 It's the mat work. Oh, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man Sean and welcome to Music News That Matters. We're on the first of every month. We help you sift through the noise to bring you the most important industry news. We know there's so much information out there, but we're going to focus on topics that matter most to you guys and give you our perspective as well, of course. In this episode, we're going to bring you the latest updates and drama on Live Nation, TikTok and Spotify, who has always shown we're never too far away from the headlines in our podcast. And don't forget, everybody, before we get started, since these videos are only once a month, make sure you sign up to our newsletter to get notified of the latest news and why it matters between episodes. You can also listen to the podcast on the go now. This episode, along with all future episodes, is on all audio streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and many more. Let's get into it. What have we got here? Another busy month was a lot of drama this month, actually. One of the big ones is Live Nation. I know that Corey did a video on the channel last week after this memo was leaked. To summarise, for those of you who are not quite aware, it was a very negative memo about Live Nation's plans for 2021 and the new artist contracts. The main headlines was that they're going to guarantee that there'll be a 20% drop from the 2020 rates for artists. So they're getting a 20% less than they were getting this year. And one of the big things that stood out was that if an artist cancels a performance in the breach of an agreement, they'll have to pay twice the agreed-upon compensation, which is just ludicrous, especially given how hard the industry's been here already. Another main point was that artists stand secure 25% of their performance fees for concerts that are cancelled due to low ticket sales. And another one that I think is interesting is that they're now required to get their own cancellation insurance to, you know, they've got to cover their own ass now, even if it is an event like the COVID-19 crisis from now on they're expected to sort out their own insurance, which is just crazy, considering you can't really plan police things. Exactly, exactly. I mean, this whole scenario, of course it came as a shockwave. It threw a lot of people off because it was just so blatantly violating. But I've heard a lot of people speculate that one that is not necessarily a leak. It's more intentional. So, and you know how that goes, right? It happens all the time in music, in business. And when we speak of these backtracks that also has been speculated to be a part of the strategy. The first person I really, I guess first company that I really noticed and paid attention to that with was Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, where oftentimes they'll be hyper aggressive knowing that some of the stuff will have to be backtracked. But, you know, I'll still move forward three steps because I got pushed back from seven steps versus slowly incrementally changing which most people don't like anyway. It's almost like you have to, you know, ruffle some feathers just to move to the point that you want to. Yes, a classic case of ask for forgiveness, not permission, isn't it? 100%, 100%. That's what I think it is because it has so much leverage. We know the ball's gonna move forward a little bit in their direction. That's it. There was always gonna be cuts as well. It wasn't gonna be, you know, like everything stays as alley as it is. Everyone's gotta adapt and obviously they've gotta try and cover themselves. Obviously they've been trying to pay out a lot for cancellations, but they have come out and retracted some of the stuff. So they've said that they're not gonna, they're gonna abolish that, requiring us to pay twice agreed upon fee they cancel the show. That's not gonna be in any contract now. They're completely gone against that. They are still doing the 20% reduction in artist guarantees, but they're trying to spin that in a sense that they think it's gonna be so lucrative next year in terms of ticket sales that it's actually gonna make more money than it was in 2019. I think that difference is actually gonna be sort of like leveled out. So I think it's quite ambitious considering people should be very skeptical I think next year. Even if we are sort of like over the hill in terms of coronavirus, I think people will still be very wary about it because it's not gonna be gone. It's gonna be obviously lurking around still. Yeah, I think that's pretty ambitious in terms of show projections, but maybe they know something we don't know. I wasn't really going to shows anyway. So I can't really boycott or withhold my attendance from something that I was never in account for. But another, well, flip perspective of it is a promoter was speaking on the fact that they think that this is a good thing in some ways. Although there was some violation in the contract and the language, there is a middle ground that needed to be met between artists and promoters and apparently a promoters feel like artists were having an advantage to the point that it didn't make sense. So they could be the leader on that side of things and just level setting and having that trickle down effect from there. Also, I know you're also very angry about the cancellation, like getting your own insurance which hasn't been discussed anymore since the announcement, but we have to get insurance for most things ourselves. Is this sort of, I think, is that fair game? Yeah, and that's probably a part of that conversation with the promoters saying they need to have that, right? They need to like get some more balance in things. I honestly, I just have no stake in that game. I don't care which one and I don't have an opinion. But when I was running shows, I definitely didn't want to have the insurance on me and I hated that part of it. Yeah, and obviously we're seeing that South by Southwest this year, obviously we really struggled. They couldn't really afford the damages it's cost them and I think most businesses have been blindsided by it. There's not many that have actually like sort of have their assets covered by this. So I think it's only natural that's gonna happen anyway, but it's nice to see that they have sort of retracted some of it. I think it's more of maybe like a publicity thing anyway in the first place, just to try and see the test of waters of the announcement and also then scale back as you said, but I expect more scale backs from this because obviously the industry was up in arms last week about it. But that is the latest on Live Nation. Another thing interestingly from yesterday, so Monday, 29th of June, recording stay on Tuesday, Indian's government has blocked TikTok and 59 other Chinese based apps completely. So TikTok was currently not available in India, which is obviously a massive blow for them considering that they had, I think India in terms of downloads of the app, it's like 30.3% of the total downloads. Yeah, which is massive. Like they were the number one by large. It's not even close. Yeah, I know, so you were saying to me earlier that you've had clients that have been working with you now that's something like, well, what are we gonna do now? It's not even available to us. Yeah, and that was one of those things where I couldn't say anything in back. Sometimes you think a client might just be trying to hold things off procrastinate and you're like, oh no, we're okay, but that was one of those things where I had no response. I actually did not see that coming, you know? So I've only, I haven't even had the chance to really get all the details. So like I'm leaning on you because I see a few notes you have in regard to soldiers and TikTok personality. Was all, is any of this stuff in relation to why or are these just additional? So a couple of them are, the main thing is that relations have been quite strained between Indian China, like most of this year. So that the Ministry of Information Technology claimed that the blocked apps are prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India defensive in the security of state and public order. And they weren't very happy with China because earlier this month, 20 Indian soldiers were killed on the dispute Himalayan border with China. So the Indian Army claimed these deaths were a result of a violent face off of Chinese soldiers. And there's been lots of news recently about a lot of Chinese apps actually spying on users. I know there was this thing that TikTok accesses like your clipboard, your phone gallery, every 14 seconds or something, kind of the exact quote. Do you remember that thing on Capitol Hill or whatever? In DC, where they were basically saying nobody in government could use TikTok. They were banned from using it with government workers. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's been that serious for a while. And again, I already thought when I just recognized the trajectory of TikTok, I was like, yo, this is going to be crazy. This is going to be an issue. Especially even just getting in the experience is weird because it collides worlds a lot differently than other apps where you're following people from other parts of the world. And unless it's like China or Russia where they might be using a lot of distinct language but if they're using English, you don't know where they are a lot of times unless they speak or something like that. So it really turned the world into a melting pot far greater than most apps have so far. Most people connect their region. This one was really connecting the world without people even knowing. And then you zoom out though and find out that Chinese businesses, especially these apps, have to report their information to the government. Like the government has access to that same information that immediately is a red flag where it's like, wow, all these tech companies have an absurd amount of information. Facebook has an absurd amount of information. I think there's been battles before about our government wanting to see some of Facebook's data and data Facebook being like, nah, but it's America and how things run in America. They have a completely different philosophy and in which they built their political system in China, which I don't think nah is much of an option, right? So if you're telling me the government has access to all that information over there and people already, and China's already rising and then you already understand the geopolitical issues. Then you think about kids with all these features, what do you call them? Filters where you're putting your face in it, right? People are complaining about that app where it ages you. Yes, yeah. Yeah, and they were saying like, oh, Russia trick people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, that being true or not, right? Well, TikTok is doing it every day through these filters, right? Every time you put your face in a filter just like it's Instagram, except this is owned by a different company. We're not used to a widely used social network or social media platform that isn't from us. Exactly. Every other one is from America. The closest thing we can get to that's not that is Spotify being in Stockholm, but that's not quite social media, right? And driving media, that conversation. So just that alone, that shift alone is interesting. It brings it back as well. On a larger scale, you've got last year's old drama about Huawei and the 5G networks and US and UK trying to block them coming in, because obviously there's fears of security breaches and spying and things. And this has a potential to me to get on a similar scale if this continues, if more reports come out about the technology goes involved in the TikTok app and it's tracking and spying. Like India's been a massive statement here and other countries may well follow suit. So that's why I think it's a bigger story than perhaps from the surface. Yeah. Look, they know what's happening and they know what the attempts are because it takes a con to be able to sniff out a con artist, right? If you come up in the streets and you don't want to get robbed, you have to learn how criminals think, right? Just to be a part of it. Even if you don't want to be one. Well, in this case, each of these countries are a criminal where they're trying to do this to each other so they can sniff out what somebody else is kind of positioning to do that to them, which is like the paranoia is just gonna be through the roof and this is gonna get very interesting, right? We know that the wars aren't as much physical anymore and a lot more digital, right? And coding, hacking, media. So I think people should pay more attention to it than they are because I've been having behind the scenes conversations with some people who seem to be more than know than me which I already think is pretty definitive that this is a very big issue that's gonna happen in between the countries but some people are like pretty afraid that TikTok won't be in America for too long or at least they're gonna go through a moment like what's happening in India. We all know how tough it is though for the government to come out on top of these scenes as we've seen in the past when Cambridge Analytica and Facebook the scandal about interfering with the US elections and Brexit and obviously the government tries to take them on and get the information and that was a long bow to many years and hasn't really revealed too many answers they're not gonna, I didn't buckle under the pressure of Facebook and I just feel like we have a very long dispute again which may not bring them any answers. So yeah. Yeah, it's weird man just because of the political thesis it makes America more vulnerable in things like this but even though I guess politically we look at it as a strength we talk about the freedom and freedom of speech and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff but when you think about responding to coronavirus you see there's a lot more order in a country like China because people in America think, well, you can't tell me what to do I have my rights and blah, blah, blah, right? And the same thing goes in a moment like even these apps and the way things run in business China has been blocking American companies from expanding to China for years and heavily censoring them for years but even if it might be called for in this instance it's so unprecedented at least in terms of public knowledge on a large scale that it will be very weird and I would be interested to see how the public reacts to it or what the government would have to do media messaging wise to get the public on their side and to understand. I'm gonna be watching it with a very keen interest as it develops that's for sure. Another thing related to TikTok and India but not related to this ban is that one of the big personalities over there Sia Kakar, she was 16 years old she committed suicide last week she had over a million followers on the platform I just thought I'd mention it because obviously it's kind of it gets so many things get lost in the noise of social media these days but it's just another sign about you know that behind the scenes of these creators and all this noise it seems it's just terribly sad. Yeah man, I mean that I'm on TikTok all the time and sometimes I wonder what serious and what's not serious you know you can never tell for sure some of the most that these teens have some of the things that they're going through and you know if you've been a team before you know that there's a lot of volatility in emotions even if you weren't one of those people you know that there are a lot of peers that had those ups and downs and once you amplify that to social media level right that when that volatility already exists it doesn't help. I'm still of course we know what social media can do from a positive standpoint in terms of uprising, voices and things like that but in terms of an individual generally speaking it seems like it's just it's pretty harmful but I don't want to say and assume that her case has to do with social media but I will say you hear a lot of you see a lot of crying out on TikTok and there was one campaign that we were going to work on the song was basically I didn't even recognize it it was like catchy sounding but I didn't recognize that it was about suicide so then I looked at all the hundreds of thousands of videos now like 300,000 plus videos where people are basically talking about like the last picture they take before they die and it's like how many of them are just thinking the song is catchy how many of them are you know, serious and kind of hiding behind a supposed train so yeah it's a sad case have you seen much of this or just what's your perspective on it? Well one thing that got me thinking was that I'm not trying to say this is any thing of power but it's just saying that I've noticed is that how one users broke was that her management released the announcement I just think I imagine being 16 and younger and having a management team behind you and all the brushes that was bring it's not normal for a child to be in that environment and I just kind of feel that's going to play a lot of stress and in fact growing up is a very different child to what you'd normally expect and a lot of these stars now are quite young and do have these massive lots of voices talking to them and influencing them not just the family but the the agents and the sponsors and the management teams and that's just got me thinking about all of that aspect Yeah look we've seen this for years when we look at child stars all right now you have people that are considered normal but still consuming or living out a lot of child star at normalities all right yeah and without necessarily that immediate compensation without the understanding of that dynamic because so many people are going through it at once it's just like even I felt it when I came I was in my mid 20s when I started to be more front side and experience just a lot of people watching and that shit was weird yeah that shit is just weird this is not a normal thing you know so I could only imagine being that young and having that many people's eyes on you and look and it's pretty well documented so far that there has been an uptick in suicides and depression and things of that nature through social media and you know that whole paradigm of being more connected but more disconnected at the same time is a real one and I wonder how you solve for it I've been off of Instagram over the last week except for my desktop but which is I'm so happy that they allow you to do that right they've become so functional on desktop that I don't really need it on the app because I only want to be on there for business and I hope Instagram doesn't like hear this somewhere and then all of a sudden try to mess up the desktop but I could feel the difference in my focus and it wasn't even one of those things where I was trying to do it like oh to become more healthy in a social media cleanse but I can just feel it it's clear all right my intent is clear my thoughts are less scattered and I'm able to focus on other things more and I'm just continuing to do that and I don't know how to guard kids from that though because that's so much a part of the experience and so much a part of the world so much would be based off of that group experience of those apps it'd be it's a weird thing to manage going even further from like just finally on a management sponsorship aspect obviously TikTok is still a very very new platform so the the attention on those who have got a big following and the pressures on them is going to be 10 fold compared to what it has been for people in the past because obviously they want to get they also want to tap into this talent like now and just really stretch them out as much as possible because it's so new yeah man that part is trashed so like this whole management thing is extremely predatory and how they approach the TikTok I want to talk about it more I've been wanting to talk about it for a couple months but obviously I've been light on YouTube but the the predatory nature of just coming in swooping up these kids and to become a manager when really you're only managing them for their numbers you're not actually giving them value a lot of these managers aren't they're really just using them as leverage for their own deals all right versus like seeing about their career individually as an artist it is not making sense it's not adding up and I think there's going to be a huge moment where a lot of these these kids crash at a collective time and I don't know what that's going to do to a lot of them mentally either but a lot of them will experience the height and like the steep height right we know TikTok is exaggerated too that's the worst part about it you experience three million followers and then all of a sudden I'm only getting 10,000 view engagement and I can't figure out what to do because some of this algorithm is not fully sensical in the first place it's going to it's just going to be something else that that'll be scarring trauma of its own to Gen Z absolutely I've always definitely left like mentioning just discussing this for a bit because it's it's not the first time and unfortunately it won't be the last and it's yeah it's just not really any words for it yeah well our next topic is some of you always tend to talk about is what's going on at Spotify every month we have a little a little chat about them back in January we were discussing Marquis which we're going to come on to very shortly but what I want to do first is that there's been a lot of reports floating around over the past month that Spotify is working on adding music videos into its app there's been reports that in the code now in the app code there is like an extra like button and feature where video would go you could swipe across from music and from podcasts and there'd be video so they're now speculating that there might be some videos being added we also know that the Joe Rogan podcast deal is happening there's going to be video on Spotify like exclusively so we're going to have to put that functionality in anyway so are they going to push the wheel and include more videos and that's what it looks like because if we start doing it for adverts in the US, UK and Canada you can now run video ads on the platform and they've been doing very well 50% of advertisers use the tool it's only 11% in March wait so how many what videos are they showing already? just you know like the the adverts with the audio ads you can get on the platform on ad studio you're familiar oh the audio ads okay and now they're doing like actual video ads you can now promote think you can now promote products or but what are they showing the video ads on I'm saying have they actually started using them or you're saying now they have the ability to but when Joe Rogan comes this is when they'll actually start no they've been using them it'd be like the you know where the canvas plays you have a little looping videos they get played in that interesting interesting I haven't noticed that so your 50% of advertisers have been using this tool now and apparently a lot of spot for users are using it with the sound on not just muted because you can mute the sound on the ads on the video ads according to them that they've got a 1.9% ad recall with 2.2 times percent 2.2 times increase in brand awareness according to company stats so the advertisers seem to love it it's much improvement on the audio aspect so with the fact that they're doing these video ads now it does seem natural progression that we're going to get more video content on the platform for more podcasts and for music videos and it's just another case of we never quite know which direction Spotify's heading in one minute it wants to be you know all in on audio the Netflix of audio but now here we are again tapping back into video they try to do it in the past like four or five years ago they bought a lot of startups that were in that space and also you did not pair recently discussing the future of Spotify and what it needs to do to try and survive with the threats of TikTok and Rezo but I don't video wasn't really sort of like on our radar again no it wasn't but I'm not surprised because video only makes sense when it comes to the leverage that they're trying to build in the podcasting space because a lot of people watch podcasts I watch podcasts like when I first started listening to a lot of the podcasts that I watch most of them I actually started watching them on YouTube I never I still haven't listened to Joe Rogan podcasts I've watched many of them on YouTube and then sometimes like listen or I walk around and use it like a podcast Joe Budden podcast same thing I watch a lot of I watch a lot of long form content slash listen like do both so it only makes sense and then if you're going to do it from the anchor point of the Joe Rogan then why not start to test out the recommended you know your recommendation engine and see what those stats can really look like you have to use this opportunity in this window to you know feed it back in because I know they know the value of video that's why they tried it before and just because they weren't they kind of failed doesn't mean that they they don't think it's valuable anymore they just knew whatever route they were taking wasn't right or the timing wasn't right so they know the value of it this is it looks like that this is their way in yeah I think the podcast route has to be the way in because music videos obviously they're not anything new other platforms offer that but if you can now get exclusive podcasts that have the video to you to watch it's actually going to get you more engaged with staying on yet rather than locking their screen exactly because music videos which is what they were focused on that wasn't really all that interesting anyway the music videos don't have the appeal they used to no exactly I that I don't even know there's so many songs that I listen to and there's so few music videos I've seen this year you know so that's a part of it they probably so moving off of that traditional concept but probably discovering what I just said that they don't have the appeal that they used to and they make sense for a platform like YouTube where everything is video and then music video just happens to be part of it but a main behavioral driver like a show is is a completely different thing and also you mentioned those ads I'm not really impressed with the stats although they are good they're early right and you're very very early yeah so a huge part of that is just that the fact that people aren't used to it all right just like any other platform oh I'm not used to ads on my email and now I'm used to ads on my email and now it's harder to get people over there email oh I'm not used to this Facebook ad thing what's going on and Facebook ads are extremely cheap then they drive up Google ads it happens that's just the cycle so that's a huge part of it you're going to have that when you have a newer platform or a newer way of advertising on a platform and you have limited advertisers whether that's due to selection or due to natural selection through financial limitation or that either way it goes there's a small sample size but hopefully they continue to you know make it comprehensive but I think it will still follow that natural curve but they are more natural to do ads around podcasting as well too then them so I think Spotify is in a in a strong position they're really wiggling their way out of their music mishaps let's put it that way and it's through every and they're finding their way back through everything but music I would like to see them focus more less on music videos and more on little artists interviews and documentaries aren't exclusive to the platform because obviously Spotify's got an insane amount of access to these artists so you can have then the film vertically you know interview clips and weave them in with playlists of artists so you're playing their songs then one of their like interviews or documentary will come on it's been made by Spotify and that just that would be so much more valuable I think it's be so much more interesting for them and certainly they can easily do as well and just like obviously if you follow artists you can get notifications saying I'm just dropped an interview with so and so or a new extended documentary because the album music beats one docs are very very popular in interviews and I feel like they should tap more into that and that would be yeah just do much better than music videos yeah they have the leverage to the infrastructure might be more natural once the podcast and then you slowly set up in the videos is really put in there I would be more interested to see stuff like that so keep it on with Spotify as I mentioned Marquis we had a long discussion about this back in January when they first announced like the is their first ever form of like paid advertising for labels and it was going to you know the pop-up alert saying new album or new track out by so and so artists now go listen it's a little pop-up advert on your phone and they just used them before organically and now they're going to start offering them out as you know labels could pay into this but it was going to cost them even buying a five thousand dollars so our discussions back in January are like this obviously disappointing because it's inaccessible to like the major labels and it's not really very valuable for anyone else yep you're questioning the sort of results it was going to achieve as well but six months on and they're reporting that more than a 20 percent click-through rate for the ad service anything that's not anything above single digits is very strong as far as I'm concerned so that's an encouraging number and they said that over one fifth of Spotify users he was served a Marquis ad string to promote a release within a two week time frame and with 2.2 times more likely in average to save or place a track from it they've got quite a few examples of some strong campaigns one new K artist Georgia who released an album called seeking thrills in January she got a 33 percent click-through rate on her campaign with 22 percent of them serving at least one of her tracks or listening to it and the most important thing for me is that Spotify said they've done a lot of campaigns that were well below the minimum buying of five thousand dollars and the key line is that it's their intention to make the tool that works for acts of all sizes so it looks like in the near future we might be getting this ad service ad tool for everyone which is massive we'll see because as much as I might speak against how some things that Spotify doesn't do for the smaller artists there is also a lot of that to their benefit outside of a we're just catering to a larger label but just from a platform perspective there's the curation benefit the limitation benefit from a user experience point of view I don't get a lot of push from Spotify right because so much of it is organic in nature in an inner field I'm getting these recommendations and I really trust Spotify because everything they're showing me for the most part I pretty much like right I'm looking for the playlist that they're showing me next and I'm looking for what some might discover weekly and things like that so since they have that trust built up a lot of that is because it hasn't been inundated by advertisers who are going to be less less cautious right and a lot more frivolous in how they handle the consumers attention so I don't even know how I mean maybe it's profitable back in regardless and of course as a company that's going to be the end all be all but from a but again I guess from click-throughs and the effectiveness for maybe smaller artists and or just anybody once it gets to that that mass point I wonder what the click the rules will look like then and I wonder how consumers will view those because right now I guarantee you most of those people don't even know that that's an ad all right they don't view that as an ad probably just something else based on from Spotify based on the stuff that I like to listen to because they always show me stuff that I like to listen to you know so yeah we'll see how long and how how they are able to maintain that trust that they have because there's strict guidelines with this starting out that you'd only show like one per day and like two or three per week maximum and that is only going to be sorted to your listening history it wasn't going to be too far out of that remit but obviously they the more they open it out as you say the more noise and more proliferation is going to be in the space and the more advertising it's going to feel yep but it's it's certainly promising that even if this isn't the one that is going to be the one that's going to be like brilliant for independent artists it's positive to see that they are considering you know forms of marketing advertising on the platform that will be catered more to us all sizes not just the labels we alluded to in our previous conversation and I still think this tool has got legs they're rolling out more features like to target the ads based on geography and also categories as well so there's going to be three different ones for audiences you've got users who have engaged with the arts on the platform previously but haven't done so in a while you've got new fans who recently engaged with the arts for the first time and you've got super fans should be able to access that sort of data and target those three different audience types which is interesting yeah I mean but they can easily be the most effective platform for music marketing if they want it to I don't know what the goals are or what the complete timeline looks like when they're marketing features for their ad system but I mean what better place to advertise than Spotify you know exactly they have the data where I don't have to now have my Facebook algorithm learn that they like that type of music and use these interests to then click over off the platform I can easily pop up within platform I can easily say people who listen to this this this artist or like you said people who have listened to me once people who listen to me over four times that I mean that can be game changing you know it just depends on how it's approached and has always seemed like advertising has not been a focus for Spotify and that could be to its benefit like I said there's a lot more brand equity and trust with them over there so I I mean kudos to them for holding out as long as they have to have and being as particular as they have but now they've started up let's see if if they don't you know fall down that slippery slope because it's very easy to start nibbling and then next thing you know take a big bite when you start seeing that advertising money especially for a company that have hasn't seen massive profits over his timeline speaking of advertising did you see last week that a lot of big companies are pulling advertising from Facebook is haven't seen that yeah a lot of because of what the spreading of misinformation and fake news and a lot of a lot of the anti-racist black lives protests were affected by this as well they've sort of had enough and decided just to pull around that because Twitter's obviously been flagging misleading or glorifying violence but Facebook wasn't doing anything to fill this out so you've got one brands like Eddie Bauer Patagonia Norface Ben and Jerry's they all sort of have pulled advertising for now on the platform so there's an article on music business worldwide you know sort of debating whether music companies should do the same just kind of a big discussion now about you know should we be doing what should we be doing now to sort of tackle racism and obviously there's a lot of things been done or we had the blackout Tuesday but should there be more of a stand-taking against Facebook which I thought was a very interesting discussion and you have to you have to agree that you know that they've got to you've got to take drastic action like this to you know to make make a statement I think I think it's necessary that part I agree on it usually is the money that makes the change all right the voices are nice but the withholding is just the way that changes seem to happen more than anything in this country you know money or blood whichever one so I hadn't heard anything about that stuff if people want to actually make Facebook change something cool sometimes I just don't have those expectations of companies like that like Facebook to even care I think Facebook is definitely had a a past that made it really clear that the lines are extremely blurry based on the messaging they do allow they don't allow the social things like this then you have the thing that happens with Russia and then you have things like kicking banning Lewis Farrakhan from Facebook when you I mean you know it's not saying anything that could be anywhere near as bad as the stuff that they show or allow so I don't know man this um is weird they like to act like they care about voices and not limiting the people and like they use that conveniently right we don't want to limit or be intrusive in a day yeah they go on the other side and they get very specific and push certain people and voices off and things like that so you know I don't really expect much from them in that regard I've been the main message that the discontent about the other companies that is that Facebook seems to think that they're above it and they don't have to get involved with this these kind of social issues as to discontent I think is that they can try and just you know brush it aside because Verizon actually have pulled their advertising and they spent $1.5 million on Facebook ads last year and half a million on Instagram and they've pulled everything so that's a that's a big scalp yeah that's uh that's commendable for sure I'm interested on how Facebook reacts I'd be yeah let's stay up to date on this one because I want to see what actually happens with this because I haven't seen Facebook really bow down much and they do have a lot of additional income to sit on and wait out a $50 million loss $100 million loss if they need to so yeah I can't I can't do anything but wait and see yeah so I'm just looking now a few days ago they did make a statement saying that they'll take a similar approach to Twitter labeling posts that may violate its policies but are allowed to remain on the platform because they're dean newsworthy so it's kind of very wishy-washy and I don't know if it's gonna really that's stupid that's that's the stupidest shit up you can't say fake news is newsworthy like when we're literally talking yeah like I've seen some stuff on you know what on Twitter I'm scrolling and they're like yo this is photo shots to to appear as news and it's not news and it didn't happen and that we like we took this picture of the KKK and put a different and put and changed the sign of who they were supporting and things like that that doesn't that doesn't act as news like that's just a lie if it's so it is newsworthy now I need to see your criteria of newsworthy if you're gonna yeah if you're gonna use that contingency because it doesn't make sense especially when we know for facts even when fake news is told that it's fake news and even almost immediately still told that it's fake news it still has the ability to anchor and begin to nudge your opinion and your perspective because what they're saying is they're gonna have like essentially a little information that says we know it's this bullshit but open it anyway and share it just and stay on our platform yeah yeah it's it's a very yes a very terrible statement is doesn't address anything doesn't yeah not so that's that's facebook right now and in hot war yeah yeah they used to it exactly one final thing to mention is that twitter launched like audio clips this month from the platform so rather than tweeting in text form you can record some audio instead up to two minutes 20 seconds just a new quirky little feature from them it's probably one as we said before it's probably one of the most valuable things they could have done because there's not really much they can go to sort of like reinvent the wheel and they're not reinvent the wheel of this but it is a fun new way to engage and post on the platform yeah and if you're an artist you can obviously record some yeah put some demos on there and you know share share your voice with your fans and it's just a new way to engage yeah that would have been really cool if twitter did it in like hot twitter days you know you know they did that in like 2011 it would have been crazy like they might have found their way down the path to really resemble some of the social networks we have up today a tiktok ish a even ig-ish napchat they would have probably innovative innovative further to this point before anybody else versus being left behind if that one feature was added because I'm sure the the behavior around that and the the data they would have had insight on would have just probably pushed them to to start creating more around that I man I would have been very fun to have when I was less responsible yeah kind of be like a massive audio meme culture wouldn't it since there would be building right oh my god it looks nice as well with the the color background your profile picture and you pick on your profile picture circle to play as a like a play button and it looks it looks it looks pretty nice like the way it's been designed but yeah it feels like it's very very late to the game but it's still like a surprise welcome addition to the platform and check it out do you even have audience between the audio yet oh there was like on the first day Lil Nas X just said the word penis and that was it yeah so here's one of the first ones to do it yeah you know it's gonna it's gonna get shared it's gonna it's everyone's going to be talking about it so why not that guy yeah there's things to be done with it you know you can make it what you will but I'm I'm sure there's creative things to be done marketing wise to sort of leverage that now new feature yeah I agree so that's pretty much it on the news this month a lot of sort of like interesting sort of like gossip really it feels like with that is what TikTok and Spotify and Live Nation yeah yeah I mean yeah Spotify always responds their way in the news TikTok things like it's about to either compete or maybe even take the crown yeah and obviously we've we've got a lot to talk about in the coming months about their I'm sure especially with I'm anticipating Rezo to make its way over the border sort of like you know later on this year yeah I think they might try to move a lot faster considering the India ban yeah I think that makes sense like it's been how long has it been now like three or four months anyway since it first rolled out so it felt like it's only been a month maybe two I was supposed to base it was before that but I guess like officially yeah but we shall see it's certainly going to be interesting everyone's sort of just trying to thumb all the way through this time right now and we're not going to see lots of like major announcements like we've had done on this podcast in the past but there's lots of little nuggets and potential stuff that as we look ahead to post COVID-19 post COVID PC looking forward to it 100% I hope everyone stays safe and well and we'll see you again next month with lots more news and lots more discussions all right like and subscribe peace bye for now it's the network