Steve Boom

a lot of customers. You should know what's going on. So, without further ado, Steve Boom is the Music Media Summit. Last time I got together with Stevie was so formal that I thought that was his image. Now we's so relaxed after we evaluate my perception. Anyway, we were at lunch and a friend of ours, the Worse for Concord Music, which now owns Razor and Tie, said that the number one streams music on your service is kids Bob. Is that correct? No? Uh, because I said it was Garth Brooks. Uh.

Kids Bob's pretty up there. Okay, Uh, so's Garth Um. I think our service the number one artists I have to check, but most recently was Bruno Mars. Okay, stop is up there. We have a lot of people, you know, when you have an inexpensive device. A lot of people have put Echo dots in their kids rooms, and we family has always been a really important part of the Amazon customer base. So UM, I think we make up the converse of that, though, is true. I'm sure that

we're the number one streamer four kids bop. If I looked across the different streaming services, I think that would be a runaway. Well. If you look at Spotify, where all everything is totally you can see the Spotify Top fifty very dominated by urban music. Okay, and Apple does not stop trumpeting how they're breaking records with their urban streams. Rumor has it that the complexion of music on Amazon that people listening to is different. Is that correct? That's

not a rumor, that's fact. Absolutely. Um. If you look at if you just look at our charts, you would see a much greater diverse profile of listening. Um. Urban is important to our streaming service, like every other streaming service.

It's kind of strange to kind of cran my neck here a little, but you'd see a much greater blend you'd see a lot of country songs, you te rock, you t pop, um, if you go down past the top fifty you might even see a classical track or two after Really yeah, Um, so you know it's it's

it is very different. I think when we see who our customers are, you know, and we compare that to the charts and the other services, we feel pretty confident in saying that, you know, we're reaching new segments of the of the of the streaming addressable market and bringing those people into paid streaming. And a lot of people don't know a lot about Amazon, you zick. So if you have the Amazon Prime, what can you listen to?

If you listen? If you have Amazon Prime, you get a catalog of about two million songs, But you get two of the three major companies for all three majors. Or you get all three majors. Now, when did the third major come on board? Oh gosh, two and a half three years ago, Yeah, quite a while ago. Um, you get all three majors most indies. Um, but it's a limited catalog. So you know, we launched Prime Music, and the whole premise back then was you have to

remember dial back right. Spotify was much much smaller. Apple Music didn't exist. There was a bunch of startups who were offering ten dollars a month, and we knew we wanted, we needed to be in streaming. But we also knew from our own music store that back in very very few people were actually spending anything close to twenty dollars a year, which is what ten dollars a month adds

up to. In fact, the bottom of our customers, we're spending about fifteen dollars a year a year, right, So our idea behind Prime Music was, let's put out let's give these people a lot of music. They're more casual music listeners, but let's take out all that friction that we talked to people. What do you not like about the free music services. I don't like the ads, I don't like the fact that I can't take it offline. I don't like the fact that I can have limited

on my limited skips and all that stuff. So the idea behind Prime Music was, let's make a music service for everybody else because at the time, the only people who were interested in ten dollars a month. And the market has totally moved since then, um, but back then it was it was very It was a small sliver of people who wanted ten dollars a month, probably everyone in this room, but you guys aren't representative of the

average consumer. And you know, out of the gate, the whole industry misunderstood it, um, but consumers didn't because it was adopted really really quickly. And yeah, so that and there's a lot of curation involved. You know, we have a team so that routine. How would you see the market today, Um, there's definitely been so that that whole

segment still exists and is still growing rapidly. Um. And we always got to remember that of the US population or any other population historically hasn't spent anything on music Lettleon ten bucks a month. Um, there's two. There's just there's There's always been tress or radio, There's always been almost always been cable music choice and YouTube and all these other alternatives. Um. So that's still growing. But what seems to have happened in the last three years is

a shift in mentality among consumers. I don't know if there's this greater awareness of how what a great value ten bucks a month really is for all that music. I think I think Netflix and Hulu and all these other services have helped. Right, people are used to subscribing to things and not thinking that as I'm paying for music, but I'm paying for entertainment. I think devices like the Echo UM lower the barrier because it's something you use

so frequently and it's frictionless. And so we see that. You know, the projections that existed for the size of the ten dollar month market, um, you know those were those are wrong now. I mean, it's clear that the market's grown more quickly than anyone anticipated. And if the percentage is on your service you have baked into Amazon prompt you're not being charged per month you have are to listen on an Echo, you have essentially a ten dollar program to listen to Alla, Spotify, Apple Music. How

do the subscribers or the listeners breakdown amongst those three choices? Yeah, I mean, so the three is really the same. It's we have two services, Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. Prime is a limited catalog unlimited, as the name might suggest, a full catalog service. UM. But one of the innovations that we had was at launches, say, you know, can we we think the Echo is incomplete without a full catalog of music service. If you've ever used one. You've

got an intelligent assistant. You want to ask her anything you know. And the analogy I always give people's imagine if you said, hey, Alexa, you know what's the weather in Santa Barbara and she'd say, well, I'm sorry, the weather in Santa Barbara is not included with your prime membership. I only have the weather in San Francisco and Seattle.

Not a great experience, and so we are. We've always felt that for that device where it has no screen where you can ask her anything, she's intelligent and always getting more intelligent and you so you expect her to be able to give you what you want. That it demands a full catalog, and we took the approach of saying went to the labels and said, you know, we think there's a real opportunity here. Two for the first time have what a lot of people called a mid

tier service, but not a dumb down service. It's a full catalog, has all the features and functionality. The one limitations that you're restricted to that single device. Um, but it is Amazon Music Limit. There's abolutely nothing different about

it except that you can only play on that one echo. Uh. That's been really successful for us, and we've seen a pretty significant percentage of people who come on to that on ramp leave and go to the full price plan, whether an individual planks that would listen on their phone or a family plan because they might have multiple echoes and they like to have concurrent streams. Um. So Prime

Music has been around. To answer your question more directly, I mean the Prime Music has been around for four years. Next in the month, next month, next in June. Amazon Music and Limited been around for eighteen months. Um. You know it's it's uh, not quite fifty fifty, but it's it's getting close. Um. And so Amazon Music Limb is growing really really fast. Um, and Prime Music continues to grow faster than Prime. So we're pretty happy there too. Okay,

let's go back. You don't come from the music business, Uh No, although lass six and a half years I do. Okay. So for we always like to get where someone's coming from. We've discussed before. But for the people who are not here, you grow up a lot of places. I was born in New Jersey, grew up overseas and in New Jersey, um until I was twelve, and then moved to Houston, Texas. Uh, my parents are immigrants from Belgium, and so I spent a lot of time in Europe growing up, and uh

then came out to California for college. And you know my adult life, have lived a bunch more places, so a bit all over. But after college you went to law school, yep, I did. And when you went to law school, what was your intention relative to practicing. So my original plan, because I was an engineering guy. I was an electrical engineer in college as well as a history major. And you know, the life plan was, oh, go work as an engineer for a few years, go get an m b A and do that. And I

did work as an engineer for Compact Computer. If anybody remembers that brand, um, yeah, there's enough people my agent here, I certainly remember. Was I mean, I just was addressing Uh. I was Amazon's got a small offense in Santa Barbara, and I was going to talk to the people there before coming here, and I was like, I think I'm twenty years older than every single person in this room. But I realized I didn't really enjoy being an engineer,

so I decided to go to law school. So the plan was always go practiced for a few years, but just take a different path to the same end point, which is to to get into the business world in one way or another. And what kind of law did you practice? Uh? Corporate law starting in Washington, d c.

And that was miserable. And then UM moved back out to northern California and met at my five year college reunion a partner in a very small tech law firm, and UH, by the end of launch, I was ready to come out and started there the day that Yahoo went public and it was in this company. This law firm represented Yahoo. It's a very exciting day at that law firm is one of you know, that was the beginning of the Internet. UM Netscape had gone public six months or year prior, and it was just a crazy,

crazy time. So I worked with startups for about two and a half three years. And what did you actually do as the lawyer? UM? A variety of things. So, you know, you do finance work, work with the venture capitalists to raise money, take companies public, two mergers. But the fun stuff that we did was actually we really kind of acted as their outsourced general counsel, you know, because those are small companies. They may have money in the bank from Sequoia or one of these big vcs.

But um so when it came to doing partnerships commercial partnerships with people, um we would get involved at a much earlier stage than you would normally associate with the law a legal team. Normally it's like, hey, we've negotiated a deal paper it. Uh, that's not how we worked. We were in there a lot of the guys and this was the early days of the Internet, A lot of the guys that were the busines, dev guys, the business own guys that these companies. I didn't know crap,

I don't know anything about the Internet. No one did. But we actually knew more just because you know, we would represent ten companies, you would see ten things. All these people were straight out of business school and they were just in their little lane with their one company. So we got involved very early in hand in hand

it was. It was a lot of fun. So you enjoyed that as opposed to working in Washington, d C. Yeah, I enjoyed it until I realized the learning curve started to flatten out, you know, and thinking any job you probably look up and say that the people you work for do I want to be that person? And as people I was would be happy to be them. They were really nice guys, but I didn't want to be in their job. I didn't want to be a partner at that firm. So, so how'd you segue into your

next role? I reached out to some clients, and so you were actively looking to get out? Yeah, I decided I had one of those moments. I still remember it. I was at a wedding of a friend of mine back east, and uh, I was flying back with my now wife and we're sitting watching a movie and I just I wasn't watching the movie. My brain was just going a mile a minute. And I remember just out blurting out, I'm done. And she looked at me, she what'd you say? I said, I'll tell you later watch

the movie. Um. Yeah, I just had one of those moments where like, I'm I don't want to do this anymore, And so I started reaching out to clients. Now at the time, was your soon to be wife. Was she working? So was there any issue of economic instability or you say I'm not leaving the law until I find another thing. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't leave until I found a job that was a lesson my My father taught me. It's like, I've got more leverage if you're still working. So okay,

So you reach out your clients. What do you find a lot of interests, UM and I, you know, I talked to both startups and then I talked to Yahoo. And Yahoo at that time was a newly public startup. Basically, um. You know, it's hard a lot of people here are old enough to remember, but it was the hottest company in the world bar none. Um and UH. They were

looking for someone at the time. They're starting to expand in Europe and they Europe generally was a couple of years behind the US from an Internet accepting except in Scandinavia, but in Maine, you know, Big five was kind of behind the US, and so there weren't They've been looking and it couldn't find anyone. And they're looking for someone to run business development, and uh, I have a European background and and and so that helped, and they said,

do you want to give it a shot? And like, if you'll give a shot on me, I'll take it. And so we moved to London. And so if you're moving in London, you're you know, eight time zones away, so one would think you're pretty much running your own show. Yeah,

you get a lot of autonomy. Um, you know, you you spend a lot of time back in California the company of that age, and doing business to all means like doing partnerships that doesn't mean selling advertising means like product type integrations, right and which means you need engineering support,

which happens in California. So you spent a lot of time on Uh just say you get you get a lot of phone calls when you're ready to go to bed from people, right, and then you're bringing his firing and you can't go exactly, So I supposed loved it. It was a great four years in London and ultimately a success or a frustration in terms of executing on your role. Oh it was great. No, there were frustrations, but I haven't had a job that doesn't have frustrations.

So but the net, the net output was great. And when you were done four years later, our Yang and his original partners still in charge. Oh yeah, yeah, Well Jerry was there when I left the company. He he had just become CEO. Um, we were at our second CEO and said Tim Coogel was the original CEO of of Yahoo and then Terry Simul had joined while I was based in London. Okay, so how do you decide

we're at the end of Yahoo. Well, first they brought me back, got promoted, did a bunch of other things, spent I spent totally ten years there, first forward in London. Then I may maybe I misunderstood, I forgot. So the next six years, when you're back in the valley, what is your role? It evolved to be head of UM Mobile effectively, so I was the s VP of Mobile to date myself. This was mostly in the feature phone era. We did a lot of J two me apps, We

used whap browsers. Um. Uh, it's like getting flashbacks. Um. The I left Yahoo two months after the app store launched. Okay, so so we were but we were there on Jerry was on stage with Steve when the iPhone launched. Yeah, who was a big part of that launch. UM Yahoo Mail was embedded in the service and to the Yahoo the stocks and weather apps, though they were called widgets back then by Apple. We're all powered by Yahoo. So, um,

what's when we knew the world had changed? Like the first day when iPhones actually hit the market in June two thousand seven. You may remember this, but they went on sale at six pm, but six pm and each time zone. So we sat in California, they were on sale in New York on the East coast, and we just sat with the engineers and just watched the data of people using it, and it just it blew us away because you know, you were like for years the

perennial question that someone to ask you. It's probably similar to what was going on streams, Like you could take this story and apply to streaming. But every year, you know, you have your business plan review and Jerry Yang or Terry selling, when is mobile actually finally going to be big? And you're like, it's two years away? Every years, two years.

The analogy I always use is digital photography. We heard for ten years the digital photography is going to come in and kill Kodak, and then all of a sudden, one year it happened everything and it's like wow, And when iPhone happened and we and we had you know, we've seen blackberries were the most used devices for mobile internet then, but they were really horrible for mobile internet.

You know, they weren't designed for it, but but most people had them were being their companies were paying for their data, so you'd use it anyway. And then iPhone came in and despite their being you know how many few devices actually went online that day is like these spikes and we all sat around like the world changed, changed forever, and that, by the way, it's what changed for music as well. I mean the iPhone smartphones are really the foundation of a streaming of the streaming evolution

over the last ten years. Okay, looking at Yahoo which has now been sold, what's it savable? And if it was savable, what should they have done differently? Was it savable? I don't think it was by the time. By the time it got to that point, I think Yahoo suffered. And one of the things that attracted me about coming to Amazon, um it never had the kind of visionary CEO.

Jerry is an amazing guy, for he's never the CEO, never wanted to be, and he was only when he was forced to because there was no one else who wanted the job. Um he's an amazing guy, and uh had a good had a really good vision, but he he wasn't the CEO that could just galvanize the whole company behind it. And and yeah, who got stuck. Are we a media company or a technology company? And it was never never land Um had it decided that years before?

Perhaps savable, but I think by the time Jerry became CEO, I don't think it was. And you could see look at the succession of CEOs after that, they all followed despite saying they were doing a new strategy, was pretty much the same strategy. And Terry Summel big mistake or nothing he could done. I love Terry, Terry is a great guy. I don't want to I'm not here to talk, you know. No, It's just interesting because we see this in the music business, both famously with Andy lack Now

I was back in the news business. Came in and he really didn't understand the business. So we look at Terry Semmel, who came from enter Tinman. Was he a fish out of water and really did not understand the technology business? Um. You know, I think they're probably people who are in better position to answer that than me. To be honest with you, I didn't work that closely with Terry Um. I was off kind of doing my own thing in mobile and he was okay. So you wake up one day on a plane and say I'm

done at Yahoo. Uh. It was coming for a while longer than that. You know, the company got bigger, and UM, I don't know, just I kind of had an itch to go do something smaller. I think politics had changed in the company. It wasn't as fun as it once was. Um and uh I kind of waited around, you know, because I remember Microsoft bid for Yahoo and a hostile

takeover thing, and then carl Icon got involved. And that was a moment where you like, I never thought I'd worked for a company that carl Icon was making a bid for it. Just it just it was time. It was time to do something different. And the next step was so I went to a couple of different startups. I really wanted to be CEO of something, and so I went to one company that I stayed in the mobile world, and it was a social networking app that

had taken off. I was on feature phones and um that was it was called meg thirty three, and you know, Android was almost non existent at this point. This is now fall of two eight, Um and Uh. It had taken off in places like Indonesia, India, Malaysia, a little bit in South Africa, and we ended up moving the company to Singapore because it was just I didn't move with it. Um. Well, it was the motivation. It was impossible to run a company in that part of the

world from California. It was just happenstance that the customers were there. The r poo's out of those customers don't support California engineering costs. Um, you're not close. You know. The thing is, none of our engineers are. Probably people really used the product because it was a social networking thing. They're all on Facebook and there, so they don't know their own product in a way that you can only

know you in the internet. If you don't, if you're not close to your customer, you're just not gonna have a successful service. And uh so it started to languish in terms of product innovation, so we decided to move it there. It ultimately Um that company ultimately got listed on the Australian Exchange and then got bought out and I'm not sure what's going on with it, and kept

up with it, um. And then I went to another company called Looped, which was one of the original apps around social location sharing and social location sharing, which ultimately got sold. Um. You know the name of that was that was looped l O O P T. Yeah, it

ultimately got sold. Um mainly that the company had its moment in the sun, like internet companies do or consumer companies do, and they either kind of continue on that trajectory they flat line, it started to flat line, and it got it got bought out, primarily for the tech talent that was in the company. That's an Amazon called. We'll take a quick break and come back with more of my conversation with VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom, recorded live at the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara,

California this week. I'm speaking with Steve Boom. Over the last couple of months, I've interviewed the lead singer of Free and Bad Company, Paul Rodgers, and social media expert at U t A. Kendall Lostro. We try to provide a balance of entertaining and informative content for you here on the Bob Left Steps podcast. Be the first to hear next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast on tune in, Apple Podcast or your podcast Apple choice. While

you're there, please rate and review the podcast. Okay, let's get back to my conversation with Steve Boom, Amazon called you what was the gig they were looking for you to fill. Well, it's kind of a funny story, um, at least for me. Uh. They called said, well, we're

starting to invest heavily in digital media. This is two thousand eleven and so um the Prime Video service had only recently launched and the Amazon Cloud locker had just recently launched and I and I remember reading about that because it caused a bit of kerfuffle in the industry because it was unlicensed, and I think that's why it made all the tech news. And they said, look, we're we're investing in digital media. We're looking for some executives

to come build this out. And I said, well, you can see from my LinkedIn that I don't have any background in music or video. And the answer was, yes, that's probably that's probably not a bad thing. And their view was, you know, at a company like Amazon, you know, your traditional music industry exactly, the hit rate was going to be low for them to succeed at a company

like Amazon. Um, they really wanted someone more with a more tech background because that the roles involved running engineering teams and product teams and someone maybe came from a more data driven background. And so what was your were your responsibilities when you finally got the gig and went into the building. Well before I joined, I thought it

was gonna be all of music, including physical music. Um. But I had dinner with my boss a month before I joined, said, Hey, I just won't let you know. There's a re orc coming. The company's gonna split out, split the physical and digital businesses altogether, not just in music, but across the board. Just realize how fundamentally different they are other than the fact that your partners are the same, um, but from a running a business perspective, they're They're just

totally different. Uh. And he said, I don't I doubt if you're too upset about not having to run the physical business. And I was like, you know, I'm just excited to be joining Amazon. Whatever, It's fine. So my when I joined, my my my role and was and continues to be to run Amazon's digital music business, um from soup to nuts. And that's the way the company organizes itself. It really has true general managers that have product and engineering and marketing and finance and business development

and you know, licensing, label relations. All that stuff rolls up into a single leader and that's the way the company has always organized itself. Now there's a point where you go to Bezos with a pitch. Why don't you tell that story? Well, I mean we, um, you know, we Amazon had been in digital music since two thousand seven, it launched the MP three stores, the first first guy

to launch with DRM. Without DRM, I should say, um, but you know, honestly, had had had modest success in in the download business, and um, it was clearly a segment that was being fairly well dominated by one player given the device ecosystem, we knew we needed to get into streaming. And the pitch was when I basically just you know, basically kind of described with Prime Music, which is, um, Jeff, we should get into streaming. That's where our customers are going.

And they know Amazon everything is customer first, customer first, customer first. We saw what our customers were doing, and uh, you know, we had seen that Prime the Prime Video service, this is you know, this was now we're in early the time frame that I'm talking about, and and um, we could tell that Prime Video seemed to be getting traction and the company was starting to invest more in the Prime Video service and was really starting to put

its weight behind it UM. And you know, Jeff, we we had talked to him before, like how do you consider what do you think about adding things to Prime? And you know, obviously the things you want to add to a service like Prime or things that have broad appeal, and what has broader appealed in music? Really nothing? And people have been speculating for a long time, when is Amazon going to add a music service to Prime? When you know it's got to be coming soon, and so

we do what you do at Amazon. We spent several months. We have a certain process that we follow there which is different than another companies. And what we do is we write a press release, one page press release of explain to the consumer what you're about to launch, and you polish that because if you can't do that, then you don't know what you know, you haven't figured out

what is you want to do. And then behind that one page press release UM, we call this document a p R f a Q. There's an f a Q Frequently Asked Questions section after that, and you write your own questions and answers, and then we call a meeting UM and there's then financial support and exhibits and all that kind of stuff, and we call a meeting, and we called a meeting with Jeff um with our CFO at the time, um kind named Tom Scoot Tach who

is not our Brian. ALSOFSKI is the currency, a CFO, and and a couple and several other you know, senior leaders at the company spent ninety minutes first thirty minutes of that meeting. You know, it's a bunch of middle aged people with reading glasses sitting around staring at this document and reading it because we don't we don't power point at Amazon. We don't believe in it. Except if I were, if I were giving you a speech, I would power point. But then what's the difference. Why no

power point inside the building and power point outside the building? Well, because if you're if the purpose of a meeting is to to make a decision, power points are not a good it's not a good meeting is a good way to tell a story and present something, But if you want to make a decision, you know there's two things.

One empower point. It's really easy to have bullet points and to b as your way through things, right, It's like try to do that when you have to write complete sentences in a paragraph form and make it a narrative that stretches over six pages. You find yourself testing your your own thinking is refined and refined and refined until it all hangs. The other part is when you

give a presentation. If we were to try to decide something in this room, all of us together, some of you would know what I'm talking about before I even got up here, maybe more than I do. And then some of you would know nothing about the topic, and I'd be trying to give a presentation. Hands would be going up, and you'd be asking questions about slide twenty seven, even though on slide seven, and there's someone who's still trying to figure out slide three, and you have a

complete mismatch of information. So the conversation is not even handed. And so what happens. The way we do things. You walk into the room, you hand out this, you make whatever, twin copies, twenty copies. However, however, many people are in

the meeting, and we all then read. And the idea is when we're done reading, some people will still have more information than others, but everyone will have the same baseline, and that baseline should be sufficient to make the decision that we're asking you to make, UM, and so we'll all sit there and read it ahead of time. And I heard Jeff explain why don't you read it in advance?

I think there's two answers, one as no one has time, and the other is and this I laughed when I heard this, because I was just listening to this um in some speech he gave recent. He said, because everyone in the room is really smart, and they won't read it ahead of time, but then they'll b as their way through it and act like they did. And so this way you're forced to sit there and you know, what else are you gonna do? You know, there's this

thing in front of you. So we spent ninety minutes. Uh, and so once again, how long are do people spend reading? Thirty minutes? Okay? But I just remember, you know, like being in school, you're always uptight or you fast? Are you slow? You're gonna be ahead of this person. It's almost like you feel a pressure. You know, we're we're

all friends and colleagues. So um, you know, you wait if your if it's your meeting, you kind of look around and you say, okay, it looks like does anyone need more time, or sometimes you'll say, look, we're gonna read for thirty minutes and then and we're going to talk after that, and yeah, if you haven't read every word, it's not the end of the world. And then we talked about it for the next I think it was a ninety minute meeting probably, and they asked a bunch

of questions, talked about the numbers, etcetera, etcetera. The product that merrily and okay, let's do this. And you know that's for me pre remarkable. I've worked in a number of places and too. It was you know, we we had prepared. So it's not like we didn't come in half prepared, because that could have been a go back and think about this and that and the other thing. But it was, you know, we thought about it, thought it through and uh had a decision taken in in

that meeting and lunch. You know, everybody at this point you talk about a CEO with vision at this point, with the death of Steve Jobs, in the retirement of other people, uh, the two people two people people focus on our elon Musk and Bezos. So of all the CEO as you've dealt with, what does Jeff do differently. Um, I think he's just is he very demanding? It's very great clarity. Uh, And I think he he talks the

talk and walks the walk. So we we've set out broad principles that we we managed by at the company. He reiterates them, Um, explains them when he feels necessary. But mostly what I think he does that's great is he he lets his leaders lead. So if we were to get him on the phone right now and we were to talk about some details of Amazon Music, would he be familiar with those? He dives down into all

the product verticals. So from the time you decided that you wanted to do this until you gotta yes, how long was that? Uh? Well, the time the yes was in that meeting, I don't know when I'm talking about from the time you said months, a few months, don't know. And then you built everything from scratch. You didn't buy anything. No, we haven't bought anything in music. But that's interesting because everybody else is buying services. You know, Apple bought beats

and other things to give it leg up. Why do you decide with certain players in the marketplace that you're going to start from scratch. There's lots of reasons. I mean, you know, well, now we already have an infrastructured so if I were buying something, it would be to buy subscribers. I haven't come across other than the biggest of the big I haven't come across companies that can that can really accelerate our growth. We're doing just fine, thank you,

um and UM. But in the earlier days, look, it's you can spend as much time trying to integrate their systems into the Amazon systems as it will take you just to build it from scratch. And uh and you know, so we looked, we did look at companies and either the prices didn't make sense for what you were getting, or we didn't think the technology was all that great. Um. That happens a lot a lot of a lot of startups.

You know, the biggest thing when you buy them. And I saw this at Yahoo all the time because y'aha yah who operated an incredible scale. UM. And we bought a lot of companies in the in the late nineties, and the first thing you'd end up doing half the time is having to rebuild half the technology because it just couldn't scale. It's a lot for now because everyone runs on Amazon Web Services, so thinks scale seamlessly. But

back then that didn't exist. Um, you know some of the technology some of these companies that are trying to sell themselves, maybe their technology is just based on an older technology stack. You know, they've been around for a few years and they're using older technologies that, yeah, we're gonna have to replace that. So what's the point. And do you hire outside people to build it or you have inside engineers the Amazon to build your music service? Yeah?

Now we build it in house and we've we've staffed up our team, but we don't use out we don't use third parties. It's all it's all internal. Okay. So from the time you launch it, at what point is the Echo introduced? Um? Five months later? It turns out, so we launched in June two thousand fourteen Prime Music in the United States. The Echo launched on a beta invitation only basis in November or late October, early to

mid November, somewhere in that range two thousand fourteen. And at what point did you feel this is the future? Probably March? And what was what was the lightbulb moment? There are a couple of lifebub moments, um, I mean, the first was just being consumers ourselves and being in the music game. So you know, we had echoes those some of us on the on the on the music team during the when no one knew this product even existed.

But it's a beta product, it's an alpha product, and you know, it works and some days it works, some days it doesn't work, like any product that's in development, so you don't really get that full customer experience. The magic wasn't happening just yet. Um. But then you know, once it started shipping, then of course we all had them. And what I tell everybody is because we we've given a lot of people echoes, and you know, when we visit the labels like here, you should have one of this.

And what I tell people is if I come back and it's sitting in your office, I'm taking it back with me. Put it in your house, because it's not meant to be in your Office's not that's not where

I mean you can put on there. It's great, but if you want to understand the magic of a of the voice interface and you have to have it in your home, it has to be in a an area where you're going about your business doing other things, it's in a high traffic area, it's in a communal area, and so we started using them in our homes, right, And so when it was in beta, we weren't really using them in our homes because you never know who's

gonna pop into your house that kind of thing. So, uh, part of this, we were just consumers and we started

to understand the possibility. The other part was we started to look at data and we could see of the very few people that had gotten echoes in the very early part of two thousand fifteen because they were in very short supply, um, just how much they were being used for music, and the different ways in which they're being used for music, the ways the way people that the ways that people are asking to to have Alexa play music for them, in many cases very different than

you would expect them to do if they had a visual app like an iPhone or an Android app. And that's when we kind of realized and put all that

stuff together like this is this is profound. And I've been around the block a couple of times and I've seen these platforms shifts happen, and it was Okay, I remember the shift from you know, uh button to touch interface and and the impact that had fundamentally and mobile, and we just started to you know, extrapolate out and dream a little bit and say, you know, is voice that level of of of a shift in platform and the way people compute interact with computers, And you know,

we thought it would be, and particularly we thought it would be for interacting with digital media, because we just once you use it, you're like, it's just easier, it's so much better. It's you know, there's so much less friction. The first time. I'm sure all of you guys have have you voice controls at some point, but man, the first time you show someone of any technical background from

my mother in law to an engineer. She's not an engineer, by the way, so I mean like she's got the less technical background of those two people, and you just say Alexa play and name a song and it comes out. That's just magic. And the first time, now it's the best innovation seemed commonplace three or four years later, um, and like, well, of course, but I was not. And of course a few years ago and it truly that I remember showing to you know, record label executives. Their

eyes popped out, you know, and and that magic. Once we understood that magic, we realized this is this is a great this is just the way that you can interact with digital media. It's just better. And do you think at this point the music industry is up to speed on what a huge breakthrough this is at this point now and the eighteen Oh yeah, totally. Do you think people understand that because there have been historically late

to everything, whether it be file trading, digital download streaming. Yeah, I gotta say I, you know you're right, And UM, I have to you know, I I'm not getting paid to say this, but I have to take my hat off to the labels because we went to go talk about Amazon Music Unlimited in the very beginning of two thousand and sixteen, so this is after the very first

Echo Christmas, but it was a smallish Echo Christmas. The device was a year old, and you know, we went to go pitch them on the deals and we came with suitcases full of Echoes to hand out to everybody, and I gave my little speech. But what we found was that to a t or two to a person, rather they had all bought them already. They had gifted them to friends over the over the holiday they all were super up to date on it and understood the opportunity, so,

you know, very collaborative conversations from the get go. It wasn't It wasn't I think what maybe conversations were in previous generations, and I think that's a lot of streaming obviously was advancing, and the label saw that, um, this was going to be their business going forward. And then they saw this device and I think they used it as consumers and they understood the power of it. Well, I just know this is one of the products that

was sold by word of mouth. First of all, there was theoretically limited availability, but yeah, I was liking theoretically I'll tell you know, I'll tell you I So I had one, but I ordered it in November when it first came out in novemb It showed up on my doorstep in May the following year, so it really was limited.

It started to be they ramped up production, you know that year at some point, well, Gary Dela bat I was talking to Me's really in the producer of the Howard Stern Show, and he's it was such zeal I had to get one, and it was sort of like, first of all, we're more of a software era than a hardware era. But his excitement made me feel that

I wanted to get one same thing. In terms of Amazon Music Unlimited, doesn't seem like there's a lot of advertising outside of the Amazon ecosystem, but talk about the little triggers you have in your system to try to get people to upgrade. Yeah. So, um, you know, one of the things we worked on for the launch was we wanted to make sure the subscription process was as as simple as possible. Um. We obviously, like one of our competitors have you know, customer, lots of customers, credit

card accounts. People buy stuff from Amazon, that's what they do. We have a commerce space relationship with them, and um, you know, we wanted to make sure they could just talk to Alexa to subscribe, so you can do that, and um, we're pretty confident that that's the the if this is sounds like an oxymoron, but the most frictionless, the least amount of friction in any subscription that I've are seen. And so one of the things we do.

You know, if you were to ask for a track, and say you're a prime member, if you were to ask for a track that's not in Prime Music, so it's not part of those two million odd songs. Um, you would hear Alexas say something like, you know that song is not in Prime Music. It's available in Amazon Music Unlimited along with tens of millions of other songs or something like that. Uh, free trial for thirty days

after that as month, should I start your free trial? Yes, that's all you have to say, and music will start playing. And I don't know if it gets an easier than that. And so we do that. And that's that's very effective, you know, because you're it's always more effective to to get someone to upgrade to something when they're in the moment. Then they're already they're already so far down that funnel in consideration that it's it doesn't take a lot to

get them over the last hurdle. If if you're having to spend you know, two or fifty million dollars creating a brand for yourself, that's just creating awareness. So once they're on the echo device, you know, we do that. We do things if um, if if you have multiple echoes in your home and say you're listening in one room and your kids listening and wants to listen, well,

let's put the other way. Your kids listening in one room and then you're in the other room and you try to listen, and Alex will say, um, you know, because we're limit you're limited to one stream at a time and all these music services, that's that's a condition of the labels. She'd say something like, you know, music is playing on the other device. Um, but if you upgrade to the Family Plan, you can have up to

six concurrent streams. And well, it turns out that's pretty effective, you know, um, because if you really want to listen to music and your time, and you maybe didn't even know the Family Plan existed, right, and now he's like, oh cool, well you have four echoes, I got three kids. Great, let's do it. And also, assuming someone's not asking for something that's not in the two million catalog you do have of periodic adds, shall we say them to upgrade?

Well we we you know, we communicate with our customers, but Alexa doesn't run ads, so you're communicating saying, hey, this opportunity is here, um through normal like email and push messaging channels, but not there's you know, Alexa's personality is it's very it's it's very carefully guarded. She's not going to be you know, she's not meant there to hawk products, you know, and and she's not meant to be too sales. So if you're just you won't what

you won't see is or here I should say. So, if you're listening to a playlist, you're not going to get interrupted in the middle in between songs and say, hey, by the way, there's this thing called am some music on Limit. There's no advertising on Echo and we don't advertise like that either. It's because it's just contextual. There's no pushing of the unlimited service on Alexa unless you

ask for something that is not there. Yeah, unless you're unless you're really in the moment of wanting music and we think we can improve your experience. Okay, So, in the world today of selling music, not literally but marketing music, playlists are thought to be king. How does someone enter the Amazon ecosystem and get their songs heard? Um? Well, first of all, we have a team of programmers who are out looking for music and deciding themselves how many

people are there? Tensa um and they're out and you know, they're in different cities and assigned to different genres. Um. You know, our country programmers are in are in Nashville, not a big surprise, and um, they're out doing what those guys do. They go out to listen to new bands play and new artists and they listen for music. We obviously meet with the record labels, we meet with artists management, and we get played a lot of music. Um.

And you know, it's ultimate editorial decision. You know, what is it that we want to what is it that we want to play? And you know, we'll promote music when it comes. If if there's an artist that we want to get behind, we work with the label to promote them. Um. But ultimately the decision of what and where to put something in a playlist comes down to the editorial team. Okay. But if you're a manager, there

is someone you can meet with. Yeah, absolutely okay. And then you subsequently look at the data and there for a massage what gets played and what's not, What gets added and gets dropped from playlist based on the number of streams. Sure, sure, okay. And Amazon has seen someone of as a black hole. Now Spotify is now public, they're releasing a lot of information. First and foremost, if I am an artist on Amazon, do you have a dashboard where I can see all my data? Not at

the current time. So well, we eventually we will. We just don't have it yet. We've been more focused on, you know, getting big enough that artists would want to come look at a dashboard on Amazon. Okay, And then you have Apple, as I say, trumpeting how many urban streams they have, And we don't really know what's going on in Amazon. The first question is what is going on? And second is there a way for us to find out on a regular basis. I can't come here every day. Sorry, Um,

what is going on? Lots of lots is going on. But yeah, as a company, we tend to be more reticent to share data. Is just across the board. I value my job, so I try not to share too much. Um. Ultimately we we we will, uh created an avenue for for artists to see what's going on in real time. I mean, we obviously give reports to all the labels and so the labels know what's going on in our service. Um, but we we don't make it as public as some

of the other services. We also don't just generally beat our chest as much and try to like you know, talk about how many streams x artists did in the first weekend just sort of not it's just not really what we do as much. We'll pause here for a brief moment and get right back to VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom. As most of you know, I'm a writer and you can read my work at left sets dot com in addition to reading my commentary on

music tech in the world at large. Will be the first to find out when we've published a new podcast. Go to left sets dot com and sign up for the news letter. Now more of the VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom, recorded live the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. What can you say? We talked about this a little earlier, and I'll use the word counterintuitive. What do we learn about what's happening on the Amazon service as opposed to its competitors. UM, I'm not even

sure how to answer. That's such a broad question. Specifically, are there different genres that are emphasized? Uh, yeah, you'll see different Like I said, you'll see different genres. Um. I can look at our charts. They just they look very different. They look wildly different. Would you say, therefore, that Amazon is reaching a different segment of the public or a more representative segment of the public. Uh, that's a tough question to answer. I think it's a broader

cross section of the public. Um, if your goal is to be, you know, a service for the most popular music right now in terms of streaming, you know, then you're going to be focused on nothing but hip hop. Um, I think it's a more representative cross section of of the country. And you know, also, I can tell you know, if you think about Amazon and our customer base. At our core, we sell people things, and there were our average customer buys things. Therefore has disposable income and a

credit card. So therefore our customer base excuse a bit older than the other guys. That doesn't mean it's old, It just means it starts more at a young adult and goes up from there. Right, we're we don't have a free tier, so well, essentially you do because it's baked into the now nine Amazon Prime that you have to be a Prime member and that's not an unlimited basil said, you know, they're a hundred million Prime members

that global number. Yeah, right, Well, how many countries is Amazon Music in at this point around forty and you can get unlimited in all those forty countries, um, all but one, but that's coming yeah pretty much. Okay, So but essentially it feels free to the consumer unless you have prime. If you have prime, okay, we to of course, the original sales pitch is the two day delivery, which I think with its original prices seventy nine dollars was real.

Now that it's going up, you're looking at the add ons. Okay, so what do you see right now? Despite protestations of the minor players, is essentially a three horse race between Apple, Spotify, and Amazon. What do you foresee foreseeing the future relative to the competition of those three UM, I can speak to us. I mean, I I like where we sit.

You know, people, you know, we've we've grown pretty dramatically over the last uh two or three years and to the point where you know, it's it's it's quite clear that we're in that small group that you just mentioned. And you know, we think, we think we have a good trajectory and we have a pretty sound strategy. I think there's some secular trends that work in our favors, such as UM this plat form shifts to voice. So you know, we see ourselves continuing to grow pretty rapidly.

I know there's this narrative out there that everything in the Internet is a winner take all um. I don't really buy into that when it comes at least to digital media. I can see that where there are you know, where network effects are the strongest thing in your business, like search, um or social networking, you know, arguably it's winner take all, even though there are many very successful social networking companies UM. I don't think that's the case

of music. I do think it will be a small number continue to be a small number um of players globally. Is it those three? Is there gonna be a fourth? Ye? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. I know that will be up there if we look historically, you know, Google has se Search, Facebook, a lot of companies a dominant players of the marketplace because that's where all your friends are. There is a network effects thing. So I have all the services. I know how to

share a song on Spotify. I don't know how to share a song on Apple okay, and I think, and then of course if I share it with someone who's not a member, they can't listen. So I think these are important factors moving towards dominance of one of the services. You don't agree. I don't agree that it's going to be a single No, I wouldn't be doing this if we thought the game was over. Well, I would think that, you know, from an outside observer, I don't mean this

in a negative way. I would say that Amazon is the stealth player with both deep pockets, big ecosystem, the prime etcetera. They're the ones. It's they're frequently ignored. Like talk to Daniel Glass, you know, six or eight months ago.

He says, you know, the sleeper is Amazon, and he talks about meeting with you with the other team and the people who have been at the forefront from way longer than six But the people have been the forefront have been in serious whatever they talk about Amazon being the sleeper. But by the same time that by the way, but as I say, it's hard to fathom. And one also would say that that's who we have to you know, Spotify as a standalone product. I don't see it as

a standalone company. A long way down the line. What we look with the apples, they have everybody's credit card, but who do they market to after they don't have the free tier? And I always go back to the original example of A O L and MSN Network. Everyone thought MSN Network was gonna kill A O L and it did not. So the fact that you have a previous history does not necessarily mean success in the future. In addition, I don't believe there's a visionary leader at

Apple where there is a visionary leader at at Amazon. Therefore, it's something I'm certainly paying attention to. But getting off of my little soapbox here, one of the things that amazed me when we met is that if I go on Spotify, which is the big huna this week, they break down the playlist down into certain things, but in reality it's more granular on the Amazon that what you can say like play rockets of can you tell the audience more about that? Yeah, And that's I mean, that's

a that's actually what we saw customers doing. Right. So again when we looked at the date of what are people doing on Alexa, the way I think about is if if you have a visual app, your iPhone app, your desktop app, your Android app, it's very powerful, it's also very constrained, right, there's the product. Managers decided how you're going to listen to music, whether you realize it

or not. There's a search bar, there's a browse hierarchy of how you browse through music, and they fill the buckets of content for you, and not much not suggesting that's a bad thing. It is what it is, though, and um, that's how you're going to listen to music. When you have a head lit what we call a headless device, just nothing. There's no screen on an Echo. You're completely unconstrained. The way you want to interact with music is limited only by your own imagination. And lo

and behold. When people are unconstrained, they act in an unconstrained way, and they ask Alexa things. And you know what we saw was that. The way I like think about is if you read the reviews of the Echo in the early days and still today, you'd see people saying things like I love Alexa, Alexa is my friend, she's my best friend, Alexa is a member of my family.

And so we tried to translate, kind of translate that into music and say, well, it makes sense that people are asking for things in a much more natural way than you would get in and app because they think of her as a friend. So they're going to talk to her like you're talking to You're gonna talk to her like you talked to your friend about music. And so people were asking for things. They're asking for songs because they only know a few words to the song.

They can't remember the title of the artist. So they asked for by lyrics, They asked for the by mood. They ask you know, play pearl jam from um, play YouTube from the eighties, or play me some sad country music. Um. Or I'm having a dinner party, Alexa, can you play me some music, some jazz? And it's that kind of stuff where it's like music becoming part of what you

do and responding to how you think about music. Um, it's not always and and and As great as playlists are and I know they're the currency du jour and maybe for a long time to come, they're not the answer to every type of situation that you find yourself in wanting to listen to music. There's plenty of times you may uh not want to listen to a playlist. And so when you say, you know, play YouTube from the eighties, we just make a playlist on the fly

for you. Um, there isn't We don't go deep into We didn't have programmers creating you know, all these things. We spent a lot of time cleaning up metadata. Um, with all respect to the my label friends here or who may listen to a recording of this. Um, metadata sucks and it's a known problem in the industry. It tends to be incorrect or incomplete and certainly insufficient to to to respond to the kind of request that people

are asking for. Like, even if all the metadata from the labels were correct, they don't give us metadata that says this song is sad, or this song is happy, this is upbeat, um, this is this is suitable for a dinner party. Right, So that's that's metadata we have to go out and create, and we do that through a combination of brute force with humans and then deep learning.

Pretty much every song has metadata beyond writer, etcetera. Yeah, and we've taken we've taken humans to to to to take sample data sets and then use machine learning algorithms to to learn and you apply that against the greater catalog. Obviously, with catalog of tens of millions of tracks, it would take humans years to go do this, Um, but it doesn't take machines years. But then we have human curious

that checking in on the mic. No, that one wasn't good, And you're constantly improving the model, and that enables us to do more fun things when people talk to Alexa and make it more natural. And believe me, we've got a long way to go. I mean we've we've scratched the surface with what people want. Okay, So when I asked, like some rock music for sixty, it creates a playlist on the fly. There is no person existing there maybe

there maybe one. But if there's a pre existing playlist that someone, you know, some curator created for something, we might pull from there. But we also know you're listening habits and um, maybe that's not the right one for you, So we'll create one on the fly, and then we'll personalize the sequence. So generally speaking, if I'm talking to Alexa, I can talk year, I can talk act, yeah, era, gen genre, moved, what else? Smooth activity? What are you

doing right now? You know, go to yoga, you're gonna have a dinner party, studying. So there's enough metadata that it will then just pull on that metadata to make a playlist on the on the fly. And I only know this from meeting with you previously. How is anybody's supposed to know this or theoretically they're developing a new way to interact with Alexa and they're learning a new way of thinking about music. Well, the whole idea is

to make it natural. So, like I said, we're most of what we're doing is stuff that people already wanting to do. Um. You know, we recently launched the ability for you to make playlists just using your voice on Alexa, and sure enough, I mean, people were trying to do it. It's a very natural thing to want to do in a music service. It's pretty complicated to to do by voice,

but it works really well. And lo and behold, people are already trying to do it, so instead of failing it now succeeded and so millions of playlists are created really really quickly. Um. There are certain things, yeah, that you know, people have to learn as possible, but but the idea is that you know, by and large, people will stumble upon it when when that's how they want to listen to music, when that's how they want to

ask for something. UM. I do think in over time, you'll see us another services probably get better at helping customers understand what features are available, but most of the stuff we've launched to date has been you know, that's just how people were already asking for. People were saying things like, you know, play me the song that goes blah blah blah, whatever the lyric is, and so we looked at that. It's like, well that people are failing

because Alexa couldn't understand that. So we went out and created the ability to quickly look through lyrics databases and find that song or you know, play the new song you know by Mumford and Sons with Daniels here and hopefully they're gonna have a new album sometimes soon because we've been waiting for three years. Um, I don't know,

but I'm a big fan. And uh, you know, that's really easy to understand when it's the first single off the record, But when it's the third track off the record that Daniels promoting and that's one at radio right now, you know which song is still Alexa pull. They all have the same release date from the label. They're all have the same release date of the record of the album.

So you know, we worked with labels and ourselves and created this concept of radio impact date in our in our metadata for songs, so that when I say because that, the whole idea is I was listening to the radio. I heard the new song by Mumford and Sons. Don't know the title, but it's the one that's on the radio that that that Daniel's promoting. Alexa played the new song by Mumford and Sons, She's going to know which one to get. And so our focus has been primarily

on things that people are doing already. Um and there's, like I said, there's a lot more to come. You know. The ideas it should be as natural as speaking to your best friend about music. If you and I were to go have a beer and just talk about music, not about the music business, but about artists and songs and stuff. We want Alexa to be able to to to hang with you and to and to be your guide and to be your friend and to be able to respond to that. Well, some of this Stele stuff.

I know that Randy arranged for us to get some echo shows, and I had the default service has Spotify, which sorry, most people don't really know how to change. But once you got the Echo Show, and it can show the lyrics made the default service Amazon Music, because I want to see the lyrics. We'll take a quick break and come back with more of my conversation with VP of the Amazon Music Steve Boom, recorded live at

the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. I hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of the Bob Left Stats podcast. If you want to listen to sound bites from the interviews and see some of my guests like Shirley me Instid of Garbage or Paul Rodgers of Bad Company and Free check it out at tune in on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Now more of my chat with the head of the Amazon Music Steve Boom on the Bob Left and It's podcast. At this point, why don't we open

it up to questions? Sure people have certain things. Jim has the mic once again, Let's try to limit statements and make it more about questions for Steve. Here has Steve. My question is, as you talk about the ecosystem between the Amazon Music streaming service and the Echo do you you do you view it more as a feature or product. Um, you know, we view Amazon Music as a service. Um. You know, Alexa itself is a platform that you can or you know, it allows you to have other services available.

So um, and we Amazon Musics available on iOS, on Android, on web, on TV platforms. So you know, we're building a self standing music service. It just so happens. Our focus is to make it the best voice forward music service in the world. We've brought voice controls into our mobile phone apps, so on iOS and Android you can speak with Alexa. Um. That's how we think we really

rise above the crowd. Um that it's a service onto itself. Yeah, Stephen, you know, Hey Shapiro, I mean, how does everybody's gonna mike here? It's a cousin of kind of your core business. But I know Amazon was looking at ticketing and ticketing in music, and uh maybe the only time Amazon had

to pull back from entering a new vertical. And I don't know if you can give us color of the experience that Amazon happened had looking at going into music ticketing, and you had entered in Europe, I think, but now pretty publicly said hey, we're gonna pull back from that. Uh. Yeah, I wish I could give you shed insight. Yeah, we we did have a small ticketing business in the UK. It really started in the West End with theater, dabbled

with some concerts. Um I wasn't part of the decision process as to why the company pulled out, so I'm so I can't really tell you much. But one thing a g They had the Hyde Park shows they were tied in with his Amazon last summer and they said that Amazon sold tickets that they couldn't sell. That you reached people that they didn't reach. It was actually a benefit to it as opposed to people thinking, well, Amazon

is going to come in and take our business. When Bob wants to replay his rock from does Amazon store that so that he could get the exact same playlist again or will it fabricate a new one. It's a great question. Uh the next time probably Fabrica knewhim. But when he's done listening, you could ask Alexa to save it as a playlist and then he would access it by saying I want my June playlist. When he creates one, Shell asked how to what what names? She will ask

how to store to sign a name to it? Yeah? Nice? Yeah, Okay, Before we move on, how many people in the room have an echo of some stripe. Wow. Okay. How many people have a Google Home yea? How many people have a HomePod? Okay? Okay? Uh? Who has the bike now? Jim? Okay, Hey, how you doing um with everything going on with Cambridge Analytica and everything on Facebook? Now? You put a microphone in your house on all the time? Any thoughts on that?

You know? I want to comment on that because this is the type of thing that makes me fucking crazy and that I hear I still, at this late date, gets saying I'm not gonna have streaming? What if I'm out of cellular service? Now for almost ten years they've had it, so it seeks to your phone, so you have to pay every month. They have ownership. You can't get that message through when it comes to the Echo devices until they hear a lection the code word the

microphone is not on. Isn't that correct? That's correct. So there's a basically a small processor on the device that all it does is listen for ALEXA. It's not connected to the cloud. When it hears ALEXA, it opens up a connection to the cloud to capture what you say. Next converts that into wave file and then interpreted into text and it comes back down. Um. So the reason

there's a blue light so you know she's listening. If you ever want to make sure that nothing like if one of the kids blurts out Alexa and you and you were on a super confidential conference call for work or something, there's a mute button which physically cuts the circuit of the microphones, physically impossible for any sound to get back to Amazon. So privacy has been thought of in the very design of the device from from day one, both in its construction of the device as well as

the usual cues to let you know when Alexa is listening. So, um, it's something we take really, really seriously. I'm not the one in charge of that stuff, but it's something that I've heard described and it's it's as I described to you. It's something you know, Amazon the customer obsession and customer trust is at the center of our entire business. It has drilled into you from day one that you walk into the company, and we know that trust is something hard to earn an easy to lose, and it's not

something that Amazon takes lightly. A lot of people have trusted us for years with purchasing a lot of important things in their lives, and yeah, we're not doing anything to mess with that. But having said that, the other half of his question is important. You have an incredible

amount of data and knowledge of us. You know, as I say, on Google, they can literally they say you want to get someone you know, cough up something, just say you threatened them with release of their Google search history. But you literally have the purchase history. How do we know that you're not going to use that to our detriment or to brainwash us, or to get us to

do something we don't want to do. That's a music conference. Uh, you know, I'm happy to get our public policy people here, but um, I think we're the most trusted brand in America for a reason. And I kind of would leave it at that. You know, I'm not I'm not here really to talk about data. Place say, I don't need

to press his expecting answer. But I think the other half of the question, the non technical question, is something that's in everybody's minds that certainly needs to be in the marketplace, if not a chilling effect on the abuse of data. Not that Amazon has a history there, but we want to put that in everybody's mind. Jake, Um, you know Steve brought up something interesting, Steve about the

other Steve about playlists. So Bob does a great playlist of rock from sixty nine, and uh, those of us really like Bob's taste, so we want to listen to Bob's playlist from nineteen nine. Does Amazon currently and I don't know or will it allow third party playlists to be made on the service where other people can go and listen to other curators beside your own playlists, I

mean playlist sharing. Yeah, playlists sharing or for that matter. Um, I don't know if they're on your but Majestic Casual is a great example of people that make playlist They've been doing it for years. They started on YouTube. You you go into I go into my son nos playlist search and I do Majestic Casual and Deezer comes up with, you know, a Hunter playlists, and Apple Music comes up with a Hunter playlists, and Spotify the same thing, and uh, and they're just a playlist kind of brand. We have

some of two questions. The first question is playlist sharing. Uh, yes, Um, that's something we either do or about to enable. Um, okay, we enable that with voice. We'll work through that. Okay. The second thing is third party playlists. Yeah, we have some of those brands in our serves. I don't know about Majestic Casual per Se, but I know that we

have some of the other ones in our service. So so so one of the things when Troy Carter was here the other day, he said, you know, we concentrate mostly on our own playlists, and they're kind of pushing back against third party playlists because they're afraid of graft payola to get on those those bigger playlists. And I just trying to get your sort of take on the same thing. Troy is a really smart guy, and I agree with him. And you know, there's there's two angles

to that. One is worrying about those types of things, um, but also you have to understand that we're a music service and in a in a world where all of us have very similar music alogues, we are going to differentiate ourselves through a variety of means, and one of those is our own curation. And so it's it's only natural that a music service would want to, you know, invest heavily in its own creation to make sure it's

really great. But you know, and and we know that we won't be doing Payola and Graft and all that other stuff. So I don't know what goes on in the other companies. So that is a concern. Next person with the microphone. Yeah, so actually you just answered part of my question. Um, the question was my my thought. My my question is about where do you think the responsibility lies for actual curation and promotion on the platform? Um,

specifically with with regard to Voice. Um, how much of it is or I know you don't like to share numbers, but how much of the traffic is organic, purely organic? I want to play this now, And how much of it is driven by your curation? And what direction is that moving? And how do you think about that? Yeah, a substantial percentage of our our of our listening is

through curation. Um. I think Troy might have mentioned some numbers the other day or recently, and you know they seemed in line with what we kind of see at Amazon Music in that general range. Um, what we see in voice is interesting behavior that you see the same person will will Will go from a very casual lean back, just play me some music or play a genre playing artist whatever, to then like go straight deep down into the catalog and want that specific track and so just invert.

But but of course by just sheer volume when you're in the lean back mode, you're going to hear more music than It's more tiring to say, play this track, play that track, but you know it takes you a long time to play. If that's fifteen requests you have to come up with to to listen to an hour of music. Um, so we do see invoice people tending to listen to more hours, longer sessions, and a higher

incidents of curated music for sure. Now, my girlfriend always says, I do these back exercises and I have thirty second timers, and she says, well, you can set a series of continuous timers. I've yet have been able to do that. But can I load Alexa for your voice? Can I say, play the Rolling Stones, then play Jesus Jones and play Drake? Is there a way to do that? You mean a cue? I mean or just looking getting there but not yet? Okay, it's coming. And are there anybody else with raised hands here?

Jim over here? Uh? In terms of statistics, how significant is music? Is a us A case for uh? The echo? In terms of versus other user activity like asking for the weather or recipes or podcasts, and where do you see those statistics going in the future. Yeah, so it's an extremely important use case among all things that people

do on Alexa are on Echo. I like to remind my team that, you know, we sell a speaker that has an intelligent assistant in it who can do a lot of different things, but the main vehicle that we're delivering that intelligent assistant to the home is a speaker. And so not surprisingly, music is super important on a speaker because that's what people like to do on speakers. UM. So it's one of the top at all times. How

do I see that evolving over time? I think that will stay the case as long for for devices where speakers are really the delivery vehicle for the intelligent assistant. I think if there are other devices that are less music centric than a speaker, I think that percentage would be different. Um. But in the smart speaker category, I expect music to continue to be up there no matter

how many more skills are added to Alexa. UM. And it's the thing that you know, people use it not just a lot in terms of hours, but it's frequency and repetition and coming back to it. UM. It the only you know the other skills like that that you know, whether yes, smart home something, if you control your lights you know you do turn them off and on fairly frequently, so you'll repeat that. But music is has an incredible engagement level on the device now on the really regular

Amazon Prime, the more people listen, it costs you more money. Okay, So is there any talk at the company of dissuading people from listening because you literally have to pay for that. Uh No, I mean our we we know the value that it generates for Amazon. You know, we know that our Prime members who use Prime Music are better Prime members and they they renew their Prime memberships at a higher rate, They come out of their free trials of Amazon Prime at a higher rate than than than do

people who don't use Prime Music. And you know, we we carefully watch that and and understand the value that it's generating. And you know, we're not trying to dissuade people from from listening at all. And yes, um so serious sex sums done a great job of facilitating uh festival and concert live streaming. Red Bull TV has been doing it from a video perspective as well as others.

All the Red bullis got out. Um, does Amazon have any intentions of getting into the live music streaming business, uh, via artists directly or festivals. Yeah. I mean I'm not going to talk about things here that we haven't done yet that we might do if we you know, this

isn't the forum where I'm gonna disclose something like that. Um. What I would say is we've been doing some live broadcasts lately with working with some of the labels and doing some really interesting promotions around new records by Justin timber Lake, by Elton John just had these tribute albums as well as by you two in the in the in the Winter that are a combination of uh, interviews and music and and it's it's it's really kind of

like a live radio show. Um. But in terms of whether we're gonna do live concert stream that's not This isn't the forum for me to talk about that. Yeah. Another question you were talking about, UM, some of the metadata that you have to create on your own and I've been recently reading articles about tags for your songs and like you know, I work with indie artists who work with tune Core and CD Baby in places like that.

Are you gonna now go to some of these aggregators and potentially have a different metadata form for when you're submitting your music. You can say this is a sad song, this is an upbeat dance song, and those kind of tags to help you guys with your service. Yeah, we've been actually working with d dex um to try to update the DDX standard to include more fields that are relevant for voice and so that would be you know, it would be in the d dex standard. Okay, any

other people with questions here, Okay. The thing about this is we've learned a lot about Amazon and as I even though I have the service, I'm still learning things, which speaks you know, we have the music. People say, oh, market the hell out of it, but it's a stealth operation and something you definitely have to pay attention. And thanks so much d for coming and sharing, Thank you

for having me. That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob left Set podcast, recorded live the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California, and produced by tune In. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with VP of the Amazon Music s feed Boom. I found it fascinating how Amazon Music uses data to its advantage. What part of the interview is interesting to you. Your feedback is always appreciated. You can email me at Bob at left sets dot com.

Until next time, I'm Bob left Sets than reads. Don't know exactly must be out