of like, here's your list of files. And Turntable looked like a room. Like there were speakers. I mean, the speakers didn't do anything. The speakers were just pixels. But it looked like a room.

And you could see people. And when people liked your music, you'd see their head rocked back and forth. And kind of, it hit the right formula of being new and novel enough that people got into it. And then it helped that it was addicting. And we also had social chat features involved.

We had chat rooms where people could talk to each other. What I love, even though Turntable doesn't exist anymore right now, at least there are some of these connections that were made, including even romantic connections. We know some people that have gotten married to people that they met through Turntable, and there's even Turntable babies. No way. That makes me happy.

That's awesome. It probably didn't hurt that some celebrities were using it a lot and investing in it. How did you kind of get this star attraction to Turntable? I mean, that all happened after the fact. In the beginning, we were lucky enough that we had investors that believed in us and the team. And then only when it started really kind of taking off and investors are always looking for that viral signal, like what's just growing like crazy that we had what every founder dreams of. And even what I still dream of today, it's just kind of you don't have to go out and fundraise. It comes to you.

So I wanted to ask a little bit about the move from turntable.fm to turntable live, which part of this was because of you could only market to people in the United States because of music rights and then how expensive it was to be playing a song every time somebody streamed it. And so at the beginning was all of that stuff true and or did that happen later that you had all these restrictions? I kind of want to like understand that timeline. So right off the bat, we actually launched and we were international. And that was definitely illegal. Like we couldn't be international. We didn't have the rights to be international. The internet radio stuff was just for the U.S.

And so we very quickly closed down international usage. And we had a large amount of international usage. So it kind of sucked to cut off all of those users who also started contacting us asking, when are they going to get turntable back? And we're trying to. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. So if you launch turntable.fm, not the live, but today, would things be different from a legal standpoint? Like, have things changed enough? Or would you, do you think you'd still find yourself in the same position?

It would be very close. The good part about launching music services is you get to leverage what all the other music services before you negotiated to some extent. So Pandora put in a lot of work to get those internet radio plays cheaper, and we were able to take advantage of that. And they're technically supposed to all be confidential, but the reality of the industry is everybody's moving around between these labels and companies. And it just becomes known what everybody's paying and how they're paying it. Right. The only other question I was going to ask you about Turntable was why? do you think it's so hard to create a good and sustainable social music experience? I feel like there have been a lot of attempts and some do really well for a minute or they find a really,

you know, small audience that really loves it, but they don't seem to last very long or really make a play at the mainstream. And I wonder if that is more to do with the legal standing of music rights or if there's something we're missing in making these. So ultimately every business needs to make money and needs to have more money coming in than going out. And when you have this very large silent partner as the record industry, taking as much as they can possibly take, and you don't really have that much leverage when you're small, they're going to take a lot and it's harder to pay them and pay for your servers and your staff and everything else, especially because people are really not willing to pay for music, at least to pay for multiple services. A lot of those

things that we tried to offset the cost just didn't offset it enough. Well, thank you so much for talking to me about like a bunch of different stuff you've been working on. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for chatting. If there's any service I'm kind of sad about losing, it's probably turntable. I loved it so much for about, I don't know, the first two weeks, big and then a month even, I was still really on it. Did you totally obsess over it also? Yeah, I was using it a lot and it was almost like a return to like, I don't know, early 2000s weird internet for me where I'd just be like talking to strangers online basically. Like I did a lot turntabeling. I would just find a random room in a genre I liked and just sort of like tried

to become the ultimate DJ in that room. Yeah, it was super competitive. Exactly. It was an interesting return to sort of like connecting with strangers online, which was already sort of like, I feel like got out of favor a little bit, sort of like in the post-Facebook era or whatever. But Turntable definitely brought that back and connected with music, which is really cool. I felt like a big part of the Turntable appeal was the sort of virtual room you were in and you're having your little character and, you know, customizing him or her. So it's kind of like a little video game mixed with a listening experience, which made it really fun. Yeah, I really miss it. This is my plea for someone on the internet to bring Turntable back or make a new one. I would love that. You'd have

like at least two weeks of engagement, as has been proven. Right. That's plenty in 2016. Yeah, it's true. Another app that tried to generate community around a digital music service was Vivo Gig. I sat down with Tanner Maylee to speak with him about his involvement with the app. You used to run or be part of a startup called Vivo gig.

I did. But I was thinking of the best way to describe it and it kind of like Instagram for concerts, I think was sort of the tagline. No, I think that's a good explanation. And what we were really looking at was a way to look at an event. And when people were all together, but they might not know each other, but they're all taking photos of the same thing. And we were trying to gather those photos together from events.

So, yeah, it was basically like Instagram for events. Around concerts, specifically? Yes, specifically around concerts. So we were trying to basically find a way to filter out, like, if someone used a hashtag for 9-inch nils, and then there's a photo of a sandwich, like, well, that doesn't belong there. How do we get the sandwich out of there? Well, we do that using geolocation and like a geogate, saying if you were at this specific location at this time,

then we'll use these photos. The inspiration, the CEO and founder, his original idea, was to come up with a better way to look a better app for concerts. And we didn't really know what that was going to be in the beginning. And then through our research and going to do, concerts and interviewing concert goers and people that were really entrenched in the Austin music scene. We kind of came up with this idea. And eventually that turned into like doing contests and photo contests. Yeah. What was it like launching at South by Southwest? I honestly cannot imagine

what it would be like to be a founder at South by Southwest. It's insane. It's so noisy. I've heard Reggie Watts describe it as the brand festival because that's what it is. It's just like so many brands all at once launching. And nobody really, I don't think a lot of people really download a lot of the apps because it's so constant, like every corner you turn there's someone handing you like a flyer or like download this and get something free or check those app out. So it's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to know whether this thing is going to work in the real world.

I had a great time using it for three days, but like what's going to happen when I go home? But for you guys, like, that has to be crazy because you get this very inaccurate picture of what your user demographic looks like, I would imagine. Absolutely. It's basically spring break for tech nerds. And you should go, if you're going to go to South by, you should have that in mind. You're going to like grow your network. You'll meet some great people. But as far as spending money on a product lunch, I would advise again. that. Okay, fair enough. And it is incredibly expensive. It's insane. It is not cheap. And it continues to grow more expensive each year. So yeah. I know people gig is not around anymore. What kind of happened in the year since? How long were you guys up and running and kind of like what were some of the things you think not went wrong, but like it wasn't the right time? Yeah. I mean, we ran into some pretty big

problems. We didn't have a developer on the team, which was our biggest, that was our Achilles heel. And so that was definitely one big problem. And the other was that we should have kept the app a little bit more open to all events rather than just concerts. And by locking ourselves into such a small niche in the very beginning, I think that that was another big problem that we faced. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you're kind of directly competing with Instagram. Probably been way better off doing that and using it for a photo contest. Right, right. And so you launched in 2012.

How long did you guys, like, until if you sold the technology or until just you are, like, well, we're done and ready to move on. Yeah, we were out of money. And it was about, I would say, like, two years in. Okay. It'd gotten our first seed round, and that kind of helped us, helped us along. But we initially, like right after we got our first. seed round we hired a fairly big team which was I think was a pretty bad decision and that kind of

made our funds dwindle a little faster than they should have sure and so that you know a lot of our funds went towards that rather than into the app itself I mean hindsight is so 2020 with those things you know like if they had worked perfectly everybody would have been like see told you so tanning you rolled the dice and it worked out yeah it's it's such a crazy and endeavor to even try. So if you hired like a big team, was that like really hard once you guys, you know, decided that when you ran out of money, when you had to like tell people like, hey, we invested in your job. However. Yeah. No, it was definitely. And it was a very young team that we had brought on. And it was a lot of fun. I love going to work and, you know, having our,

having everybody in the office and working on the app. It was a lot of fun. And at the end of the day or at the week, we would always go to a concert or we were throwing a concert. Yeah, that's an amazing work perk. Some people have, you know, like free lunch or something, but that sounds better. Do you, and some people have said before that just trying to start a tech company, especially like a consumer facing app, not being in San Francisco hurt them. But I don't know if that's something that put any strain on you guys. No, I don't think so.

I mean, one of the reasons that we felt like Austin was a good testing ground is because there are so many shows and there are so many concerts, especially in the spring summertime. I mean, it's just festival after festival. So as far as being able to test our hypothesis, we had plenty of opportunity here. And I don't think that it hindered our ability to see results, even though we didn't like the results. We were as far as, you know, obtaining users. But yeah, definitely. So what did you kind of take, even if it's just like how to run a business kind of stuff? Are there any specific things that you're just, you learned from VivoGig that you're

applying to this, that you're just like, yeah, this is going to go better now? Yeah, absolutely. We all know what are, you know, what we want to get out of the business. And we also, I guess just the transparency thing and having a very clear objective up front because in Vivo Gia, it was always kind of like a moving target. Like, well, this isn't really working. Should we shift now? And that was something that we talked about.

And some of our advisors tried to get us to do was like we were so successful at throwing live events that a couple of times we were told, like, why don't you guys just pivot to like a live event company? You're really successful at that. Right. And I thought that was a pretty good idea. But it's hard to like completely change direction when you're so far in. Yeah, for sure. And do you think you'd ever want to go back into a tech startup or are you done? It just depends on what the product is really. If it makes sense and it's something that isn't out there, then I might be interested in it.

But I took a bit of a break from graphic design and interactive design for a while after Vivo gig. I was really burnt out on it. I'm sure. I had kind of beat my head against a wall for two and a half years. So, yeah, yeah, I think, sure, it's just something you have to, you know, know, before you're ready to put that much time and effort into it, it's something that you think will really be successful. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for talking to me about it. Thanks for having me. Did you ever use VBOGIG? I'd actually never heard of it until this interview. Okay. I'm trying to remember

I'm trying to remember when it came out but it was a long time ago it was like my first job and it was at South by Southwest and it was one of those very cool South by Southwest apps and obviously there are tons of concerts there but okay

so you didn't use it but can you see an Instagram for concerts thing kind of working on its own? I can see why someone in 2012 might have thought that would work I guess Sure. But obviously at this point, we're at a point where there's like, we have, we sort of have our social apps and that you're coming with like a really fundamentally like paradigm

shifting concept, like Snapchat, for instance. I don't think people really want, it's your social network, but for this thing. People are pretty chill, like, in their Facebooks and their Instagrams, etc. I wanted to get some perspective from some of these bigger platforms that have managed to stay in the business in such a tumultuous industry. I talked to a music analyst at Pandora who gave some perspective as both a musician and an industry insider. And now I'm joined by Scott Pink Mountain, who works at Pandora, but also has a new podcast

called The History Channeler. And I just wanted to ask you a couple questions about what it's like being on the industry and creative side of music. So can you give me a little bit about your background in each of these things? I studied music in college and went immediately into grad school, studied music. So since that time, I've been playing music professionally, and that was back in the mid-90s. And on the industry side, I've been a music analyst at Pandora since 2004. So 12 years now, yeah.

When did Pandora launch? I'm trying really hard to remember. It was about a year after I was there sometime in 2005, I believe. So I was there. The company was called Savage Beast at the time, and they were in the process of figure. out what to do with this music genome project that they'd been building. Did you have a job as a music analyst before going to Pandora? I don't think that there was a job as a music analyst before Tim Westagrin invented the job.

How do they like turn that into a job title and find you and decide like this guy, this guy's going to be able to analyze music for us? I had to actually take a music analysis test to apply for the job. So because of my background and because of my experience as a musician, I was able to do well enough on that test. I actually met with Tim Westroger, and I think I was one of the last people that was directly interviewed by the founder of the company. Amazing. Yeah, I'm sure it grew really, really fast. Especially in like the early days, what did that entail?

Because I know it was, you know, working on the music genome project. Yeah, I mean, the job hasn't changed since then. It's the same thing. and I think it's been pretty well discussed probably more eloquently than I can do in just a minute or two. But as music analysts, we essentially go through and tag what we call genes. And those are all these different identifiers for as objectively as possible analyzing the music, turning it into a data set, essentially, that can be transformed into an algorithm. And then that algorithm can be paired with similar algorithms to generate playlists.

Right. And I read an article where you talked about how there's such a big difference between listening to music and analyzing music. Like you might kind of think that those are the same things that you get to sit around all day and just listen to your favorite songs. But can you tell me like a little bit about, you know, when you go into analysis mode and then you go into listening mode and how that's different? It's essentially the same thing as analyzing versus experiencing anything. You know, if you're watching a TV show and you're sort of immersed in it, you get lost in the story and the acting is transparent. If you're watching it as a critic or an analyst, you're noticing the edits, you're noticing the camera placement, you're noticing the lighting, you're noticing the delivery of the lines, all those things. So analysis is really a removal from the experiential view to a critical point of view.

when you kind of think about how music has changed in the internet age, I guess. And one of the main things is how much more science and technology is going into this, obviously. We're doing things like what you're doing. We're analyzing music to a different degree and using that to create experiences like playlists. So that's one thing that's changed with music. But if you could pick a few things over the last 12 years that you've been doing this and paying attention to what's going on in this industry, what are like the big huge changes? as you've seen over the last 12 years?

Yeah, well, first I'd just say that people have been analyzing music since the beginning of music. And I don't think that the scientific approach that we're attempting to take is necessarily any different than the whole field of musicology. It's just doing it in a way that can be quantified. But people have been turning music into numbers for a really long time. Okay. In terms of other changes on a big scale that I think music has gone through in the last 12 years,

God, that's a really hard question. I think the biggest change has been cultural in that audiences no longer feel like they have to pay for music. Yeah. It's kind of the strange thing where no one owns music anymore. I used to talk about that with some of my old colleagues about we all pay for subscriptions, but you don't. Like I remember owning CDs still. Like I used to buy them when I was in middle school and high school and you physically owned them. And even if once you started, you know, putting, uploading those and you had an iTunes account or whatever, then you had that and you still owned that.

And now it's not really yours. The other component to that is the infinite plenty or the plentitude factor where you have access to all music at all times, assuming, you know, you have a subscription to one of these vast libraries. and I think that that must in some radical way change our relationship to music. The idea of scarcity to access was what I grew up with. So I remember the first couple albums I bought because those were all I had for a long time. I listened to them a lot. I listened to the same 25 albums all through high school. But that model just is gone.

So our relationship to music, I'm sure, has changed. Now, whether it's for the better or. worse, I think we're still in the process of discovering that. The other component of that I would identify is that we're in a transition in terms of how to use and access our collections. One of the problems that I personally have and that I hear so many people talk about is, I've got all these albums on a hard drive over there, and then I've got this thing on my iPhone, but then I've got to plug it into this thing. People don't have a common way of listening to music like they used to. Yeah, that's true. This is what everyone's trying to figure out. I mean, Title and Apple Music are like maybe even, I think they're the newest subscription music catalog apps to come out. And there's been like a lot of controversy there. There's like people who are going to sue because they're mad about, you know, exclusives come out. And then a week later, they're, you know, anywhere else on SoundCloud even sometimes. And do you see a solution in that mess? Or do you think they're experimenting and trying to figure it out? Or is it just, is it doomed?

I don't see the solution coming from the marketplace because they're, the needs of the marketplace are not the needs of artists and they're not even necessarily the needs of listeners. So enough resources on the artist side to solve this problem. Artists have to at least have enough time to make art and some time left over to promote their art, they can't also be responsible for distributing, marketing, everything. There's no time left to make music at that point. Right. And then, so do we stop getting as much music?

Does the cycle, has it gone down? It's easier to make music now than it's ever been, that's for sure. One of the other things that, in addition to trying to figure out this subscription model and having some services that seem to have artists first, some that have money first, and no one can get all three things, right? Artist user money. The other thing that you keep seeing,

like tech trying to innovate with music is like a social music app. What is like stopping the internet or the tech community from making a good social music experience? Yeah, I don't know. This was one of the most bewildering things to me when MySpace disappeared. Yeah. Because MySpace hit the scene and people freaked out and every single band in existence rushed to make a site.

And it seemed to be... It was working. It seemed to be working. Yeah. I mean, here you could get five or six songs up for free. You could have a place where your fans could come and check it out. And it seemed like people really liked it. And then it died for various reasons.

And then nothing stepped in to fill that. that void. So that's a mystery to me. Did you ever check out the new MySpace when they kind of, they, you know, tried to relaunch under new management and it was artist first kind of thing. Did you ever use that? I sort of would check back once in a while, but I think the thing that killed MySpace was just too many GIGOs and widgets and this and that and too many ads. And it just was so busy that I couldn't even look at the site. So I got turned off pretty fast. Yeah, the glittering Was it any good? It was okay.

But actually navigating it and finding people you wanted to interact with around all the music was impossible. A lot of spam, a lot of people who I don't think actually cared about music, they were just signing on to the new MySpace because it was the new MySpace. I haven't checked it out in years and years since it launched. So that says enough. It tried. It was an interesting attempt. But again, they had problems with rights. they couldn't get certain catalogs, there'd be giant holes in the music you wanted to listen to,

so you'd end up going to a different side to listen to music, which is the whole point. Right. So it's going to make sense that whatever that next iteration of that is, is also paired with somewhere where you can listen to all of any given bands music. But yeah, that hasn't happened yet. I was going to ask, does that ever happen? Or do you think that's years away because of right stuff or is it something else? You know, I've thought a lot about this, and I think that part of it is that like interpersonal face-to-face social networks are not going to be replicated online. I don't think that you can look to a digital app that you hold in your hand to replace the experience of going to a live concert or even your best friend saying, oh my God, I just heard this incredible song.

you have to sit down, sit down right now, you have to listen. We're not getting out of my car until you listen to this song twice. Yeah. You know, nothing is ever going to replace that. Now, that's not to say that something can't come along and provide a totally different experience that may be equally valuable. But I don't know what that's going to be. I don't know.

Is it the human kind of connection there a good thing? Well, maybe it's not going to happen until we fully land in that next environment. maybe there will be some kind of virtual environment that makes that experience more significant. Because I feel like right now it's so abstract. You know, the libraries on Spotify or Netflix, you can't see them. They're not transparent. So if I'm searching for something, I'm just kind of getting whatever's thrown at me or whatever's trending or whatever's now.

But it's very hard to visualize that in the mind. Yeah. there has to be something that you can hold in your hand either physically or simulated physically. That's how I came to albums. You know, like album art is gone. Yeah, that's really sad. If we have to identify one problem of why people are having a distance from musical product, like there's nothing to look at.

That's a good point. We're of super visual people. And that helps us access the music, even if, music isn't visual. It's not like I was listening to great music when I was in middle school, but I do have like fond memories of ripping open a CD case and like devouring each page of, you know, the photos and the notes and everything else. It was, you know, I wanted to see the design was cool. It was great. You like would cut them out sometimes and put them in your binders and stuff like that. It was really fun. What do you think is going to happen with all of the battles going on

about rights and royalties and how much it costs to actually, you know, put this music into a service for users to then subscribe to. Yeah, I envision some utopian situation where a third party panel of economists that everybody respects gets all vested interest to one table, like one big room, and helps everybody hash out the value of a single digital spin. We have to to put a number on that that everybody feels comfortable with and everybody agrees on. There's someone smart enough out there to help us hear it's out. We basically need a G4 summit but for music. Yeah.

Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. Well, thank you again. But music is healthy. Yeah. Good. The music industry may be problematic, but music is healthy.

I was going to say, music's not going to go anywhere and you will always have a way to get to it. It just might be frustrating and full of lots of different applications and accounts. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you again. I really appreciate it. This was great.

It was super interesting. Right on. Happy to be of help. So I think one of the most interesting things Scott was talking about was this price on a single digital spin on the internet, which has been pretty contested. Yeah, definitely. The idea of having like a single price point, I guess, for per spin across the web would be really interesting.

And it seems like artists are sort of already advocating for that. This week, labels and some major artists like Taylor Swift, they're in this battle with YouTube right now about trying to raise the rates for spends on YouTube. So it's going to be interesting to see whether or not they're able to legally compel YouTube to give more money. Because I guess there's basically an argument

between the companies who want to lower the rates and make more money and the artists you want to obviously make more money themselves with higher rates. It's going to make sure to see who wins out ultimately in that battle. Yeah, I wonder how YouTube's gotten away with this. Is there some loophole? in being a video service that happens to have music on it or something? Yeah, I don't know.

It's tough to say. I guess it's kind of like it took the labels a while to realize that actually YouTube is the most popular way to listen to music online. And so now that they've sort of come to their senses about that, they're being a lot more aggressive about compelling the service to give them more money. Yeah, YouTube is basically just like the world's clunkiest playlist maker. Like it's not, it's not like user-friendly. but if you really want to, you can go through and make a playlist with YouTube and it's going to be free. And it's very easy. It's still the simplest way to access a song from your web browser in five seconds, which is why it's the most popular.

All right. Well, we did a lot of talking about music and internet. Thanks for coming on and chatting with me today, Victor. No problem, Molly. All right, cool. Talk to you later.