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.
00:52:26 · Ruby Justice Thelot
I do think the stream ring by Sandbar is quite beautiful. The DVD player. This one is a little bit harder because we just saw the news with Netflix and kind of like the difficulty that the streamers are having because of a lot of competition, right? Netflix used to reign supreme in the teens as the best streaming service. Are winning a lot of awards. There is a lot of great content on there. And it seems like they are facing a lot of strong competition both from HBO, from Disney plus and all the other streaming companies. And I think that people are very loyal to specific shows and so they have us and that's something that Radhika writes in her piece. She has streaming services based on specific shows that she wants to watch. I think an underexplored way and maybe it is impossible because of the way Hollywood works, but I think people would buy the DVD of their favorite show, the box set, whatever it is when the season comes out, instead of having to subscribe to a service. And this might be like a novel way of funding the series or whatnot. This might be completely impossible based on the financial model of Hollywood. But I think there is quite a bit of room for people to go back to the box set model. I was talking to a friend last night and she was on her, I want to say, eighth or ninth watch of Orange is the New Black but she was watching it on Netflix. She might as well at this point kind of have the DVDs and just watch them on her laptop or on her DVD player in part because some of these things disappear over time. I think it is very important perhaps because I am obsessed with memory to have these things that you love in your possession because sometimes the library gets sold, sometimes the server goes down, sometimes the company disappears. And I have lost too many things online to not want to own the things that I love. So I guess my recommendation here or my prediction here rather on the DVD player front is that as people face what I call the shock of deletion we will see a further and further return to analog technologies because people want to keep the things they love. And they love art. They love movies. They love songs. They're gonna want to have them with them. On para technology. Now, of course, it is my recommendation. You have heard me say it.
00:55:29 · Ruby Justice Thelot
My recommendation is to of course like we learn to not eat too much candy or not to have proper nutritional guidelines. I think we also need digital hygiene guidelines on how to use our phones, it's my recommendation. But that's not necessarily a prediction, that's more like what I want for the world. Okay. So in the next twenty four months my sense is that this gap between I use my phone too much, I've tried not to use it and I failed, it is probably going to grow for people who do not use these tools. My anecdotal evidence, my conversation with people who have tools like Brick is that it is actually very successful because it is physical, like you have to go back to the place to make it work. And so over time I expect to see growth in the paratechnology market because people are unable to do the thing that those services do by themselves. And if they can't do by themselves they are going to buy a product in order to help them do it. And so you will see more ads for Brick, more ads for Opal, more ads for different para technology because it is a strong consumer need at the time. I don't know who needs to do this. Maybe it's Jonathan Haidt. Maybe it's Tristan Harris. I don't know who's going to do this but I would love to see someone build a small curriculum, a small set of guidelines that explains to people how to use your phone well. You know, remember when you went to the dentist and you had to learn how to brush your teeth? Maybe you go to, the cobbler for the first time and learn like, okay, this is how you wax your shoes. It is really crazy to me that we do not have a little book as like how do you properly use a phone. We are given this amazingly powerful tool. It is probably one of the best things that has ever happened to my life to have a smartphone. But I did not get a guide on how to use it. That guide I think could help a lot of people. There are so many different settings, so many different ways that you can make your phone work for you. I am always surprised, of course I am a famous snoop, I am always looking over the shoulder of people and seeing how they use their phones. The amount of notifications, the amount of clutter that I see on their phone, it's like when you walk into a person house you're like damn, you live like this? Your phone could be beautiful, your phone could be amazing but your phone has to be in my opinion clean.