YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Boom

lines on the record: 113
first: 2022-11-01
most recent: 2022-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're back So, you mentioned the echo several times. The echo is more than a speaker, it has Alexa. I've talked to Dave Limp on the show. He runs Alexa, among other things. He confirmed the obvious thing, that asking Alexa to play music is very popular. Is that something you take to the labels? Hey, we want Alexa devices to work out of the box. We need some version of Amazon music that operates, but you're going to get all these additional streams and will guarantee you some amount of activity because that's what people do with these devices.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, the labels, they're not going to tell us what the terms are with other providers, nor do we tell one label what the terms are with the other label. These are, we're all big companies, the majors, the music streaming services. We're all big companies and these are arm's length negotiations. And we all have different asks Our services aren't the same. The core value proposition of all the world's music for a really good price is the same, but there's lots of nuances in what we do that require licenses and marketing things and that ends up in puts and takes that are different from service to service. So it's almost hard to compare other than like the, am I getting all the music? Beyond that, it's actually, it's harder and harder to compare the deals.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, some of those conversations happen in the interim period when market conditions change. Neither they nor we have to wait for the contract to be over to say, you know what, this term doesn't work anymore because something has changed. So it can wait two years or three years. But yeah, that's the kind of thing to your question directly. Yeah, that is the type of thing that we would talk about in a renewal conversation.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this is the going back to the two or three year contract negotiation. Yeah. In two or three years, you're going to go to labels and you're going to say right now you're charging us more money to stream lossless. You're charging us more money to stream in spatial. We want to bundle that into the base price and take that revenue stream away. It's a gate, right? They have a revenue gate around higher quality files or differently mastered files or differently mixed files. And over time, you're saying those gates will go away and it'll just become bundled into the default.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's really what's happened now in music, right? We came out at $5 a month. And within two years later, it's now part of the bass service. You don't have to upgrade to Amazon Music HD to get all the HD quality. It comes as part of the bass service now. So I think it's very analogous to what happened in video.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you paid $10. You used to pay $10 extra to Comcaster, whoever your provider was to get HD television. And then it got ultimately bundled in”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it's strange the default price gets you a worse version of the thing and you can pay to get closer to the artist's intent. And then just because you can hear it, because the music industry can put some chrome fins on another one bites the dust and make it swirl all around you, you can pay yet more money.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I listen to both of those The idea that Brian May is sneaking up behind me to play guitar, so it was just like not that compelling. And the thing that I wonder, the reason I'm asking this line of questions is you're right. The artists are in the studio, they make a thing. Yeah.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First song you always hear is Rocket Man, and it's amazing. Yeah. So that was the one where I was like, oh my gosh, we got to do this. I mean, I literally sat in a room like this. The Amazon devices team invited me down. I live in the barrier. They invited me down to the office down in Sunnyvale. And they played it. And just, they just sat there watching my face. Just like what the music guy is going to think. And my jaw was practically had to be picked up off the floor. It was amazing. That was the first one. I always like to use another one bites the dust, a queen. If you listen to that, it's just, it's. So I listen to both of those. Yeah. And you don't like them?”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some studio mixes aren't awesome, but if you hear a really good mix in spatial, like in Dolby Atmos, it's mind-blowing, actually.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we added spatial audio. So Dolby Atmos, Sony 360 Reality Audio. And I think that content, interestingly, I think what we're finding is people are gravitating towards that even more than the higher quality bit rates. Because you can really hear the difference. And we've done it, so you don't just need a regular use our mobile app. You don't need special headphones or anything.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's weird. Yeah. The artist records it at this quality and we're like, yeah, that's not what we're going to give you We're going to give you something worse. Like, why would you do that? Well, technical constraints. We're past that point. Once you get to 5G, almost unlimited capacity on your phone, storage on your PC is, you know, it used to be how much it was for a gigabyte, now a terabyte cost you a buck or something like that, right? So we felt like all the technical constraints were gone. We don't have to trade between convenience and quality anymore. I do think a lot of people care. I think a growing number of people care. I think vinyl is actually evidence of that to some extent. A lot of people you talk about vinyl, they like the sound quality. For other people, it's actually considered more like merch, right? It's the way they have a physical connection with their artist.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other high fidelity services combined. That being said, it was still relatively small in the industry, but we think it was a really important driver. I think you're right that convenience has trumped quality at almost at every turn in the evolution of digital music. But it's already so darn convenient now. It's time for quality. Our view is it was time for quality to cut. It was a false trade-off at some point. It was the right trade-off back when storage was limited, bandwidth was limited, all those things that made, you know,”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we rolled out Amazon Music HD back in, I think it was 2019, right? We're almost like right before the pandemic, if I recall. And our goal at the time was to take higher quality audio more mainstream because at the time it was, you know, you paid $9.99 for a bass plan and then other services are charging another $10 to get to $19.99 or $19.98 to have the lossless audio. We all said that was way too way too niche, way too expensive, and we work with the labels like we want to make this more mainstream. We want to do it. And, you know, we want a wholesale price to support us to be able to go out at 15, like a $5 add-on, right? So we launched that everything in the catalog as CD quality or better. So we called it HD or Ultra HD, ultra HD is now, you know, 192 and all that kind of stuff. So before things changed, I think it was a year and a half ago, Amazon Usic HD was bigger than all the”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That stuff play like I am a nerd for that stuff. I'll take the lossless streaming all night. But my experience in this industry and with our audience is that convenience trumps quality every time. And so asking people to pay for higher quality is always just a slug.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's new for us. And new for the artists, that's a different part of the industry than the recorded music industry. Merch is not part of the recorded music industry. So we're working directly with artists on that. We're working directly with artists on the live stream. We work with the labels to some extent, but ultimately they're less involved in that stuff than on the recorded music where they own the copyrights.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, it's good that amazing that she could actually manufacture that money. That's been the biggest problem in vinyl. There's just not enough manufacturing capacity. But I think there have been these big shifts. Streaming is really driving almost all the revenue and certainly all the revenue growth in the industry. So is there going to be something new that comes on top of that? That seems like the more likely outcome to me.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's great to see vinyl growing like it is. And I saw Taylor Swift's numbers. I mean, I think she's sold a half a million or more vinyl copies in the first week is incredible.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great for Amazon, you know, it's ironic for me because when I joined Amazon 10 years ago, it was vinyl was kind of like, it was a hipster thing, right? And people were buying turntables at urban outfitters, which is just weird. I remember saying, well, when I grew up, vinyl was how you listen to music. I hadn't had a choice. It wasn't cool. The music was cool, not the format.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, they have investors who are making long term investment decisions based on the predictability of revenue and the structure of the industry. Is there some big new thing that's going to come along? Like there have been these major format shifts and streaming being the latest of them. Is there a next big shift? There might be. I don't think within streaming you're going to see massive structural changes. We're trying to do new things. The other guys are trying to do new things. So you need to get licenses to be able to do that. And then we have to figure out the economics of how that works. But I think the core structure of the industry is pretty well set in terms of streaming. But yeah, there could always be something brand new that comes along that displaces or augments streaming or supplemental to it and has a totally different structure. That's more likely what's going to happen. And streaming is always going to be, I mean, it's driving almost all the revenue in the industry these days, except for the resurgence of vinyl, which is fun to watch.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just can't think of any other business outside of sports streaming where every couple years they could say, you know what? Like we actually don't like any of this. There are very few businesses where even the possibility exists that every few years the entire structure of the industry would change.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that's quite right. I don't think that's quite right. Every two to three years, you're not restructuring the whole industry. We maybe we want to do something new”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But like every two to three years, there's a pretty competitive renegotiation of how the entire industry should work, what the rate should be, how the payouts work. Is that the business or is the business? I don't think that's going to be.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels like unless someone stops them, they will just consolidate into one major label by the end of it all because it keep doing it. And there's only so many big tech companies. I doubt the tech companies are going to consolidate, but you never know. Yeah”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that to me seems, I think that's a hard sell. And I think the music industry and the streaming companies have, they have a long way to go to convince people of how much value they're getting in their lives for the amount of money they spend on it versus, I know, every Marvel movie. I've seen them all. I'm still paying Disney. I don't know why, right? But I'm going to open my music app 10 times a day. And I think there's something imbalanced there. But inside of that is a series of competitive content licensing negotiations that occur every two to three years among several huge players on both sides, right? There's only so many major labels and they're right.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the main thing that it strikes me when I talk about the structural nature of the music market. You make the consumer product. I pay you. I still think I pay you not enough money, but I can get all the.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I don't, I think five years, I think frankly, I think both sides would be reticent to do five-year deals. I think stuff is still changing rapidly. And I think that would leave you, both of us, exposed to maybe things we don't want to want. We'd end up having to renegotiate two, three years into the deal anyway. It's like, hey, this changed. Yeah, that doesn't make sense anymore or whatever. One of us or both of us would be coming on various points. So I think the duration of the deals makes sense given the context. It is a rat, it's still. 10 years pass into streaming or whatever, still rapidly changing and evolving industry.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not five. I mean, you can if you just can't, they're two to three year deals typically if you look at public filings from Spotify, you can figure it out because then you can figure out when they're in renegotiations. And it's pretty common across the industry.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To hand out to them in case they didn't have it. And to their credit, almost all of the executives we brought them to like, oh, I already got one. And they were checking it out, and they understood that there was a lot of innovation happening that was going to make digital music get bigger and bigger. And at least for Amazon, I can't speak for the other guys. That was the turning point in the relationships where we went from having good relationships, but challenging to license new things. We were asking for stuff they weren't used to giving and they were still a little bit, I think, like I said, digital destroyed the music industry for a while. So understandably, they were reticent. But that was shifting, I think, probably before we went to visit them at an industry level. And then we showed up in early 2016. And the conversations have changed ever since. And they've been very, very positive and collaborative since then.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I think the turning point for us was in probably 2015 when we went to go talk to the major labels about licensing Amazon Music Unlimited. So we talked earlier about prime music. That's our service that comes bundled with prime. And then you can upgrade to the full on-demand catalog 100 million songs on demand. And that's called Amazon Music Unlimited. We went in early 2016 to go talk to the labels about that. And you could feel the shift happening. A, in the industry overall, I think the fear of digital and the fear of streaming was subsiding and the realization that, whoa, whoa, this is actually where it's going. This is going to replace retail. So we need to embrace it. And then we came to the table. If you look at the timeline, that's right when Echo devices were just sort of starting to catch the public imagination a little bit. So in we walk and we went to visit all the majors carrying an extra suitcase full of echo devices.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly on the artistic side and some of the stuff you see in the press, it can seem from afar that maybe, wow, there's a lot of chaos going on in the industry. But I think on the business side of the industry, I don't think it's nearly as chaotic as that. But I don't think that's any different from any other business. We have to take a long-term perspective. We make educated judgments about what we think is going to happen in the future. And we're a big enough player in the industry that we can actually play a role in making sure that our educated judgments are going to happen actually does come to pass.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know that from a planning perspective and working with the major labels and the major publishers, I don't think it's that fickle. Like we have longstanding relationships with them. We consider them partners. We enter into contracts, long-term contracts, and we talk all the time about how the industry is evolving and what our needs are, what their needs are.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time it would be. There's this myth that I can't speak for the other bigger tech companies. There's a myth that, oh, we're just using music to sell other stuff is simply not the way it works. I mean, I run a P&L. In fact, I'm about to go present our annual plan to the CEO. And I have to show what's our profitability profile look like and what's the cumulative investment and cumulative return in the business over time. Over time, yeah, we would be self-sustaining. But like any business, you go negative for a while as you invest to build the customer base and build out the product, et cetera. And then over time, you're able to get leverage on your investment.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's like to me the biggest structural question about the music industry. Almost all of the players, apart from Spotify and Spotify has its own structural support from the music industry, but Amazon, YouTube music, Apple, all part of massive concerns that can somewhat subsidize the growth of the thing until it's self-sustaining. And there's Spotify, which has major investments from the labels, I think the labels and investors and investors. But I think the labels in particular are pretty keen to make sure Spotify exists.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, historically, I think if you look at the history of music startups, one of the problems has been is how do you acquire customers? It's expensive. And obviously it's $10 a month, but we pay a substantial amount of that revenue back to the rights holders who in turn pay the musicians and the songwriters. So there's a limited amount you can spend on kind of traditional marketing means. So I think the companies that have been successful have figured out ways around that. I think one of the ways we found is we've managed to build a service that's great for Amazon customers. We focus on Amazon Prime. We focus on Alexa. And these are areas that have brought lots of new customers into the fold. And as a result, we've brought lots of new people into music streaming over the years. But we also acquire customers off of Amazon as well. But that's been, you know, if you think about Apple, a lot of it's come through iOS and Spotify has their free tier and that's kind of been their distribution channel. I think the ones who have struggled have been.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have to make our service feel like it understands and is aware of music culture and is contributing to music culture and reflects music culture. And by doing that, yeah, we think people want to use the service. But the people that are focused on subscriber acquisition, they're not specifically, oh, the Taylor Swift release is coming out so we can do X, Y, or Z. Because obviously the release is going to be available on all services. Yeah. So it's not really a specific tool in that regard.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the way you think about it is obviously whenever we're doing something, we're working closely with the artists. So, whatever their artistic vision is for how their new release is going to be represented, we're working closely with them to represent that within our framework. But I think you should think about like we need to be culturally relevant. So it's not specifically about acquisition or retention. It's at the end of the day, you want to use a music service because it feels like it's part of music culture.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A two way door would be launching some new feature. And three months into it, it doesn't have the uptake that we hoped it would have. Do we shut it down? Well, yeah, we can shut it down. If it's not providing enough value to customers, we can do that. That's an easy two-way door decision. A marketing plan to experiment with marketing in this channel. Well, why don't we go experiment? Like, we can always just stop. Let's not spend a ton of time getting into analysis paralysis. Let's go learn by actually doing it.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a decision making framework and we think of them as one way door decisions or two way door decisions. One way doors are ones that once you make it, it's really hard to unwind. It's hard to open that door and walk back through it. Two-way door, it's easy to walk back through. Two-way door decisions we really encourage people to take them quickly, be willing to fail because you can unwind it. One way door decisions, a good example of a one-way door decision. When we decided to put music into prime, that was a one-way door. Could we unwind it? Of course we could. It's going to be painful though. So at that point, we take our time and we do a lot of analysis. And, you know, we write white papers. We take them up to see at the time Jeff Bezos was the CEO.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely not mostly music industry attorneys. We are a media company fueled by tech, right? So the majority of our employees are tech, but we have a lot of employees who are not tech. And some of them come from the long time in the music industry, and some of them are newer to the music industry. Some come from other parts of Amazon and are massive music fans and then want to work in this part of the company. And we've brought in a number of people from the industry to bring some of the more, what we call the music DNA into the team.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, how is that structured? Are most of your people engineering and tech, are most of them music industry attorneys or most of them artist market? Definitely not mostly music industry attorneys.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Yeah, so my organization comprises Amazon Music, which includes music and podcasting, the service Amazon Music, Wandery, our live radio service we call AMP, and then some other smaller, more internal things. All in it's a few thousand people.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to come back to that. There's also Twitch, by the way, which is pretty good live streaming. We'll come back to that. Let's keep going through the decoder questions. How many people are part of Amazon music right now?”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Live streaming, and we're investing heavily in merch. And so, yes, there's a fixed pool of money in recorded music. But it keeps growing, right? It's fixed per customer. But when you get into areas like merch, there's unlimited amounts that people are willing to spend to connect with their favorite artists and to represent their fandom. And I think obviously Amazon's position as a pretty big retailer in the world and pretty good at e-commerce and logistics and a brand that people really trust to spend money with. I think it sets us up really well for the future”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that's actually one of the interesting things about Amazon that sets us apart from the other services, which is as we look forward to what is a streaming service going forward, the way I tell my team is like we've been in streaming service 1.0 world for the last few years where the primary goal has been distribute a huge catalog of recorded music and help customers find what they want to play next. I think going forward, I'm going to use my terrible pun again, but now that streaming is mainstream and that's how everyone listens to music, it's taken over retail. This is how we both consume music and we discover music, which kind of take displacing radio, displacing retail all at the same time. The way consumers want to engage with artists is different is beyond the recorded music. They want to express their fan and they want to get deeper. When I talk to my team about 2.0, it's like we need to think about a streaming service, not just being a catalog of recorded music, but being a host of services that connect artists and fans together. And so you've seen some of the things we're doing there. We've invested heavily, for example, in”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in terms of recorded music, right, if you're paying a flat fee per month, the two ways that we can put more money in the hands of musicians is to have more subscribers. So the total amount of money available is bigger or to have a higher price. Those are the two leverage you have. Obviously, I'm not privy to the types of deals that the artists have with the labels and the publishers, and we leave that to the side as well.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I want to get into that because it seems like the music industry, the artists and labels always want more of what is effectively like a fixed amount of money. Everyone's only paying so much, and the only way you can make more money for the actual musicians is by raising prices. It seems very difficult to make more money in any other way. You can make more money for the companies, for Amazons and Spotify's by layering other kinds of content like podcasts and audiobooks, but actually generating more money for the music industry seems like there's only one lever.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's very reasonably priced, and it has been priced that way for quite a long time. Obviously, there's some changes that you may, you know, that have been talked about recently. And that's an interesting development.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also think you have to look at how people listen to music compared to how they consume video want to make playlists. The content is much shorter. And so you engage with it in very, very different ways that I think would make having these. Islands of catalogs very different. There was a moment when one of the services tried to go big into exclusives. And ultimately it wasn't very friendly to consumers and the industry didn't like it either, quite frankly. So that ended pretty quickly. So I do think it's the right product for consumers. And I am yet to meet someone who doesn't think it's awesome that they get access to all the world's music”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things was you had to make it more convenient than stealing music. And if you ended up in a land of Amazon has this catalog, Apple has that catalog, Spotify has that catalog. It's just going to create more piracy because people who like one service or the other are going to go down, you know, they're going to find ways to pirate the other music.”
2022-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT