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Rex Woodbury Profile picture
@rex_woodbury
Jul 21, 2021 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Spotify launched in the US 10 years ago this month. Here's my best take at how economics flow from a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Three takeaways:
1) Spotify only keeps ~33%,
2) Artists and songwriters don't get much,
3) Music is really, really complicated. Image
This chart is probably out-of-date and imperfect (and I am in no way the expert!) but the takeaway remains the same: music is the legacy media industry in which gatekeepers—record labels—still have the most power, and that shows in economics to artists.
Spotify isn't thought of for user-generated content, but the most-popular playlists are UGC. This is the modern version of sending your crush a mixed-tape

Personalized & curated playlists are an underrated lock-in: e.g., I won't churn bc I don't want to lose my Discovery Weekly Image

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More from @rex_woodbury

Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Feb 5
1/ When it comes to AI's application layer (slightly more developed) & Vision Pro's application layer (slightly less developed), we're early.

At this point on mobile, we had the flashlight app, lighter app, & beer drinking app.

It took a while for the app ecosystem to develop: Image
2/ The iPhone came out in June 2007; Uber was founded in March 2009.

Here’s a chart of US smartphone ownership, overlaying the foundings of WhatsApp (2009), Uber (2009), Instagram (2010), and Snap (2011).

This first wave of mobile took years to take shape. Image
3/ App was voted "Word of the Year" in 2010, three years after the iPhone first hit the market.

This chart shows continued growth in the app ecosystem in the 2010s: Tinder (2012), Robinhood (2013), TikTok (2015).

These apps emerged 5, 6, 9 years after the iPhone launched. Image
Read 4 tweets
Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Mar 24, 2023
Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.

I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.

Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her:
First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."

This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:
Taylor Swift is only 33, but she's already the only woman to win three Grammys for Album of the Year.

She holds the record for most songs to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (188 songs), and last fall became the first artist to own the entire Top 10 simultaneously.
Read 19 tweets
Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Mar 24, 2023
A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?

My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.

Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing:
1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.

There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.
2/ New entrants crowded the market & marketing became essential.

Today, marketing is often *all* that distinguishes a product.

In America, kids as young as 2 can recognize brands on shelves, and by age 10 kids have recognition of 300 to 400 brands.
Read 9 tweets
Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Feb 23, 2023
More celebrity brands are failing.

Adidas is set to lose $200M on Beyoncé’s Ivy Park this year. That's on top of a $1.3B loss from Yeezy.

What went wrong? In order to work, a celeb brand needs to get three things right:
1) Authentic to the celebrity / creator

Ivy Park sales fell 50% in 2022. Adidas projected $250M, but the brand only brought in $40M. Ouch

Beyoncé has an aspirational, aloof persona that's at odds with Ivy Park’s athleisure style. IMO she should have created a luxury brand.
2) Have a genuine net-new insight

The two best case studies for celebrity brands are Fenty and SKIMS. Both had a unique insight:

• Fenty: Make-up should come in more shades for people of color
• SKIMS: Shapewear is outerwear
Read 8 tweets
Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Dec 8, 2022
1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.

From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.

In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%.
2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.

It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.
3/ We see the globalization of pop culture in what audiences are consuming:

• Squid Game (Korean) became the most-watched show on Netflix
• Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok
• Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify
Read 5 tweets
Rex Woodbury Profile picture
Oct 7, 2022
The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"

How it's reshaping literally every industry:
To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.

Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.
Digital advertising rapidly shifted to mobile in the 2010s, and desktop-era companies like Facebook had to scramble to reinvent their businesses.
Read 18 tweets

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