Spotify and Disney have everything-app dreams

Today on the flagship podcast of machine learning-based recommendation systems: 03:31 - The Verge’s David Pierce chats with Spotify’s co-president and chief product officer Gustav Söderström about recommendations, audiobooks, app design, what Spotify wants to be, and whether it’s possible to do it all well. Spotify - The Verge 44:08 - Alex Cranz joins the show to discuss a bunch of recent streaming news, including the plan to combine Disney Plus and Hulu. Streaming - The Verge 1:10:28 - Chris Welch joins the show to help answer this week’s Vergecast Hotline question about mp3 players. The Mighty — an iPod shuffle for Spotify — finally arrives for $85 bemighty.com Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of machine learning-based recommendation systems. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am on a walk. So I've been trying this thing where instead of sitting in front of screens all day, which I do way too much of, my back hurts, my eyes hurt, it's just bad times. I try to get out in the world once a day and just kind of wander around. A lot of smart people say that if you want to think something through or be creative or process something, there's really nothing better for you than to just go for a walk. Leave all your technology at home and just walk until you've figured it out. It's a kind of romantic idea. I really love it. But so far, in my experience, I've found that I spend a lot of time just like walking, singing 121 Pilots song to myself over and over again.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  And then I get home and I'm like, did I actually just accomplish anything? I don't know, maybe it's like meditation where you have to do it a lot and you get better at it. But I feel like when I go on a walk and I'm like, I'm going to think deep thoughts, it's not going super great so far. But at least the walking is nice and it's definitely good to not look at screens for at least a little while, every now and then. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. The first person I'm going to talk to is Gustav Soderstrom, who's the co-president of Spotify. He also ran product for Spotify for a long time. And he is the person I most wanted to talk to about what Spotify is trying to be. It's trying to be this incredible AI recommendation system that knows exactly what you want to listen to and exactly what you're doing at exactly the right time.

• 1:28David Pierce?

  It's also kind of trying to be TikTok and it's doing audiobooks and it's doing podcasts. And I'm trying to figure out how you do all of that all in one place without making a total mess out of Spotify. So that is what Gustav and I talked about. He's very open and very smart about all of it and it was a really fun conversation. After that, I'm going to talk to Alex Krantz, who is my favorite person to talk to about all things streaming. We're going to talk about Disney and Hulu and what Verizon is doing with Netflix and Max and what's going on with Marvel movies and just what to make of all of this upheaval. We both have strong theories about ads and bundling and we had a lot of fun hanging out. And of course, we're going to get to the Vergecast hotline. We have a really fun one this week.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  All that is coming up in just a second, but first I have like three more blocks on this walk and I'm going to go try and think some deep thoughts on my way back. This is the Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 2:22Speaker 01

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• 3:22David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So I didn't think any deep thoughts, but that 121 Pilots song is now deeply lodged in my head, probably forever. And also, I'm cold. All right, let's get into it. I think Spotify is one of the most interesting companies and apps on the planet right now. It's a huge winner as a music streaming app, but it turns out there's really no money in being a music streaming app. So it's trying to figure out podcasts and audiobooks and in general, being whatever the TikTok for audio is. That's what CEO Daniel Ek has called it before. And it sort of makes sense. But then, as a user of Spotify, mostly I worry that all of that stuff is just going to clutter up the app and confuse my playlists and make everything about it worse.

• 4:07David Pierce?

  I think a lot that maybe Spotify should just be a really good music app instead of trying to take over the world and shove a lot of audio into one place. I don't know. Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify's co-president and chief product officer, is the person responsible for making all of this stuff make sense together. So I brought him onto the show to talk about everything from recommendations to audiobooks to app design, all to try and figure out what Spotify wants to be and whether it's possible to do it all really well. We started by going back a few months to this spring, when Spotify announced a more visual, more TikTok-style redesign for the app. Here's Gustav at Spotify's Stream On event explaining kind of the big idea behind it.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  The Spotify we're revealing today is built to feel alive. The interface is dynamic. It's easier than ever to scroll and swipe and loaded with all new ways for listeners to enjoy your work. The reimagined home feed will show better recommendations from your favorites to fresh content, with richly animated images and videos.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  I asked Gustav to dig a little deeper on that and to explain what Spotify was trying to do with this redesign. Because I think the redesign actually says a lot about what that app wants to be. So what was Spotify trying to do here?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if we go all the way back to what we were trying to achieve, something like a year ago plus, a bit more actually. So we kind of pride ourselves on being good at discovery. Sometimes we say we think we're the best at discovery if we ask our users, but it's a certain type of discovery. It's kind of the type of discovery we call background discovery. When you're listening to a playlist, we're very good at finding tracks that fit that playlist that you might like, so forth. We also have a lot of specific playlists for discovery, you know, Discover Weekly and Daily Mix and so forth. But there's a different type of discovery which we sort of call foreground discovery. When you're finding, for example, a new act in a genre that you didn't even know you liked. It's not actually similar to anything you're listening to right now.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  And the truth is that most of that type of discovery doesn't happen on Spotify. We're really good at inserting more of what you're already listening to. You know, if you're into a certain genre, we're really good at finding other things that isn't that genre that we think you'll like. But if you want to explore a completely new genre, those things actually often happen off-platform. They happen on YouTube, they happen on TikTok, they happen in other places. And two things are important there. When you are evaluating a lot of sort of new music that you don't even know if you like, you usually don't listen to the full songs and spend hours. You're kind of evaluating much more quickly. And secondly, you're also quite interested when you discover a band in sort of seeing what they look like and so forth, right? And that's mostly the first time we're interested in that.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Not the 10th time that you listen to the song, but the first time it kind of matters, right? So we've been in this symbiotic relationship with these other services where You know, there's a lot of foreground discovery that happens all over the place. But then you usually save that track to Spotify and that's where you spend most of your consumption. And that's, that's fine by us. It's worked for us really well. It means that we could focus our investment on the sort of background moment, background discovery being a really good background application. But we decided about a year plus ago that we want to become a really good place for when you want to explore something completely new as well. And when you want to break out of your shop, that's, that's the feedback that we got, like Spotify is really good for our already like. But it's not that easy to break out of your sort of taste bubble. And this is what brought, brought about the whole redesign.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  And it was across music, but also across podcasts and now recently across audiobooks as well. How do you evaluate a lot of items in more of a GTD, get things done way where the hit ratio may be low? Maybe it's one great candidate in 10. Well, then you better need to be able to quickly get through those 10 versus in the background. If we had a one in 10 hit ratio, you would hate Spotify. It has to be like nine in 10, right? So you have to be much more careful and so forth. So we thought that's, that was the impetus, like why we did it. Because we also wanted to, in addition to staying very good at background discovery. We wanted to bring foreground discovery or, or being able, giving you tools to quickly break out of your taste bubble and find something completely new.

• 8:14David Pierce?

  What's really interesting about that is that that strategy makes absolute perfect sense. I think especially the idea of trying to make it easier for people to find stuff they don't like, which sounds weird. Like the, the sort of lowering the penalty of guessing wrong.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:27David Pierce?

  Makes total sense to me.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. What is often called like fault tolerant in like product speak.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  Right. And I think like if TikTok did one incredible thing for the world, it was that. Like it, it is the most fault tolerant app that has ever existed.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:40David Pierce?

  What I think is really interesting and, and the way you described that makes me think that if Spotify had always done that kind of thing. It would make perfect sense to everybody, but there's something about coming back around to the foreground piece where it's like, we want you to be more in the app. We're going to make the app more enticing and more inviting. We want you to scroll more. We want you to do more stuff. And I'm just like thinking about all of the like mad people on Reddit when the redesign started coming out. And that sort of instinctive reaction, some people had to seeing the way the new app looked. And even as what you describe is very much sort of the other side of the coin of a thing that already exists. It's just so different. Did you expect the kind of visceral reaction of like, we're doing a very different thing, even in service of the same activity?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  So let's dig into it because it was a combination of a few things. I sort of did expect it any like I redesigned like the entire thing a few times in my career. And people are always very upset. Sure. The problem with that is that they can be upset, but it's right. They just don't understand it yet, you know, the Steve Jobs view. Sure. Or they can be upset because it's actually bad and wrong. And the question is, how do you tell those two apart? And so there was a little bit of both in this case. So this was impetus. It was to give users tools for much better foreground discovery and be able to effectively try a completely new genres and so forth. Now, what happened when we launched this, even before people got to try it, to your point, like even when we showed it, I think the big challenge is that we were trying to do something very different with these feeds.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  We were trying to get you to go through as much music as possible in order to find stuff to save to your library to listen to later. So it was actually discovery, but not consumption. Our point was to get you through this thing as fast as possible. And the thing we measure is sort of saves per minute. Whereas if you look at TikTok or YouTube Shorts or Reels, the feed is the consumption. It's not discovery. The feed is consumption. The point is to keep you there as long as possible. So I think what happened when people saw this, they were like, oh my God, I don't want another TikTok feed. Like I have three now, you know, I have Shorts and I have Reels and I have TikTok. Like, why aren't they sticking to the music thing that I like them for? Why do they want to become TikTok? Because that's honestly what it looks like when you see a feed of moving images.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  And so there was that like visceral reaction to it, which is just like a problem of communication. And the idea is, well, when you start using it, you'll understand that us, we're actually trying to get you out of the feed as much as possible and get you to save as much and actually listen to it later. Because that's when, I mean, we don't gain anything unless you listen to it later. This is a tool for creating more sessions down the line. But then we also made a few mistakes in the first iteration of it, which was that we were so keen on adding foreground discovery that when we redesigned the experience, we changed the balance of what the homepage specifically did quite drastically. If you think about it from like the product team's point of view, you look around and you see like there's YouTube over there. It's kind of similar, long form experience. Music, it's just, it's just a feed.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  You know, everything is just a feed as the, as the start page. So you could guess that that's what users want. They want to feed as a start page. And so I think we got a little bit too jealous of the competition. And so, you know, we have these shortcuts on top of our home. But then pretty quickly, we went into like full screen carbs. Cause that's kind of what it looks like. And people are quite upset. And so we looked at this and we realized that to our benefit, we were doing something quite well that we didn't understand that we broke. So our homepage was quite different from, from these competitors, which was just like full card feeds. We had these shortcuts and then we had these shelves. And what they did, which I think we saw much better than competition is that they managed to keep you in a lot of sessions at the same time.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  You might be in the middle of two podcasts, now one audiobook and a playlist. And you might be into a set of playlists right now. And our homepage managed to solve what we call recall really well. It made it really easy without having to go into your library and search to get back to those sessions, the ones that still were really relevant to you. We had this balance between recall and discovery. Where, when we looked at the metrics, you know, how much of the consumption from the homepage, it's sort of recall, you go back into sessions that you had previously visited or were in the middle of versus how much is you truly listen to new one. It was almost like 90% recall and 10% discovery. And when we flipped it around, we sort of turned it into 10% recall, like the top shortcuts and 90% discovery. And you could see this in the metric and on Twitter.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  So on Twitter, if you squinted through all the swearing and cursing and this guy should get fired and I was going to be put in a lion cage and all these things. You could see the actual feedback being like, where the hell am I playlist? Where are my podcasts, right? And then you look at the consumption data and you see the same thing. You see traffic going to search and to library. People were trying to find their playlist. So we realized the error that we have flipped the ratio too much into almost like forced discovery. And then we, we said, okay, let's look at this and let's embrace what people loved. If we were really good recall, instead of even just going back, let's make sure that the redesign, we leverage that and we become even better at recall. The weird thing for us then was we looked at competition and like they're actually

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Not doing this at all and people don't seem to complain and be angry like what's the problem and we realized that we're probably very good at recall keeping in many sessions at the same time and our competition is probably not but the the thing is they were never if you only ever had like a single feed you think about something like a YouTube or something it's very hard to actually get back into the session you have to click at the bottom right and scroll back in history so maybe it was just a case that they don't complain because it was never good there as we try to then reverse and lean into let's be really good at recall so we actually made it even better and we got the recall metrics measured as like how many people find a relevant session on home without having to go to search or library got that even better and then the problem was obviously well we wanted to achieve foreground discovery so how do we solve this and we switched our

• 14:26Speaker 03

  tactic to instead being voluntary entry points into instead of these cards that ought to play in a very high up we have two mechanisms now one is we have these what we call watch feeds or discovery feeds which are these small cards that you can click and then you go into feed only optimized for this but it's it's voluntary like you click through and it's just like hey we found a bunch of new songs for you we have a bunch of podcasts for you the idea now is as soon as you feel a little bored and trapped in a taste bubble it should be one click away to just get into very effective discovery and then when you scroll down the homepage you actually get to these cards and we we think of that as like if you keep scrolling well then you probably didn't find anything so now you are interested in discovery and to cut a long story slightly

• 15:06Speaker 03

  shorter where we are now finally is now the new homepage is is out to a hundred percent of existing users or we're back to like one homepage with you know being on two stacks it's very very expensive and very frustrating and we see what we want to see so in these watch feeds for example we actually see fifty times the saves per minute versus any other session versus like you know a discover weekly or something not they're not saving fifty tracks per minute but fifty times more saves per minute so we're seeing what we want to see finally and and users now seem happy so that's a long version of what actually happened.

• 15:40David Pierce?

  No, it's super interesting and you you actually brought up kind of the the like two central questions of what Spotify is that have always fascinated me I think part of the reason people flipped out at having all of this discovery added was That Spotify is the app that you use all the time, but hardly ever touch.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:57David Pierce?

  Right. And that's, that's a really valuable thing. And it's, it's a thing that I know Spotify in the past has been very proud of, right? You can use Spotify for hours and hours and hours without ever looking at it. And in a time when every app is demanding my full face attention at all times, that's a good thing.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Very true.

• 16:13David Pierce?

  But then how to marry that with this idea of, obviously, you know, you, you, we, we want to build a video ads business. And we also want to engender this foreground discovery. And like, I can see why there are lots of perfectly valid pulls back into the app. But it just breaks that sort of core behavior that is so good about Spotify. Like, I don't go to TikTok to listen to songs because it's a pain in the ass to find songs on TikTok, right? I go to Spotify because, and that's like the purpose it has served. And if like trying to pull that thing back into it, even if it's the right call, is just a challenge to do right. But then the other flip side of that is, and this is, I feel like the, the sort of great product journey of Spotify, is how to do a lot of things in one app in a way that makes sense, right?

• 16:53David Pierce?

  And, and this is like, this goes back to the question you and I have talked about before, about like, how do you do podcasts and audiobooks and music in a single interface in a way that makes sense? And I'm still not convinced you're all the way there. I'd be curious to hear how you think you're doing. I got chapter three of an audiobook in my release radar, which like you just cannot convince me is a good user experience. But uh.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  That's a great chapter. I promise you.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  I'm sure it was, but I think that question continues to be kind of the big one, right? Like, if you want to be the TikTok for audio that Daniel has talked about in the past, like, you have to figure out how to put all these things in one place, but doing it in a way that feels like it doesn't compromise each one of them along the way just gets harder every new thing you add.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you're, you're completely right that there are two dimensions here. One is the, what we often call foreground versus background. So we're still a vast majority background service, meaning what percentage of the time is the phone in your pocket? Most of the services to your point are like, you know, 90% in the foreground and we're sort of the opposite.

• 17:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  So that's one dimension and that's what we try to find is when that phone is in the foreground and you're bored, that's when we have to have these tools for you to find a lot of music for that. That sort of eighty, ninety percent background listening. And that's a, that's a tricky balance. And we, we rebalanced the homepage to reflect too much of the, the time that you're in the foreground, which is the minority.

• 18:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  And sort of focusing on, it still needs to be insanely simple to get to your favorite sessions.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  But that thing, and by the way, that user flow you've landed on in which you say basically like, I'm in discovery mode, you just like bang, bang, bang through a bunch of stuff, pick a bunch of stuff you want to listen to, click play and put your phone away. Like, that's a very Spotify version of the thing you described, right? Like, that's much closer to the way that the app is always then.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's, that's a plan. And that's where I feel we've landed now. But there was a bit of wilderness wandering to get there.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  There always is.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the other thing you mentioned is what, cross-content, right? Now, there certainly shouldn't be audiobooks chapters in your daily mix or something. That, that's just a bug that we need to fix. But there is that question of how is, is that the best product experience? How much is that a strategy that we need to adopt? Because it's a distribution strategy versus what is best for the, for the consumer. I choose to see it as a very interesting challenge. And it puts a lot of requirements on our experience team, right? Because the challenge is, in order to keep sort of the complexity, as we call it internally, to keep the entropy down, you need to make things look as similar as possible so that it doesn't get very confusing, right? And, and the notion is like, well, it's all audio, right?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Music is audio, podcasts is audio, audiobooks is audio. But then it's also very different. Music is like three minutes, audiobooks maybe, podcasts maybe an hour, and audiobook twenty hours or something, right?

• 19:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  So it's also very different. So the, the real big challenge that we just have chosen to accept, given our strategy, is to make it sort of to consciously misquote Einstein, as similar as possible, but not more similar than possible, right?

• 19:46David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  And so what was an example of that? You know, you can say that it's all cards. Like, there's a, there's a track card and there's a playlist card and there's a, an episode card and audiobook card, which is kind of true. But on the other hand, we also have to realize where they're different. So, so for an example, one thing that we're working with right now is the feedback to the algorithm. We actually, we've been playing around with giving people tools to feedback on the algorithm. And it turns out people love that, even when we had like On the three dots, a hidden option. I was amazed at how many people found that and said like, I didn't want this recommendation. I wanted this. So we're making that easier. But you run into these problems where where it's different. So for example, we're experimenting with these things where you can say like, this is a bad recommendation.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Or more like, I don't want this recommendation, you know, which gives the user a way to back to fault tolerant to solve when we were wrong quickly, but it also gives us a lot of super valuable signal to improve for the user. But then for a podcast episode, it's pretty straightforward. You just say like, this was bad recommendation. Don't show it again. And we can interpret it as like bad recommendation. For a playlist, it's trickier because if you say that, maybe it was that you didn't like the song, but did you not really like the playlist? Should we actually show the playlist again, but not with the same songs? And then for audiobook, you have a different problem, which we realized, which is when you say like sort of thumbs down, it could be because you hated this recommendation. Or it could be because you love this recommendation, but you already listened to the book or read the book years ago.

• 21:09David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  So we are trying to find the exact balance. We will have different controls on audiobooks, then on episodes and on tracks. But we also need to still make the system similar enough that it makes sense as as one app. So this is where we're putting most of our effort and we think we're we think we're doing a good job. If you just look at the metrics and and user engagement, but it is kind of the the strategy and path we have. Now, I always tell the team that the challenge is like, how do you choose between these things, you know? Should we show a podcast or an audiobook or music? I choose to say that we're just being more honest with ourselves than other companies. So if you think about something like Apple, they also have a music app, podcast app, and audiobooks app. It is the same user in front of the iPhone.

• 21:49David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  The three teams treat it as different users. Right? And they all try to compete for the user. But it is the same user, the same 24 hours. They're just fooling themselves. There's three different users. We're just being honest to ourselves. No, it's the same user.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  So it's it's in a way a harder challenge, but it's in a way true for everyone. It's just one user and we just have to be more explicit about how we solve that problem. But the user can't listen to all three at the same time anyway. And I think when people say like, if you just had three apps, you don't have to worry about it. I'd say like, no, it's the same David. You're still gonna have to choose between the three apps. So why not solve it in one app if we can? It's just less clicks. That's kind of how I think about it.

• 22:26David Pierce?

  I agree. I think this has become a somewhat controversial stance over time, but I actually think doing all of these things in one app is the right path. I think the sort of wilderness stuff for Spotify, so to speak, would be the thing where it's like, okay, what we actually need. And I think people accuse Spotify of this more than, at least I've actually seen it in the wild. But it does seem like one possible endpoint of this is like, how do we mix your favorite songs with a bunch of podcasts you might want to listen to? And then we'll throw an audiobook in it. And to me, that's just not even remotely what I want. Like, sometimes I want to listen to a book, and sometimes I want to listen to a podcast, and sometimes I want to listen to music. I always know which one I want. And for Spotify to guess or try to intermingle them all,

• 23:09David Pierce?

  that strikes me as like borderline impossible to do well.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  So when you do that on, if we had three different apps, you would just go into three different apps, right?

• 23:17David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Because you would know, right? So the way we solve this is we land you on a homepage where we have a pretty good guess. We're trying to, we have these shortcuts, but you are in multiple sessions at the same time. So you can actually continue in that playlist, you can continue in that audiobook. And there's like, in the middle of that episode, there's two episodes you were in. So hopefully, it's like super easy to solve it. But then, back to fault tolerant UIs, this is also why you see these tabs where you can say like, you click the music tab.

• 23:42David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  And then it's music only, or the podcast tab, or the audiobooks tab. So which is almost the same as opening the separate app. So this is how we're trying to solve it, with trying to program for you and then have a fault tolerant solution if we're wrong or if your intent was super high. But we do statistically see that it works, that we actually managed to get people to listen to podcasts who didn't, and hopefully the same for audiobooks. So it seems to work, but I think it's a statistical question. I think you're right, but my hunch is it's like 80% of the time or 90%, people know what they want. But the other 10% of the time are incredibly valuable, because that's when you find this new podcast or book. And it's back to this, like, why we need to be 90% recall and 10% discovery, and we went wrong with 90% discovery.

• 24:25David Pierce?

  The upside of doing all those things together is you can do a sort of one and one makes three thing where it's like the podcasts I listen to probably do inform the kinds of books I might like and the kinds of music that I listen to probably informs the kind of podcasts I like. So if you can actually, having all of those things together in one place lets you do stuff, but that stuff is not shove stuff in front of me that I don't want to listen to, I think. But I think you're increasingly getting away from that, which I think is very good.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  I'm glad to hear that. We're trying hard.

• 24:54David Pierce?

  But that also brings me to AI, which I think you're using kind of in both directions of that, right? Like, it seems like the AI stuff I'm seeing floating around, both what's been released and what random people are finding in code on Spotify, is that both you want to use AI to be smarter and more proactive about what people might want. Like, the daylist thing, I think, is really fascinating and the names are all deeply weird, put in really interesting ways.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:20David Pierce?

  And then on the other side, there's this idea of like, what if you could just make a playlist with a prompt? What if you could just sort of declare to Spotify what you want to listen to and it can do that? And that's the kind of thing that, as far as I can tell, these large language models are relatively capable of. That's data that you have. Like, that becomes a whole new sort of tool for finding stuff to listen to. Again, if your idea is like, get back into the pocket as quickly as you can, that's a pretty powerful one.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I think you're completely right. I'm very fascinated about both of those directions. So one way to sort of retell what you said is you could think one way is to, you know, everyone tries to reduce friction and get even better at predicting what you wanted to do. And certainly, these LLMs help with that in many ways. You get larger embeddings that makes the content understanding better. So just the recommendations of songs get better and podcasts, you obviously have the whole safety thing. You can now have machines pre-listen to the podcast, make sure that we can do safe, explore, exploit, which can serve as podcasts to you that we couldn't have done before because we didn't feel literally safe exploring content that we didn't understand ourselves. So there's just making the recommendations better and hopefully even better at this homepage predicting

• 26:30Speaker 03

  the right thing, the thing that you had in your head. So we reduce friction. And we're doing that and we're seeing benefits of that. But to your point, I think the other direction is really interesting as well. Sometimes you want more control. Like, you don't want to be so to everything. And so can we build even more powerful tools for you? Well, you can have a lot of fun with a podcast catalog or the music catalog. That is something I'm very fascinated about. Can't comment too much about things that aren't live, but you're certainly right. That's an area that I think is super interesting. And having a conversation around music with an entity that is very knowledgeable about the global music culture. Everything has been written on Wikipedia, every concert ever happened, but then also super knowledgeable about you because of your music taste. I think it'd be a really cool experience.

• 27:14David Pierce?

  That is cool. And how has that changed the way that you think about the kind of human-machine interaction that you've always talked about at Spotify? Right? I think like the the sort of human curated playlists with machine help is like a core tenet of what Spotify has always been. But if we're headed into this place of sort of mass personalization, both that you're bringing to me and that I can ask for myself. Does that change that dynamic?

• 27:39Speaker 03

  I think over time it probably will. If you think that the the systems are getting more and more intelligent, they can do more and more of that. But where we are right now, I think it's still the same world where you you look at Twitter and you see these 100% automatic things. There are very cool demos. You don't see a lot of applications of them. And then when you do some, when you apply something, it's actually almost always including humans in the loop. It's just that they're they get much more leverage.

• 28:10David Pierce?

  That's fair. Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  So so for example, if we look at something we did recently with the dubbing, for example, it's quite straightforward. I wouldn't say straightforward, but it's getting quite easy to to use a service to get like a a pretty good translation and a generation of a voice in another language. But if you put that to a native speaker of that language, they're going to drop off because the translation is not going to sound like a podcast. It's going to be like correct grammatically, but very formal. The intonations are off. And so what we find is that you need to use these technologies and they're amazing, but you still need people in the loop to make it truly great. So we keep applying that recipe and we think of it more as getting more and more leverage of those people, on those people, rather than.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Placing more and more of those people, if that makes sense, you have the same amount of people, but they can do more and more and more. If you think about Steve Jobs' old notion of, you know, the computer is a bicycle for the mind. I think the L L M is like, it's like, I don't know, like a motorcycle for the mind or mountain bike or something. It's just that on steroids. So that's how I I tend to think about it like that for any type of creation. If you're an artist, if, you know, I think the big benefit of this will be it's an incredibly powerful bicycle for the mind and and sure, you can automate some things, you can do elevated music and so forth. And that's not the interesting part. I think the interesting part is as augmentation to people.

• 29:31David Pierce?

  No, I I think that's right. And actually, the I'm glad you brought up the the dubbing because that and kind of on the flip side, the automated transcription stuff. Um, I think is really interesting because like you said, it it opens up sort of new avenues, both for people to reach people and for like new ways of consuming this kind of stuff. To me, like automated transcription and making podcasts searchable is like incredible.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  And we're finally getting to the point where the L L M's are good enough at speech to text that it's actually pretty plausible, which I think is very exciting. But I am curious from a from a creator's standpoint, like I I make a podcast and I've been trying to figure out how I feel at just like a very personal level about the idea of my voice being translated into tons of different languages all over the world. And most of me thinks it's very cool. Part of me is sort of horrified by it in a way I can't even totally describe. It just feels odd. It's like it's me, but it's not me in some way that I can't totally wrap my head around. And it feels like in so many ways with A I, we're headed down that road of of feelings in a lot of ways. But what are you hearing from creators and people who are are using this tech already?

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Like, what do they make of all this new leverage you're giving them?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So as you say, our focus is really on on helping creators, giving them tools rather than trying to replace them. Other people may have that as a strategy, but our our tool is really to try and empower creators, giving them more and more tools. And and dubbing is one of those and and we're working on other tools as well that we think are very interesting for creators. But if if we look at dubbing, your notion like it's weird in a way. There's a lot of these things I think we're going to get into that feels weird the next. Few years, but from another point of view, if you look at non podcasters, you know, book authors and TV movies, they've been dubbed for tens of years. That's true. And with completely different voices and sometimes, you know, in certain markets, we're just ducking the original audio. It's like really crappy in a sense.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  So from that point of view, this is just the same, but it's much more authentic. It's really you instead of someone else trying to pretend to be you. So I, my hunch is podcasters are gonna, are sort of gonna get over that feeling. Certainly will be heard from the podcasters we've worked with. Is their, their fear was the opposite, that when we contacted them, they're like, I don't think it's gonna really sound like me. Will I have like a, an accent where I sound like a, instead of a good Spanish speakers, I sound like a slow American, a heavy American accent. I just sound dumb somehow. They're really very predictably, very concerned about what they appear like in that language. So that's why we put a ton of effort on details, like it's a translation, not just grammatically correct, but is this what a, this person would sound like?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  What, is this a relaxed podcast conversation or a formal lecture in that other language? Does, you know, Lex Friedman or Stephen Bartlett, do they sound like they should probably sound in Spanish? Or do they sound like someone who doesn't speak Spanish that well? But if it's too Spanish, it doesn't sound like them anymore. That's the balance we spent a lot of time on, and I think we found a good balance. At least they are very happy. And, and maybe even more importantly, when you look at the Twitter feeds, what I take a lot of joy from is almost without a fault. The feedback are like, I'm a native speaker and this is amazing. Which you don't see that much. I see people saying this is amazing. And then you see a native speaker saying, actually it's not that good as a native speaker. Because it's wrong. And, and we really tried to put effort in was like, sort of just quality of production.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  And so I look a lot at, if the creator happy, do they feel like what they should sound like? But then I also look at the feedback from the native speakers. And then obviously I look at the episode and when do people drop off? If it's not good enough, if it's cool, but not interesting, people are gonna drop off after five minutes. So that's kind of how we evaluate quality. And so far, we're very encouraged by, by what we're seeing.

• 33:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. What are you telling the creators who are trying to figure out how to navigate this stuff? I mean, I just think about, we've talked a ton about like the writers' strike on the Hollywood side. And one of the things they're worried about is like, if you're an actor, they can just take your voice and never need you anymore. And then I listened to like, I was listening to Bill Simmons and he's like, oh, great. My voice can read our ads and I don't ever have to. And so I'm like, well, there's the two sides of the coin right there. What are you telling folks who are trying to figure out kind of how to navigate that? Like, what does it mean that my voice is now part of kind of an AI machine?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's very much about creator control. I think why you hear Bill Simmons say this is because he feels like he's in control.

• 33:49David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  That's obviously when we do these dubbing things, we get no rights to that creator's voice for any other purpose, right? It's only for that purpose, exactly for that translation. So it's their voice. I think that's the key. I think people would be very uncomfortable about giving away rights to their likeness for like unknown purposes. So for us, back to like, you know, we try to structure it as narrowly as possible around like your voice for exactly this purpose. And, you know, it's your episode. So that's how we've solved it. And I think that's the, that's the fear that creates. I would feel equally concerned if someone had the rights to say whatever they wanted with my voice.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  Sure, yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  And that's also why we've been quite careful. I think that's why OpenAI, who we work with, has been quite careful. Cause there is that potential for abuse. And I think that's why this was a good use case to start with. Where it's very clear that this is something those creators want, is voluntary. And it's, it's, I think, unambiguously good.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's fair. And I think, I definitely agree that the right way to think about it is like, these are, these are tools you can give people to use, not sort of things you're foisting on top of what they're already doing. I think that, that feels right to me.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:03David Pierce?

  So come back to the AI playlist thing for a second, because I've been thinking a lot about DJ and I've been thinking a lot about Daylists recently. And I think DJ, which is used to have done really well. Everybody I talked to about DJ thinks it's the coolest thing ever. But it's this very human thing, right? Like, it's an AI-generated thing that is still meant to be sort of a character in my life. But then, on the flip side, Daylist is just like a super curated list of songs, right?

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  There are two sort of very different ways of thinking about it. Should both be in there? Do you have a thesis about one or the other that we land on over time? What do you think?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  It's a great question. And the truth is, we don't know yet Okay. which is going to be the future play mode. And I think people have different listening modes. I still think there's always going to be a mode where you want exactly your playlist that you curated, you know, without our recommendations in it or anyone commenting or anything like that. And then I think you're going to want these music sessions, sort of like a daily mixer or something, where you're asking for like a specific genre. You kind of know exactly what you're going to get on the genre and style, but not exactly which track. But you don't want anyone talking in between the songs, the whole thing. It's like a lean back session where we call it like mind busy versus mind free. Hmm, I like that. And you know, when the mind is busy, music fits mind busy because you can think about something else. But then when someone starts talking, you have to stop thinking about someone else and pay attention, something, pay attention again.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  And this was one of the tricky things with the DJ. We've done some other experiments where we've had like these sessions, we can talk for a while and then play some music. And in theory, people love it. In practice, the problem is like it's partially a podcast and you have to pay attention. Then the music comes in, you sort of start thinking about something else. And then it's like, oh, back now I have to pay attention again. You're switching between like mind free and mind busy. And so what we saw in that data was people kind of chose, either they listened to the podcast and skipped past the music, or they kind of did the opposite. So I definitely think we're going to have these music only sessions. And the notion for the DJ was actually taking that learning and saying like the this is a music session first and foremost. The DJ needs to be quick, brief and get out of the way.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  So it's not a podcast about music. It's a playlist with some introduction to it. We may at some point do the opposite and have a generated podcast about a track where it's like 90% talk and 10% music. But then it's a different hypothesis, right? But this is the DJ. What's the point of this DJ? Like, why does it even need to talk? Well, what we found was that even for the exact same playlist, if you say like, hey, David, here's a playlist, these five tracks are going to come up. And when you look at that playlist, you're sitting there thinking like, maybe I do, maybe I don't like that, maybe it's going to feel like this and so forth. And there was a lot of like choice paralysis. And the kind of weird thing is when, when we had the DJs say like, hey, David. I'm gonna take you back to when you were like teenager, I'm gonna play this track.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  And it's the exact same track that you would have seen in the playlist. You stick around and listen. So there's something about, there's something about removing choice and paralysis, saying like, okay, just take me somewhere. Where you seem to get inspired and enjoy it, sort of the exact same tracks you might have skipped if we showed you a list of what's gonna happen in the future. And we're still not exactly sure what that is, but it's very clear that it's happening. So I think of this now as the, we have lots of choices if you know what you want or you sort of know what you want. We have genres and hundreds of playlists for every type of genre and you have your own playlist. We didn't have a good solution for like, hey Spotify, I have no idea. So this is the solution for like, I know ideas, but I want music. And then this is, this is a really good tool.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  And so I don't think it's gonna switch to a hundred percent, I have no idea. I think you're gonna have different moments.

• 38:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that actually brings me to, uh, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna throw a thesis at you and I want you to agree or disagree and, and tell me why I'm right or wrong.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Go for it.

• 38:48David Pierce?

  It seems to me that we've gone through this phase in this space where there were a lot of bets in a lot of different directions, right? Everybody, everybody went towards trying to figure out how to do exclusive content in really cool ways. Everybody tried to build radically different kinds of listening experiences. People tried to do live audio and it seems like we're coming back to the idea that actually there is this incredibly cool, interesting library of content out there. And the job of an app like Spotify or any of your competitors is to find ways for me to find that content and that content to find me. Just sort of watching Spotify over the last, I don't know, 24 months, it feels like to some extent you, you've kind of wound all the way back to like the core competency,

• 39:33David Pierce?

  which is like, we're very good at telling you what to listen to. And it just feels like you, you've pushed back into that in new ways over the last year or so. Is that fair? Am I totally wrong? What do you think?

• 39:45Speaker 03

  I think it is fair. I would say that we, we try to get more distinct about separating the modes. So the DJ is still in this class of like, it's mostly going to play things that we are quite certain. Certain that you like back to like it's probably going to be right nine out of 10 things. And then we need a different solution for when you want to be exploratory. When we're only right one out of 10 instead of nine out of 10, which is the feeds, right? So we try to separate the two instead of having a bad average of both. If the DJ was right one out of 10, you would churn out, right?

• 40:16David Pierce?

  Or if they're both five out of 10, I'm going to churn out.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's a better point. If they're both five or 10, both are bad, right? So that is true. I think we got more confident at like, let's build this product for this purpose and this other product for that other purpose. I also do think that back to your questions on AI and generative AI. I have this obsession with as artificial intelligence or machine intelligence or whatever you call it is getting more and more capable. I've always had this obsession about everyone should be able to really have a DJ. That sounds very natural, but that gets more and more intelligent over time. So it understands. So the DJ we have now, it understands quite a lot about your music taste. But with a lens, it will also start understanding a lot about music culture and the world and what happens. It can get more skilled at things like mixing and like I really want to build this perfect session.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Where you feel like a larger percentage of the time. You feel like Spotify is almost like a friend, a person, a DJ. I'm just going to trust them. Then maybe instead of 80% of the time you go and choose your playlist. Maybe we get down to like 20, 10, 20% of the time. You're going to have your playlist because this party or something, but most of the time you're going to say like, hey, Spotify, my friend. Just play something and I'll feedback. I think that isn't entirely possible, given the insane development of intelligence. So that's something I'm very passionate about. So I think we're going to keep investing in that. So in that sense, I think your thesis is right. We're getting more confident in the ability to recommend and try to program to you.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  But we still need to find this balance of being fault tolerant and give you super easy ways to like say, no, you're wrong. Give me control back.

• 41:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's totally fair. What playlist do you listen to most?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  I actually listen to, statistically, it's, it's the DJ by far that I listen to the most. And then I have a set of my, my own curated holies and goldies.

• 42:07David Pierce?

  I like it. I really appreciate you doing this. It's really fun to do this. I, I, I'm glad we got to make it happen, even though we couldn't do it in person.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Likewise, always fun. Happy to do it again.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna talk about streaming, because there is always something happening in streaming. We'll be right back.

• 42:31Speaker 01

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• 43:32David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. We have kind of a grab bag of streaming news this week, from Disney to Verizon to Max to Marvel to Netflix. It's a lot, and it feels like there's a bigger story tying all of it together, or maybe a couple of them. So I grabbed Alex Cranz to talk it through. Hi, Alex.

• 43:49Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 43:50David Pierce?

  Whenever we have streaming things to yell about, it feels important that you and I do it on The Vergecast together. So I'm very happy to do this. The first thing we need to do is we need to, we need to explain the truth to some people about what is going on with Disney. The shortest bit of the history that I need to give in order to get into this is, what, a week ago now, two weeks ago now? Disney and Comcast enacted their agreement for Disney to buy the rest of Hulu from Comcast, which we've kind of always known is gonna happen. That's the history. Explain to me these weird things that have been happening around the Disney internet in the last few days.

• 44:23Alex Cranz?

  So Disney was doing its earnings call the other day, and Bob Iger said that they're gonna experiment with a beta in December, combining the content of Hulu and Disney+. And that's, I think, something we've talked about on the Vergecast was probably going to be the outcome of all of this. So that was not a surprise to us.

• 44:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, Disney has not hid that fact that ultimately what it was going to do was probably combine them all into one streaming service.

• 44:49Alex Cranz?

  He's been talking about this, I think, since May, very openly, that that was his plan. But a lot of outlets, a lot of people have gotten confused by that and assumed that one or both of those streaming services is going to go away. And I think like a name is probably going to go away. I think Hulu or Disney Plus is probably going to get retired. But all the content is still going to be there. It's just going to be one app, which in the United States is kind of tricky, because the Disney Plus app in the United States is for babies, and the Hulu app is for adults. I say that subscribing to both. I am baby here. But, you know, that that one is very much for kids. Your kids are less likely to go find two people going at it on Disney Plus.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  Hulu, the one for sex. Like that's

• 45:33Alex Cranz?

  The one for sex. Yeah, that's the, I mean, honestly, in the United States, that's the big differentiation.

• 45:37David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 45:38Alex Cranz?

  One is Bone Town, the other population none. And one of the things that Bob Iger said was, he was like, we're going to wait and take a minute, because people are going to need to like, prepare and think about child protection and stuff so their kids don't go to Bone Town. He didn't say Bone Town, but

• 45:52David Pierce?

  It's essentially what it means. Yeah.

• 45:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I think that got people kind of scared, thinking that Disney Plus is going away. And it's like, no, it's, it is going to be there so much.

• 46:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  You're just going to have to think a little harder about the accounts you set up and make sure that one of them, if you don't want your kids seeing the Handmaid's Tale, that you block that.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  Everything you just said is true and correct, except, except for one thing.

• 46:15Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 46:16David Pierce?

  There is no question about which brand is going to go away. It's going to be Hulu. Like, I don't know how to be clearer about this. Like, Disney Plus is going to be the name of the service. Hulu is going to be a section of the service that has some of that more adult stuff. Maybe it'll be everything on Hulu. Maybe it'll just be that more like adult subset of it. Right now, there's like FX on Hulu, which is like

• 46:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:37David Pierce?

  Kind of the way that that works. This is going to be FX on Hulu on Disney Plus. Like, it's going to be insane. But that's what it's going to be. Like, let's not pretend that there is a possibility That Hulu is like the main Disney brand forever. That's ridiculous.

• 46:49Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna cling to it.

• 46:50David Pierce?

  Not only is this just like an objectively moral truth of the universe, I just want to read you the thing that Bob Iger said.

• 46:58Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 46:59David Pierce?

  From the earnings call. We expect that Hulu on Disney Plus will result in increased engagement, greater advertising opportunities, lower churn and reduce customer acquisition costs, thereby increasing our overall margins. The beginning of that sentence is, we expect that Hulu on Disney Plus. I don't know how to be like, he said it's right there, Alex. It's right there. I'm so tired of all of these people being like, what if the Disney Plus brand dies? It's not gonna die.

• 47:24Alex Cranz?

  It's not gonna die. It's fun to think it will.

• 47:26David Pierce?

  The way I see it, and I went through, I wound up reading and listening to this entire earnings call, which I like super don't recommend as a lifestyle choice.

• 47:35Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that, folks.

• 47:36David Pierce?

  But what's super interesting to me is Bob Iger, at least, feels very strongly that Disney has two really good brands. And it's Disney and it's ESPN. Those are the flagships, those are the monoliths, those are like the things he believes in as brands. Everything else is like subservient to those two things. And in an interesting way, he even kind of intimated that ESPN might roll into Disney Plus. Like Disney Plus is the thing. It just is. Good idea, bad idea. It is the answer.

• 48:02Alex Cranz?

  Which is a better name, Disney Plus or Max for your giant, your giant everything app?

• 48:08David Pierce?

  You know what sucks is I think Hulu is a better name.

• 48:11Alex Cranz?

  There we go. See?

• 48:14Alex Cranz?

  Hulu, Hulu more captures the what the hell of it all. And I like, I think that's one of the things that I'm a little questioning myself is Disney Plus has a very firm brand in the United States of population zero for Bone Town. And, and that's not the case in the rest of the world, but it is very much the case in the United States. And I think like, that's going to be a real challenge for them branding wise. But they probably will call it all Disney Plus and be like, now you can get ESPN and Hulu there. And then in a year, everybody's gonna be like, why Hulu?

• 48:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. Hulu for me has like Google energy in that it's like not a word, but it's kind of a word. And it's like fun to say, and it's a very good brand. I've always just really liked it as a, as a word, like even not knowing what it means, it's just a good word.

• 48:59Alex Cranz?

  It's a good word. You're like hula hooping, hula what? You just don't know. But you know, that's where you could get your TV legally for a long time.

• 49:07David Pierce?

  I've come to think this strategy sort of makes sense for Disney because like even if what you're talking about like Hulu equals Bone Town, right? It's going to be like a checkbox in the Disney app that it's like when you set it up for your family, you're like, my app has Bone Town, the kids' app's No Bone Town. And it's going to be a pretty easy toggle. Like, I think where content goes over time is going to be kind of tricky. And we've already seen some kind of bleeding between the two over time, right? Where like some things are on both services, sometimes they move between. Like, it's already kind of complicated, right?

• 49:40Alex Cranz?

  There's like a whole bunch of Fox films that really shouldn't be on Disney Plus as we think of it today that are currently on Disney Plus. And you're like, oh, no, like, kids are going to see something. They might see like the top of a boob.

• 49:53David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  And like this travesty, travesty for the children. So, yeah, yeah, they've already been dealing with this problem. And that was why he wanted to merge the two, right? Like, he doesn't want to have to think about that. And I suspect it's going to be less Bone Town versus No Bone Town and more, do you want your kids to be able to watch mature ratings stuff? And do you want your kids to be able to watch like TV 14? And so I think they're going to really cling to those TV ratings that they've kind of informally adopted, that they don't actually have to have at this point. Like, nobody's telling them, these aren't broadcast on television.

• 50:26David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 50:26Alex Cranz?

  They can do whatever ratings they want. And they're still out there being like, we thought of a good rating for this one at Disney, which is hysterical.

• 50:33David Pierce?

  But I do think like, even in that case, having Hulu as the kind of shorthand for like, here's all of our sort of adult originals is probably pretty useful. It's like, I know what Disney gets me, and I know what Hulu gets me. And even though they're in the same app, being able to kind of split them as I want to makes some sense.

• 50:48Alex Cranz?

  I think what we're really going to start seeing as we get these more super apps, right, which is Max, Disney Plus, whatever Paramount and Peacock end up joining together to make in order to compete. And as we start to get these super apps, I think we're going to start seeing kind of the replica of TV that we had before, where like you knew you had your different channels and stuff. That's something that Zaslov's talked about, that's something that like Iger kind of hints at. I think that the idea, that concept of channels is going to come roaring back. And some brand execs somewhere are going to be working their butt off coming up with a whole bunch of new channels or trying to resurrect old ones.

• 51:25David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting. So in the like Disney cable bundle universe Hulu becomes like the HBO prestige adult television channel.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  Right. You've got FX over still hanging out over there or whatever. And then like Disney XD for the kids. I think that's what it was called.

• 51:43David Pierce?

  That's interesting.

• 51:43Alex Cranz?

  I'm an old, so I think it's Disney XD. And, and so I think we're going to see that sort of thing, you know, free form. Well, free form's toast. Free form is not going to survive the next couple of years.

• 51:53David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  But they might still keep that for like that YA audience, keep that young adult audience there with free form.

• 52:00David Pierce?

  You're making me realize now that if you, if you take what Disney is already planning on doing, like the way you describe, and then you add ESPN's on demand stuff, and even the linear channel, which Disney has talked about adding to streaming, and then you do the same with ABC News, you've just basically recreated 60% of the cable bundle. Like you're one NBC and CBS broadcast channel away from just the full cable bundle.

• 52:21Alex Cranz?

  Which is really, really compelling.

• 52:22David Pierce?

  Wait, and Hulu has Hulu with live TV.

• 52:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  We're just back. This is just, I'm just paying Disney for my cable bundle now instead of Comcast. Oh, I guess this is where we should disclose Comcast is a investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal. Neelai's not here, so I don't have to tell you about the Netflix show that he humble brags about all the time. Alex has Paramount Plus. I don't know. Like this is, we, we have a bunch of complicated disclosures to do here, but that's, that about covers it.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  We both spend a lot of money on streaming already.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  We do.

• 52:53Alex Cranz?

  We watch a lot of streaming.

• 52:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Which actually is a good segue to the next thing, which is the other thing that Bob Iger talked about in the earnings call bunch, that also there was some Verizon, Netflix, Max news on this, is that the advertising tier of streaming continues to boom.

• 53:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 53:12David Pierce?

  In a way that like kind of surprises me. Like I think Bob Iger said over half of new Disney Plus subscribers in this last quarter were ad supported, which is huge.

• 53:23Alex Cranz?

  I don't think that's like, that's not surprising to me at all. People want things and they want things cheap and TikTok and YouTube and everything else has totally prepared people to be able to sit through it. And broadcast TV has prepared people to sit through an ad in order to get the content they want. So that's not surprising to me. And I think the most surprising part of it is that advertisers are so eager for it when they do have the ability to micro target on platforms like TikTok and stuff. So that's the part that's surprising, but I guess it's easy. You've got good partners with Disney. You know, there's going to be brand safety. You're not going to have to worry about some weird thing.

• 54:00David Pierce?

  Unlike TikTok and some of the other platforms we're talking about. Yeah.

• 54:03Alex Cranz?

  You have a lot more safety on something like Disney or Netflix or Max than you do on social media platforms. So I get it. Makes sense.

• 54:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's also very funny. Like, part of me wonders if part of the appeal of that is just all of these ad agencies have been making one specific kind of ad to go next to one specific kind of thing for decades. And for a long time, it was like, well, where do we put that thing now? And now Netflix is just like, well, instead of putting it next to, I don't know, like, Chicago Fire on television, put it next to Chicago Fire on streaming. And the ad agencies are like, oh, I know how to do that. That works for me.

• 54:41Alex Cranz?

  I think that's a big part of it. I think it's just like, this is a thing they already, all the advertisers already know how to do. They know how to sell it. Disney, all of these companies know how to buy this stuff and how to sell it. So everybody's just like, okay, we figured it out. And now also, instead of broadcast and cable and dealing with that, we can have it all internal. We can control everything. And that makes everything a lot easier and cheaper. But also, now Disney is going to own all the entertainment you want to watch.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, like in a really real way.

• 55:14Alex Cranz?

  Like Bob Iger is going to be deciding what scripted TV you watch. And that's a little, that has me a little concerned. I'm not crazy about one company having that much power over what I watch. But I do like how convenient it will be.

• 55:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, one of the things I was reading was basically theorizing that Disney is going to win because it did all of its acquisitions before it became hard to do acquisitions, both I guess for like interest rate reasons, just the way the economy has gone. And also, like, there's more scrutiny over these mergers and acquisitions than there used to be.

• 55:48Alex Cranz?

  If you think about it, the fact that they were able to acquire Marvel, they were able to acquire ESPN. ESPN led to the acquisition of Marvel, right?

• 55:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then Lucasfilm and Pixar, like, the list is crazy.

• 56:01Alex Cranz?

  It's insane. And it really shouldn't have happened. But it was also, it is Bob Iker's legacy. It was the thing he did really, really well. He's very proud of. I think every, when he was retired for that year and a half or whatever, he spent all of his time going around being like, I did this. I built this, this whole stable of, of assets for us. And now we can just go mint money. And Disney has.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, it worked out super well for a minute.

• 56:25Alex Cranz?

  He saw the writing on the wall and was really, really smart about it. Whether or not he should be able to do that, the whole copyright situation, the fact that he's going to own all of these copyrights and aggressively goes and has laws to stop this stuff from like entering the public domain, that's less cool. But.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  But the thing about that that's weird then is the flip side of that is like Disney has lost just an essentially infinite amount of money on streaming now. It's betting on this future of like, all of this is going to come together. And like, I think with the Hulu thing, I see it more than ever. Like, the bundle, the way you describe it is like, oh, that, that might work. And it might make Disney an awful lot of money pretty quickly. But also, it makes me wonder, can anyone come after Disney? Like, one of the things in the news this week was that Verizon is gonna start selling a combination of Netflix and Max, both ad-supported, for $10 instead of, I think, what would be $17. And one of the, the theories I saw about that is basically like, ordinarily, what would happen is these

• 57:25David Pierce?

  two companies would merge, or two companies like them would merge, or they'd find some way to kind of be one and compete in a real way head on. But they can't because, you know, gestures broadly. The world is what it is. And so they're having to find all these ways to kind of put their pieces together in order to be harder to churn away from. Do you buy that logic? Like, is everybody else gonna sort of sneaky bundle because they can't do what Disney is doing?

• 57:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think they have to, right? Peacock and Paramount have to bundle or they're gonna be toast. Because you've got the three or four big players. There's Disney plus with now 160, 200 million subscribers at this point, just astronomical number. Amazon with a similarly astronomical number. But that one's gonna be really curious because how much of that is just people who bought Amazon Prime and how much of it's actually users?

• 58:14David Pierce?

  Which Amazon has never really talked about?

• 58:16Alex Cranz?

  They've never disclosed. So there's always like a little asterisk when you see them at the top of the list. And then you've got Max, and you've got Netflix. So there's those, those are the big four. Those are effectively your ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox of 2023. And I think everybody's gonna probably need to subscribe to most of those if they want to be able to have, like, intelligent conversations with their friends about cultural moments.

• 58:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  And then there's everybody else. Paramount and Peacock and all these other ones are all sitting at the bottom underneath them. They're the WB and the UPN of this analogy.

• 58:51David Pierce?

  I mean, you're not wrong, but brutal.

• 58:53Alex Cranz?

  What a move for these guys. And I think the only way they're gonna be able to compete is, is to start bundling and start offering that. Because right now, they're, they're really hedging their bets on being like, better at programming. And to their credit, they are much better at programming than Netflix. Much, much better at it. But I don't think just being really talented at one thing is going to pull their butts out of the fire.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. And also, the thing we seem to have learned over the last year or so is that Netflix can just spend its way out of any problem that it has. It just has so much more money that it's like, oh, we can't make a good original, we'll go get suits and make it a gigantic hit. Like, it just works.

• 59:32Alex Cranz?

  Peacock's out there furious. I think Peacock was the owner of that. Well, that's the other thing we're seeing, is we're seeing a lot of these companies, you know, Zaslov said this last year, he said, we're open for business. We're gonna start selling a lot of our properties.

• 59:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Alex Cranz?

  We don't want to hold everything. It's not just for us. Like, Disney is very much in the business of, this is our IP, this is our brand, and you come to us for this IP and this brand. Max and Peacock and Paramount, not Netflix, but Max and Peacock and Paramount, and those kind of competitors are like, No, we want our brand to go everywhere in the hopes that eventually you say, I like this brand enough, I'm going to come back and pay you.

• 1:00:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:06Alex Cranz?

  And we'll see how that works. I don't know if it's going to work, but it definitely means there's more stuff being purchased and moved around, which is really, really, which is actually crucial to like, a good, interesting slate of content coming out. Because if all the content is being made by four companies, who run by four white guys, who all have very similar tastes and stuff, you're not going to get a lot of diversity of content. You're not going to get a lot of different fun and exciting things happening. And so needing to sell to these smaller ones, needing to keep their rest of that industry moving, is going to be important for that diversity. Because otherwise, it's just going to be Suits, Grey's Anatomy, Riverdale? I don't know. What are the, like, the most boring, like-

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  Fast talking, dramatic, white people is like essentially what I would call all those shows.

• 1:00:50Alex Cranz?

  With just a little huh moments in there. Just a few huh moments.

• 1:00:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, swelling violins at the end of every episode. That's the, that's how you know.

• 1:00:59Alex Cranz?

  Or chasing cars.

• 1:01:00David Pierce?

  That's actually a good segue to the last thing we should talk about, which is, two things happened sort of simultaneously. One was Bob Iger also said on this Disney earnings call, that one of his big focuses is to go back to the film studio. Like, the core Disney thing has always been, they develop, like you were saying, characters and movies that people love, right? And that feeds movies, that feeds the theme parks, it feeds the merchandising stuff they do, it feeds everything. And that, in recent years, especially with Pixar, and especially with Marvel, has started to win. And so what he said is, I'm going to go back and really dig into that space. And on the one hand, it's like, okay, you're like an old, rich, white guy. Like, we kind of know how that goes. But on the other hand,

• 1:01:43David Pierce?

  the Marvels opened this past weekend-

• 1:01:46Alex Cranz?

  Horrible opening.

• 1:01:46David Pierce?

  -to the lowest in Marvel history, right? It's the worst performing box office for a Marvel movie ever.

• 1:01:53Alex Cranz?

  Ton of asterisks next to it, by the way.

• 1:01:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, list them for me. Tell me the asterisks.

• 1:01:58Alex Cranz?

  There was the SAG strike, so they couldn't, they couldn't have Oscar winning Brie Larson out there. Having fun with Samuel L. Jackson, getting you excited for it, uh, which they totally were gonna do.

• 1:02:08David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:02:09Alex Cranz?

  And so you had the SAG strike. There was a, there's a, a large group of, of people in the, that are fans of the MCU that are very upset with the direction of like the more diverse direction that the, the franchise has taken over the last few years. And so they're all upset that this is starring ladies and not, not dudes. Um, there are some dudes in it. They're great. And then you have, you have the real challenge of just Marvel fatigue. There are so many Marvel movies that came out before. Ant-Man and Quantmania is another one that got short shrifted because it came out for, they had four months to like finish a whole bunch of effects that they were supposed to have like a year to finish. So they had to like rush their finish. And that's why it looks like hot garbage. And you're like, oh, this is an ugly movie because nobody has spent the time.

• 1:02:53Alex Cranz?

  So they, they've poisoned their brand, which is a shame because I think everybody who's going to see it really likes it. I wouldn't be surprised if the, the scores coming out of the film are pretty high for it. Like not astronomically high, but Disney historically has been really good at making a movie that even if critics don't like it, audiences really like it. And the last few, they really didn't have that success, particularly with Ant-Man and Doctor Strange. They really, really struggled with the cinema scores. And so I think Marvel's probably got much better cinema scores, but it's got to carry so much water that I think it's, it's gonna have that horrible asterisks next to it forever.

• 1:03:30David Pierce?

  Do you think it has a chance? Like is the, it feels increasingly with every one of these, like the Marvel fatigue is just irreversible. Even the stuff that people mostly seem to agree is good, like Loki season two, people seem to mostly like, doesn't have that like cultural force that it once did. Do you think we're just done with that phase and it's time to figure out what's next for Disney and everybody?

• 1:03:50Alex Cranz?

  I don't think so because I think what people need to remember is that the original MCU, with the exception of maybe the first Iron Man movie, was just as calculated, was just as well planned out. Like the reason Captain Marvel as a character exists today was because they rewrote her in, back in like 2011 to make her a better character to spit, make it produce in movies. Ms. Herself. That was one of the reasons Ms. Marvel, that character was created was for that same reason. Like, these characters were, have always been manufactured to sell tickets. Guardians of the Galaxy was their big, was that first big surprise where they made that film and it did really, really well. And they're like, oh shit, we could make people care about a sentient raccoon. We can do anything.

• 1:04:32Alex Cranz?

  And that's still true, but, but if you don't have the marketing behind it, and if you're not making films that are entertaining. Cause there was a lot of struggles, like early on Marvel struggled with Incredible Hulk and the first Thor movie. Did not have the strongest cinema scores. And even at the time, it was like, oh, are we gonna get it? And then like, they, they knocked it out of the park with the Avengers and everybody's like, okay, nevermind. And so they were able to kind of weather those bad times before, but they've just had a string of horrible films that nobody cares about. And they're so focused on that crossover concept and that who are you gonna see next? That it's, it's just exhausting when it's like, no, just do what you did at the beginning. Tell really good stories and then have Samuel L. Jackson show up in the last five minutes to be like, also this guy showing up next week.

• 1:05:17David Pierce?

  Well, and that's one of the, that's one of the things that I, I haven't seen the Marvels yet, but by all accounts it did very well. Is like, it's just a good movie, but also if you're a super fan who has seen everything, it has extra rewards for you. And that was the thing for me that like, the original movies did so well was like, I, I've probably seen 60% of the Marvel movies and it felt like the longer I went, the more I was being penalized for not having seen them. Whereas at the beginning, it was like, if I had seen them, I got 10 more references that I didn't get before. But it wasn't a huge problem that I missed a bunch of them. Now it's like, if I start watching one of these movies and I haven't seen 65 other things, none of it is gonna make any sense to me. And that is, that's too much. We've like, we've lost the plot when we've gotten to there, like literally lost the plot.

• 1:06:02Alex Cranz?

  I think Ant-Man and the Wasp in Qua- into Quantumania, or whatever the hell it's called, is probably like, that's the turning point. Because the original Ant-Man franchise exemplified this better than anything. It was just like, hey, look, we're doing a really cool thing. And oh, also like,

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  It's Paul Rudd. He's so small.

• 1:06:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it's, it's loosely attached to this larger franchise, but you didn't have to care about it. And then this third one, they were like, you must care about this entire franchise. And also this little man named Kang. And you're like, what? I don't, why? Stop it. And it looks like shit. So.

• 1:06:33David Pierce?

  But you think we're forever like, one or two good Marvel movies from it being back on top of the world?

• 1:06:39Alex Cranz?

  I think so. Disney is very good at making hits. Disney is better than just about anybody on the planet at making you care about something and selling it. So as long as Marvel's invested, it's they're gonna they're gonna do well. I think what's gonna be curious to see is what lessons they take from their recent failures. It's not lost on me that the last two like the two biggest recent failures were also led by women, that big primary parts of the cast. And I live in constant terror that they're gonna do what they were always doing in like the 2000s of being like, ugh, the women led show bombed, so we gotta kill all things where women lead. That kind of group think is really popular in Hollywood, and I'm terrified of that happening again.

• 1:07:20Alex Cranz?

  But Disney knows how to make hits. Marvel is not going away until Bob Iger or whoever decides it needs to.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Thank you. All right, we gotta take a break. Go see the Marvels. Apparently it's great. Charles really liked it. Everybody who sees it seems to really like it. We gotta take a break. We'll come back and do the hotline.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

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• 1:08:47David Pierce?

  All right, welcome back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. We take questions every week and we try to answer them as sometimes helpfully as we can. This week, Chris Welch is here to help me. Hi, Chris.

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  Hello, good to be back.

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  We got a question about something that I honestly thought we would never, ever in our lives get a question about again on the Vergecast hotline, which is MP3 players. But first, let me just play the question. It comes from Patrick.

• 1:09:12Speaker 06

  Hi, Verge team. This is Patrick from Tucson, Arizona. I'm trying to reduce my reliance on my phone so that when I go to replace it, I can get a dumb phone and replace all of its functions with standalone dumb or semi-smart products. The one feature that's giving me the most difficulty replacing is the ability to listen to my music from Spotify, my podcasts, and my audiobooks in my car in an easy and automatically updating fashion. It seems that all of the MP3 players that remain on the market are either over $600 at least, like the Sony Walkman, or under $100 and limited to playing manually populated offline files. Is it true that there's just no more mid-market for MP3 players? Thanks. I look forward to your insight as always.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:09:57David Pierce?

  I have like an immediate visceral reaction to this question, but I'm curious what your instant thoughts are.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  I think the main hang-up and problem challenge here is that podcasts part. Like finding an MP3 player that'll like automatically update podcasts is not really what the ones that are out there these days are for. Like you mentioned, you can buy like a Sony Walkman for $300, $400, but that's like all hi-fi listening geared. It's not really intended for like casual podcast listening. I don't know. What are your vibes on the question? What are your feels?

• 1:10:27David Pierce?

  I kind of have come to the point where I think the only reason to buy a dedicated MP3 player is if you really care about hi-fi, lossless audio. And I think that's a perfectly valid thing and reason to buy an MP3 player. If you're worrying about Spotify and podcasts, that is not you. And so I kind of think the market for those people for an MP3 player is dead. To me, the answer here is buy a cheap second phone, only download the two apps that you need. Like, I don't know, have somebody change your Google Play password so you can't do anything else or whatever. And then just treat that like your device. Basically, try to like iPod Touchify a phone that you have. That's the only answer I can think of that makes sense to me.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  So you still can buy like a used iPod Touch, that's an option, but it's stuck on iOS 15, I think. So there will come a day where like Spotify no longer supports iOS 15. And like same for Apple Music, which is very strange to think about. So at some point, the iPod Touch will be left behind. I've got one, it feels so small these days that it like no longer feels like a phone.

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  I know, it's really true.

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  It's like so tiny, so you know, it's got some charm. But yeah, software days are probably numbered. There's also, I don't know if you remember the Mighty Player, it's like that iPod Shuffle device.

• 1:11:39David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:40Speaker 05

  That can sync, that can sync Spotify and like tracks and podcasts. So that's an option, but you would need a smartphone to sync it to. So if you want a dumb phone, therein lies the problem. But yeah, that's still out there. I think they cost like 130 bucks, so nowhere near the cost of like a Sony Walkman, which again is silly and for nerds like me who like have like lossless audio libraries of fully legally, you know, downloaded music. No question about that.

• 1:12:03David Pierce?

  Don't worry about it, yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  But yeah, for this question, I would either like pursue an old iPod Touch for a few years. At least it should be good for one, two, three more years. Or like you said, buy a secondary phone that's, you know, does the job.

• 1:12:14David Pierce?

  The only other thing I could think of, and I did some research on this, like I kind of wish we lived in the world where Spotify's like car thing had been super successful and it went down this road of building sort of nichey music gadgets. Cause I agree, we should have more music gadgets. Like I think the idea that my phone is my source of music makes some sense because it's the device I have with me, whatever. But I kind of wish there were more. And the thing I wish most of all is that some kind of wearable was the answer. And there's little bits of stuff, Fitbit makes some stuff that has some pretty good integrations with Spotify and Deezer and some of these things. A lot obviously depends on which apps you use. Like if you use Apple Podcasts, all of this is moot by an iPod Touch.

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  But for some of these things, there are like bits and pieces of it you can get. But like you said, all of these are just phone accessories. They, they require so much else to do on your smartphone before you can get it on to your actual dedicated device.

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  Right, like it feels like the Apple Watch should be able to sync with a Mac at this point in time. And you know, it's, God knows it's a, almost 2024, but you still need an iPhone there. So that would solve the problem immediately. Like, like, you know, buy an Apple Watch that could talk to a Mac, you'd be all good. But that does not exist. But I would look at the Mighty, honestly, you know, it looks like an iPod Shuffle. It's got some charm. You can wear it if you want a dumb phone, it kind of fits that, that vibe. But you just got to figure out like what device will it sync with. And I think, I'm sure he's got some kind of phone lying around that can still, you know, run Spotify.

• 1:13:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the good news is, I would think on the phone front, if all you really want is like Spotify and Pocket Casts or whatever, I'll plug Pocket Casts because it's my favorite podcast app.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  Same.

• 1:13:48David Pierce?

  You don't need much phone to do that, right? Like you can buy a pretty small, pretty low end, pretty low powered phone. I would say as long as it's relatively modern in its software capabilities. So it'll last a long time. Like to almost no one would I recommend most of the like one to $200 smartphones out there. But in that range, you can get something that's going to serve you perfectly fine for these particular cases. If all you want is like a thing to plug headphones into to listen to music, right?

• 1:14:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, that or like check out like a Pixel 7A during the holiday sales and see if you can get a good, good discount on that.

• 1:14:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Google gives those things away like six times a year. You can probably find one. Any other, are there any other interesting music gadgets out there in the world right now? I feel like there's like, is Neil Young still doing the, the Pono thing?

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  Pono. God, what a time that was to be alive. Uh, that's not around anymore. I mean, I'm sure some of my readers are going to have some very super niche solutions that are out there. But yeah, off the top of my head, I can think of like Sony makes Sheepwalk bins that aren't that pricey, but those are the manual loading on music and stuff. And so those don't run Android at all. And so that would not be a good solution. But yeah, I would buy an old iPod Touch, secondary phone. Check out the Mighty for like a hundred, 130 bucks and see if that'll solve your dilemma. But uh, yeah, that's a, that's a big challenge to find a device that can sync your podcasts with a dumb phone.

• 1:15:08David Pierce?

  It's a strange one. And I really, I do support the overall theory of trying to take all the things that your phone does and sort of split them out. So that it's like, instead of having everything with me all at once in this one device, I can just have the tools that I need and not worry about the rest. Like.

• 1:15:22Speaker 05

  Single purpose devices, you know, the iPod.

• 1:15:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. Honestly, like, I wish the answer was the new iPod Classic, right? Integrates with Apple Music and Apple Podcasts and you can just live your life in that. Like that's the device I want to exist.

• 1:15:37Speaker 05

  Seriously, part of me will always miss the heyday of the iPod, I think, to some degree. But, uh, but this is the world we're in now. So you gotta, gotta work with what we got.

• 1:15:45David Pierce?

  I hope that helps. Chris, thank you as always.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Always a pleasure.

• 1:15:51David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone on the show and thank you for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, from our Spotify coverage to all the stuff going on in streaming at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also, you know, read The Verge. It's a great website. As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, weird Spotify playlists you want to tell me about, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. It's my favorite thing to do on this show. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about the PlayStation Portal, more from Epic v. Google, and all the other news of the week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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