00:34:03 · Ruby Justice Thelot
If we don't learn to develop positive, conscientious and holistic relationships with our phones, another app won't help. Real change comes from the inside. Right? Okay. And so I want to give you a sort of an overall idea of the size of this market. Not all the information is available of course. These are some company claims, some filing or procurement records from different parts of the government in places where these devices have been adopted by departments of education or different governmental agencies. So Remarkable, which is a paper... Like a e paper tablet reported revenues of $433,000,000 in 2024. It's from the the the bond report. Campsnap, another tool for education, 20,000,000. That was from... In their first eleven months. Yondr, as we just said, 19,000,000. Opal, you... Opal is an app rather than a device, reported ARR of over $10,000,000 in the New York Times. And K Safe, another paratenological tool, reported about $5,000,000. So these are fairly large markets. Like these are successful companies and they serve a very specific user need. Let's tie the bow on this. Paratechnology are devices or software used to prevent consumers from using their other tech, usually social media or their phones at large. I really want to know how popular these tools were and why they were so popular right now. They are popular because people think they spend too much time on their phones. They have tried to cut back and as we see in the Pew Research data only 25% have succeeded in cutting back on their phone usage and so they are going outside to these different tools to find success in how to not use whatever app they are trying to find themselves from using. We are seeing this not only at the level of the individual but also at the state level where 37 states out of 50 now have bans or limits on phone usage in schools. But what this tells me, whether it be the sales of the pouches or whatnot, is that we are looking external solutions for internal problems. Out of the all time installs for the most popular phone screen time apps, screens and blank spaces or JoMo, only 6% to 7% of users actually use it on a monthly basis.
00:36:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And so in this counterintuitive way, this radical way, I think there should be phones in school because we should learn from an early age how to regulate and use them conscientiously, healthily and holistically because if we prevent kids from using them from K through 12 then I think the results are very evident in adulthood. They have not developed the strategies, the psychological strategies to not use this highly addictive tool that is a phone. Alright, if you have a brick please let me know if I am completely off. But I do think that we should learn not to touch the marshmallow instead of getting a marshmallow cage if you will. Alright. Our second deep dive of the day concerns the analog comeback. Now we talked a bit about of course the DVD that Radhika Jones bought. I think it is safe to say that if you live in an urban center you have seen the analog revival in so many different facets of life. You have seen the cameras go back to 35 millimeters of analog. You have seen people start to collect VHS. Have seen DVDs come back now. I have a friend who has laser discs because he is trying to be esoteric of course. Vinyl of course is highly popular. If go to urban offers they will sell a lot of vinyl. Taylor Swift, one of the big pop stars in the world does sell quite a bit of vinyl. Has I think single handedly has raised the sales of vinyl across the industry. But by and large people are returning to older modes of technology often as a way to regain control over specific facets of their life that they tend to appreciate. I really wanted to know are people really going back to analog or is it just a few esoteric performative males in Bushwick? Driven by a lot of celebrities of course who are now musicians who are now selling vinyl, we are actually seeing quite a bit of increase in vinyl sales. So between 2024 and 2025, 20% increase in vinyl sales in The UK, in the world 13.7%. I'll try to find a breakdown of this to put on the further slides but I do think a lot of these are driven by Taylor Swift. Now the other mediums, specifically discs and CDs, we are seeing decreases overall in CDs and same for discs in The U. S. And The U. K. This seems to be kind of focused mainly on vinyl. A theory here, hypothesis rather, is that the vinyl actually has a dual purpose. If you go to a house of a young aesthete, now the vinyl may actually be on the wall.
00:40:05 · Ruby Justice Thelot
They might not even have a record player. But the vinyl because it has a cover art and it is quite large serves a dual purpose of supporting the artist, having the physical copy of the thing, but also can be hung especially if you love the album cover. And so the role that might have been played by a poster I think now is played by the vinyl and there is quite a bit on Amazon. There is like these small kind of like hanging shelves where you can just put the vinyl on your wall and you can see a lot of things on Pinterest where people like up a whole wall just with the vinyls. So presumably once you've hung your vinyl at that stage when you've it's on a wall, like, well organized and it's going all the way to the ceiling, you're not gonna bring it down to play it on your record player. It is really there as a as a beautiful image. Right? And it so happens to have a record within it. And so the one thing that I think kind of goes against the analog revival is that we're still not seeing this across all the different modes of music listening. Right? Music streaming is still about 82% of all music revenue whereas vinyl is about 9%. CD shipments are slightly up but overall, right, DVDs are only still 1% of all the home video market. I mean, companies like Criterion, of course, are still doing great selling DVDs and true fans, I would say, like cinephiles are often I think buying these CDs and people love The Criterion Closet. But it hasn't had a full impact or a full transfer into actual consumer behavior in that specific realm. And one of the stats I thought was most interesting in that specific question is that I think a lot of merchandisers expected people to buy more physical media as you will. This is fascinating. There were more CDs and vinyls shipped to shops than were bought by shoppers. Meaning the shop owners, right, Amoeba, whoever it is, probably saw the same reports that we read. They probably of course saw the news about the analog revival and said, Okay, let me catch the wave here and let me buy enough vinyls that I can supply my consumers who are going to want to buy them as we say. However, the one thing that sort of of goes against the analog revival thesis is that they have not been by and large bought by the shoppers. You can see this here. Shoppers only bought 16% of the CD shipments and vinyl the gap is even wider.
00:43:14 · Ruby Justice Thelot
Only 2.3% were bought against the 20% that were shipped. And this is data from the IRIAA, Luminate, BPI, ERA and the other reporting bodies that do a lot of reporting around the music. And so I think we have been sort of banging the drum of physical media for a very long time. By and large after the advent of digital music we did see a large decrease in the sales of CDs and it took a few years of course for vinyls to make their comeback. Since the the aughts or the teens I think we have seen subcultural movements latch onto physical media as a way of showing their belonging to a specific cultural subculture or group. It meant that I am in the know. I care about the sound quality and there was I think a set of beliefs around culture that went with consuming and buying physical media. There was also a love I think for restriction meaning to have a 35 millimeter camera to say, Okay, can take a million photos of my phone but here I only have 36 or 24 exposures. And by and large for hobbyists, for people who are trying to learn a skill, the constraints that come with physical media end up being a great place to nerd out. Once you start to get into cameras there is kind of like an infinite space for you to nerd out about different lenses, different kinds of film. There is also kind of like a lot of grails like discontinued film. There's a of lore and history behind a lot of these methods and a lot of these, different practices. There's a direct connection oftentimes with people who have vinyl and people who then become audiophiles. Then they get speakers. One of the signals that I will talk about next week is the rise in let's call it the alternative or independent audio maker, right? We are talking of course kind of illustrious OJAS, those speakers now kind of we have seen them all around but there is a lot of cool independent engineers or speaker makers that are popping up in The UK, in New York and are kind of responding in their own ways to this desire we have for having beautiful and great sound in our home and spaces. And so there is a connection between the return to analog and a lot of these emerging behaviors.
00:46:05 · Ruby Justice Thelot
We will try to pull some of these makers and maybe even make a post about them because I think it's a signal to keep track of because people who are making headphones, people who are making speakers are I think at the forefront of an emerging consumer desire. I say emerging because it has been there for a long time but we see that it is not fully realized yet it seems. We are seeing growth but there is still kind of a mismatch between how much the shops expect people to buy and how much was bought at the end. The last thing that I think confirms the hypothesis that a lot of these are not necessarily they are not bought, The finals are not bought for music. Is this very interesting survey by the Vinyl Alliance, this was a fan survey from January 2025, Of the people who bought Vinyl, only 50% said they owned a player. For Gen Z, this was a little bit higher, 80% said they own a player and the main reason that Gen Z vinyl fans bought the record was to own the object. And so in part, as I said, it is not only about listening to the music per se, it is about having the object in one's home because the object is a representation of one's cultural affinities. Another area where actually we're seeing quite a bit of CD purchase is also K pop, that's the fourth statistic here. K pop has a 27% adoption of CDs versus 19% for other listeners. And so what I think is very evident here is that in a world where people are listening to music on their phones, it becomes much harder to display or to make clear what your taste is. And so having a vinyl is a clear indication when you walk into someone's home that they like this kind of music. Spotify has yet to make that very clear and so people want to show what they love and the vinyl exists as a way to do that. And for the fans who of course have a player presumably they are in the category of people who are maybe veering into audiophilia, right, people who like sound and you can maybe assume that they have an amp and when they get an amp they are going get the JBL speakers and then they are to get whatever Naim and then they get Bengalifs and what not. And so I think this is actually very interesting for the sound, the consumer sound industry. I think there is quite a bit of market share to gain here by providing who like but I guess it's maybe Devon Oyas but like who is the cool or who is the young Bang and Olufsen, right?
00:49:16 · Ruby Justice Thelot
That market still feels verywhen I go to a Bang and Olufsen store it is old European men by and large, I find better there or interior designers who are buying speakers for their clients and less like this young music loving audience. So it is going be quite a bit of data here I think we are going to be passing through, but very, very interesting this question of the analog comeback. Alright and now time for as always one of my favorite parts of the show which is the predictions. The first of course is around the sort of Coperni thing. Is it possible, has someone sort of successfully, commercially done this sort of fashion tech hybrid? It is very hard to not think that there is going to be a larger push behind this sort of injunction of fashion and technology. Famously Meta bought a percentage of Luxottica, the eyeglass company, as tech companies march closer and closer towards consumer wearables, watch, glasses, different devices, I think we will see an increase in this connection between fashion and tech. Coperni might not have worked now but that might just be because it was just not quite the right time. But it seems sort of ineluctable that we will see more and more fashion tech crossovers because wearables are becoming a larger and larger segment of tech hardware sales. Apple is forever pushing its watch. Google, of course, has collaborations within Garmin and other companies as well. They had famously Google Glass in 2014. And there is quite a bit of young startups making rings, earrings, ear cuffs, necklaces. A lot of them have been met with some pushback right now, right? We all remember the friend campaigns and the backlash that that saw. But I think those things are natural to have that kind of pushback in culture for devices that are not clearly defined or maybe feel a little bit surveillance y. However, we are slowly marching because there is a lot of value I think to be made for consumers by providing them with quick way to communicate, quick way to save a note or to think about something you want to chat to your ring. That seems like an easy thing to do. So I think there is going to be a lot of innovation in that sector and if you are making things for people's bodies it needs to be designed by a fashion designer. I think that is often the failure mode of tech companies. There are some of them that are very beautiful.