00:00:00 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Sofia Puccini
[00:00:00] S0: The artist usually transgresses upon the original design and breaks it open and then says, hey, what if I use this thing for something else? [00:00:06] S1: Yes. [00:00:07] S0: And with all due respect to engineers, that ability, that creativity is literally, like, the the the superpower of the artist. [00:00:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:00:16 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:00:16] S0: Yeah. And so the product manager, the engineer can, like, come up with features on the road map for the next twelve months, however it is, but the artist is gonna come in, break it, and then do something completely different. Hi, and welcome to today's episode of Media Studies. We are live from beautiful San Francisco today, and it's been a very, very beautiful day here. One of the beautiful things since starting the show has been that there's been a lot of discussion and a lot of conversations. And so I wanted to spend the first segment just discussing some of the feedback that I've received on some of the topics we've addressed this week. Now as you... Some of you may know, the content being posted on Instagram and also on X and the full videos and the recordings on YouTube. I encourage you all to go and take a look at that if you're only seeing the clips. But I got a very interesting message about the segment on choosing Texas and this idea of, like, splintered culture. So before we get into fully our signals, as we call them, I'd like to spend some more time to try to come up with a better explanation as to what has happened with that song. Now I think by this moment in time, it's... People have, like, kind of caught on to the existence of the song. There's been a few articles as to why it... How how is this number one song that... How is it a number one song that nobody's heard of? But I think there's even a better explanation than just the sort of polylithic that's, like, a bit more macro, and it comes down to how the computation for these number one calculations for billboard 100 order is done. And so how can the number one song for twenty six weeks in the country be also virtually unknown by a large swath of the population? Well, three things: competition, calculation, and fragmentation. The competition is that that song was able to rise to the top because we were in a year where we, until later in the year, we didn't have a Taylor Swift record, right? We didn't have a Bad Bunny record. The big guns, if you will, such as Wallen, the people who are usually number one, had not dropped yet. The second is calculation. So in January 2026, Billboard actually removed the YouTube views as a way to count for the the plays for songs. What this means is that certain genres are more... Let's say, they're more popular on YouTube.
00:03:03 · Ruby Justice Thelot
The, quote, unquote, urban genres like hip hop and rap tend to do way better on YouTube than they do on radio. Country, on the other hand, choosing Texas as a country song, is much more radio based. And so the fact that the plays on the radio counted, whereas the YouTube plays did not count, also tilted the charts towards more country. And the last here is fragmentation. If you don't have these big monocultural event, I'm talking about a Taylor Swift record, I'm talking about a Bad Bunny record, you end up with a bunch of micro, you know, microcultures that are called, like, isolated cultures, and the song that just gets slightly above all the rest, in that case, at about 20,000,000 streams per week, that song ends up being the number one song. Now what's interesting about this, and I really wanted to go and and and take a little deep dive in this, I wanted to say, okay. What's a good example of a song we could compare choosing Texas to? And so I picked Drake's God's Plan. God's Plan came out in 2018, was number one for eleven weeks. Now this is, like, a range of streams. The weekly streams from Choosing Texas were from... This is for The US only, 19 to 25,000,000. So just as a broad, like, percentage of the population, you know, on the low end, it's probably only 5% population who's hearing, who's, you know, maybe playing the song. Now importantly, the streams count plays and not people. These are not individual people necessarily. A person might listen to a song over and over again. Now compare this with God's plan, where we were anywhere from 50, so double, and at its peak, a 100,000,000. So using, of course, a broad proxy of, like, let's say, if the plays are one to one with people, proxy, this is an approximation, of course, maybe 25% versus, like, 5% people might have heard the song at least once. Right? If you take a look at all these streams of a song like God's Plan, at its peak, it had 0.6% of all streams, right, of the weekly streams in The US market versus, right, 0.1 for choosing Texas. So five times more prominent, five times more listened to in terms of all the music that's being, you know, played in The United States. Of course, you know, there's a... The whole, like, sales portion of this, but I think that's what really makes it interesting. So it was kind of a perfect storm.
00:05:48 · Ruby Justice Thelot
So how is it that some of my friends who listen to a lot of music, they're music heads, they read music blogs, have not heard of the song. Why does Pitchfork need to have an article about how no one's heard of choosing Texas? Because of lack of competition, a change in the calculation that favors countries, specifically because of the radio, and the fragmentation of culture, right, which was what we talked about in one of the last episodes. If you compare June Texas to other large songs, it has not nearly reached the same threshold. Right? It is five times smaller in weekly streams than God's plan, which explains maybe why it doesn't feel as popular in spite of being number one. There's a lot of very interesting things that, you know, as I was reading how these things are calculated, how these things are very, very interesting, right? And so even if, of course, Langley's music would make its way, would probably have some YouTube plays as well, there's a slight tilt, a slight preference for people who listen to specific music based on the platform they want to use. So, you know, we talked a little bit about this last time, but what we're seeing here and part of what we're trying to discover process with the process of the show is to uncover the segments of culture and ideally try to quantify them. So I think this, like, this kind of research is very interesting because I think it puts a specific number, a specific multiple. We can now understand from an order of magnitude why is it something that is successful may not actually be as popular as we think it is. I also took a look at Joseph Shake It Off. She's like the undisputed queen, of course, of all streams, and we see similar results on that front. Famously, actually, Xi dethroned Choosing Texas. So... Okay. The second thing that I want to come back to is the idea of paratechnology. Right? This was a very hot topic when we were streaming earlier this week. And so I wanted to bring some more color as to what are the different kinds of paratechnology. So you'll remember, paratechnology is technology that you buy or install on your device that changes how you use another technology. Sometimes it's your phone itself, sometimes it's social media, right? It is locks, app limits, simpler device that is promising you that you will have better control over your own limited attention.
00:08:35 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And so I've broken down paratechnology into four categories, right? The first one, of course, is the subsequence of the hardware. So the first section of hardware is physical barriers. This is your brick, as we talked about. So the brick, you need to go in and tap the brick in order to get access to your phone again. The second is the yonder pouches. Of course, we talked about the sales that we saw in the government procurement contracts. These devices physically restrict the access to your devices. Another good example is the K Safe, a bit less popular, a good example of that. It is a time safe, so you put your phone in there and you can't open it for thirty minutes, an hour, so on and so forth. Now, in that same hardware category, you have the restriction and then you have the simplification. And this is where you have your Punkt, your Light phone, sometimes the Remarkable counts in that as well. Meadow. Right? These are alternatives. These are separate devices that usually pick specific, highly useful apps. Usually, it's gonna be maps, music, sometimes photos, but no social media. And you might still have your phone, but you have a dedicated alternative so that when you go out and about during your day, you no longer need to refer back to your functionally divergent and highly distracting cell phone. Then on the software side of things, right, we also have the restrict access. This is your digital barrier. This comes baked into Apple devices, namely when we think about screen time, but there's other services like Opal, One Sec, ScreenZen, which are digital locks on specific websites, specific software, where if you've passed your time over ten minutes or fifteen minutes, you can no longer access the software you want to use so deeply. And then lastly, there's the idea of calmer interfaces. These are planar home screens, there's blank spaces, dummify. These are things that remove the visual triggers of the, let's say, interface that are designed by the usual operating system. One of the things that I'm noticing now, specifically in the age of AI, you might have seen this thing pop up recently. A person was able to code their own interface for their Roku TV. They were able to remove the ads using AI. And so I think in this software simplify use, there's going to be a lot of personal creativity. Meaning, users who see the examples and decide, hey.
00:11:24 · Ruby Justice Thelot
If my Roku is not... My Roku homepage is not how I want it to be, and I've seen someone already do it and change it, then I can also build my own calmer interface. And when I talk about a desire for us to be more self determined and decide how we use technology, this is, I think, where we're gonna see the most, I think, let's say, individual creativity where, okay, how do I remake my home screen? How do I remake my mail app in order for it to serve me? And so this calmer interface, I think we're gonna see a lot of products come out, but I think we're gonna see a lot of tinkering, you know, a lot of homebrew software at that intersection of simplification and software. And why I think this this this intersection is the most important is because hardware is a little hard to do still to this day. Right? You you can't expect someone to build their own phone. However, the problem with just like a main bear is that you you might have different needs. Right? But the calmer interface allows you to select how you want to simplify your own relationship with your phone. And I think that's the most important part. Because if you just have a sort of blanket, calm or dumb homepage or whatever it is, that might not specifically meet your needs. What I want us to recognize, I think, is that we are all different, and we all have different needs from a technology. Sometimes I jokingly say that I think it is crazy that we all have the same phone in 2026 because we're all so different. And so if I had to bet, of course, right, we're we're we're often making predictions here at Media Studies, is that we will see the rise of calmer interfaces but made by individuals for individuals because people have specific needs as to how they want to make and design their plain, quote unquote, interfaces. So we're gonna keep an eye on PARC technology. Of course, we talked about it recently, but it is still, I think, very much on our mind as people deal and reckon with, of course, their limited attentions. The other one, I think, is super, super fun. Now if you're online, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of the Etsy witch. An Etsy witch is a person who, on Etsy, sells curses, hexes, protections, What I can only describe as a metaphysical product, protection or attack, of course. It could be, dark arts or, whatever the white arts, whatever it's called in Harry Potter.