EP 38: YOU DON'T OWN YOUR MOVIES, YOUR GAMES, OR YOUR MUSIC
DESCRIPTION
Tyler digs into why phones, earbuds, and even video games are suddenly going backward, dumb phones, wired earbuds, and vinyl are all trending up while smartphones and streaming keep getting more bloated and expensive. He walks through the polling data on Gen Z and millennials wanting simpler tech, then connects it to something bigger: the licensing traps hiding underneath your music, movies, and games, where companies like Sony and Apple have straight up pulled purchased content from people's libraries. It's a personal, sometimes self deprecating look at why owning something physical might be the only real way to actually own it anymore.
CHAPTERS
TRANSCRIPT — EP 38
The views and opinions expressed in the following podcast are those of the man himself, Tyler, and do not reflect those of his employer, affiliates, networks, family, pets, the goldfish he flushed down the toilet in third grade, his mechanic, or that bird that keeps getting in his vent. Obviously. Please stand by for The Tyler Woodward Project. Quick question before we get into today's
episode When's the last time your phone died and for like 20 minutes before you found that charger You were actually kind of relieved Not panicked relieved Now I'm not mocking you if that's Happened to you. I'm asking Well, basically because it's happened to me more times than I care to admit at this point, and I think that really says, you know, it says something. I'm Tyler. Thanks for being here today. This show is about things that used to work. And the people quietly keeping them running and who's profiting
off the decline. Today I want to talk about dumb phones and weird earbuds and vinyl records and well why it feels like everybody my age and younger all of the sudden wants their stuff to be simpler and Dumber and more broken, but you know in a good way and before we get rolling the standard Disclaimer these are my opinions not anybody I work for not anybody that I am affiliated with Just me thinking out loud Okay, so here's the
confession and it's a little embarrassing I've Been reading about this whole dumb phone thing this whole Going analog thing wired earbuds again notebooks vinyl CDs all of it for weeks now and You know I have to admit feeling a little smug about it Honestly, like yeah, you know, I told you so I've mentioned it before on this show now I had a Before my first smartphone. I had a Samsung two -step that phone was sweet Do you
remember that? It was a flip phone, but it had the little rotary I Don't know thing on the front kind of like an iPod For the built -in mp3 player. That was the big selling point of the phone It had that little scroll wheel on the front doubling as the MP3 player in it. And it still just made calls and sent text just like any other phone at that time. And it was fine. Actually, it really was, you know, better than fine. And then last night, I caught myself doom scrolling. You know, in bed at midnight on the exact kind of algorithm
feed. that algorithm fed nonsense that I'm about to spend the next however many minutes complaining about. So, you know, grain of salt. I'm not coming at this from some high horse. I've got the same problem everybody else has. I've just been starting to pay a little... a closer attention as to why. So real quick, my own history with this. I had flip phones well past when I should have. Had an iPod too, actually one with the little, you
know, the little click wheel. One of those. And looking back, that thing might have been the last genuinely good era of this stuff because You bought the songs 99 cents per track, maybe a dollar 29 and it was yours Nobody could revoke it nobody could pull it off of there because You know a licensing deal changed somewhere upstream My first actual smartphone was an HTC Pro 7 a Windows phone Nobody remembers that phone, you know, don't worry about it Then uh, you know,
I had one of the Samsung galaxies after that I can't recall which model but I had one and Then I landed on the iPhone 5c which side note mine was lime green if you couldn't tell by all the Imaging and colors I use in the art for this podcast lime green that acid kind of yellowish green is one of my favorite colors And I've just, I've stayed in the iPhone ecosystem ever since. And I remember specifically thinking when I got that first one, the little HTC with the QWERTY slide out keyboard, that this is going to make
my life easier. And it did for, you know, like a week. And then it just became this other job, this other sort of hassle. Another another thing to manage, another thing buzzing at me. And I bring that up because I used to think that was just me, you know, being weird about it, slow to adopt or whatever. Turns out I might have been ahead. of something instead of behind it for once. There was a survey, summer of 2024,
and it found that something like a quarter, more than a quarter, of Gen Z said they were interested in getting a dumb phone. Calls, text, the alarm clock. That's all you need. Done. Check. You don't need anything else. And almost the same number of Millennials said the same thing. That's a real legitimate polling number. That's not some sort of vibe, not a TikTok trend piece. Now, the actual sales of these things, you know, they're still tiny. And when I mean tiny, like,
two percent of phones sold in this country sort of tiny. So there's this massive gap between people saying they want this and people actually going out and doing it. And I don't think that gap means people are lying or anything. I think it means going back is a little harder than it sounds. Because I mean think about it you need your phone for all sorts of things nowadays you need it to check your You know schedule your doctor's appointments order your refills you need it for your banking you need it for your
kids school app because that's where you get the grades and the release forms and You need it for directions. You need it for work Nobody's actually going to Go out and throw their smartphone into the lake. So You know instead people are doing it in pieces So if you know if it's not really about the phone What is it about? There was another poll this one paired with a guy who wrote the big book about kids and phones and they asked Gen Z, a pretty simple blunt question. Do you wish this thing had never been invented?
When they asked about the smartphone itself, about one in five said, yeah. When they asked about TikTok specifically, basically half of them said yes. Same story. with one of the other big platforms, it was half again. You know, think Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or any of those. It was half. So from that data point, it's not really about the phone. I don't think anybody's really mad at the phone itself, the device, the
the little rectangle deal they're mad at what you know what got built on top of it the feed you know what i'm talking about the thing designed to make you open it 40 times a day sit there for an hour plus and not really know why or what you did in that hour you know the same thing's happening with wired earbuds. Weirdly, I know. There's a research firm that tracks actual sales data on this. You know, not some sort of antidotes. You know, after years of wired headphones just
dying off, you know, sales shrinking every single year, they had a real bounce back recently. I mean, it was a small bounce back, but it trended in the other direction. Wireless, you know, obviously still own something like two thirds of the market. All right. So let's not kid ourselves, but it moved for the first time in years. It moved the other direction. And I don't you know, I don't think that's mostly about audio quality. I think some of it is just a cord doesn't need charging. Accord doesn't have an app. Accord isn't trying
to sell you a subscription for noise cancellation. It just works. And then it's done working the moment you unplug it. And nothing about it is trying to learn anything about you while you use it. and then there's vinyl which honestly blows the other two out of the water in terms of actual numbers almost two decades straight of growth they just crossed a million dollars in revenue again first time in 40 years and it's
it's uh it's not just old guys like me buying reissues of stuff we already owned back in the day on cassette Young people are a huge documented part of this. Some of that's nostalgia for a thing they never even experienced firsthand, which is its own sort of weird phenomenon. I'm not going to pretend I fully understand it. Some of it's just wanting something that you can hold physically. in your hand you can put on a shelf you can put it over there on the table something
that isn't you know a subscription something a company can't quietly take away because they lost the licensing rights and look i'm not exempt from this one i've started buying cds again vinyl 2 but mainly CDs. I like to rip them and put them on plex amp and take that around as my streaming service on my phone. Some of it's honestly, that is more about sound quality. A good pressing sounds way better. You know, vinyl pressing sounds
way better than a compressed MP3 stream, you know. Think Spotify or YouTube music Apple music sort of excluded because they do have the the lossless audio Some of it's the album art actually holding the thing reading the the liner notes instead of just squinting at a thumbnail on your phone and Some of it, you know if I'm being honest is just knowing what Spotify and the other streaming guys pay out. It's a fraction of a cent per stream. I did an episode on this a few weeks back. tylerwoodward
.me slash links. If you want to go back and listen to it, we broke down the metrics of how artists are getting paid. Basically what it comes down to, if I like an artist enough to keep listening to them, especially more than once. Buying the record is the only way I really know my money is landing anywhere near that artist. And it's not just music either. The same exact thing is happening with with video games right now. Sony just announced this year that they're they're looking to end physical game this completely starting in twenty twenty eight. Honestly, that
writing's been on the wall for a little while now. Current Playstations don't even come with disk drives anymore. At least standard, you have to buy it separately and it's been capped at one per order because people are scrambling to grab the last one before the door shuts on it. But it's something like 80 % of game sales are already digital. Think Steam. Nothing physical on there and here's the part that actually makes me that That makes the whole point for me This licensing thing isn't Hypothetical Sony has literally pulled purchase You know content off of people's
PlayStation libraries before movies that people have paid for gone because a licensing deal with the studio ended over a thousand shows at once one time just wiped off the service usually there's no refund it's sitting right there in the terms of service the content is licensed to you not owned by you and a license well that can always be revoked and it's not just Sony Apple's done the same thing with iTunes purchases before. People bought movies, actually paid money for them, logged in one day and found them gone.
Apple's answer more or less was, well, we're just the storefront, go take it up with the studio. So it's not just your music collection anymore, it's your game collection too, and apparently your movie collection, no matter whose logo is on that storefront. Same pattern, different shelf. It's all the same. And that licensing thing actually matters here. It's, you know, it's the other half of this whole story because while all of this is happening on the consumer side, people wanting simpler stuff, less algorithms, more ownership. Of course, what does the industry
do? The industry side is doing the exact opposite. Streaming prices keep going up. Yeah, like cable and satellite. Every tier, add tier, standard, premium, all of it. Again, recently, all going up. And there was a big survey that found something like half Of people now say they're paying too much for streaming Almost as many say the content isn't even worth what they're actually paying for anymore Case in point myself and my family
Netflix had been a staple in this household since 2008 2009 when it was like eight bucks a month. We kept it up to about eight months ago until it finally hit damn near thirty dollars a month and now yeah there's a few good shows on netflix occasionally a good netflix only movie or whatever but not nearly a worth thirty dollars a month so netflix got got canned until stranger things came out we subscribed to it to watch that and then once the final season was done Netflix was out the door again. And you know, at the same
time, you've got these massive media companies either merging or splitting apart, depending on which way the money's blowing that quarter. One deal just closed. Another company is splitting itself back into two. Basically undoing a merger. They did a couple of years ago. It's the same handful of executives shuffling the same assets around trying to find whatever configuration squeezes out the most cash before the next earnings call. So you've got this whole ecosystem that Keeps getting more expensive and more consolidated and more designed around extracting value from
you Instead of giving you something worth paying for and then you wonder why somebody Looks at the you know this whole mess and goes you know what? I'm just gonna go buy the damn record So a few things I keep coming back to on this One, this was never really about, you know, hating the technology. Almost nobody actually wants to go back to a flip phone, at least permanently, myself included, if I'm being honest. It's about hating what got built on top of all this wonderful
technology. The fucking algorithm. the subscription, the thing designed to be addictive on purpose. Another one, the gap between wanting this and doing this is real. And it's not people being lazy or being fake about it. It's genuinely hard to opt out of this system that are built to be inescapable so people are doing it in little chunks and little bits and little pieces at a time you know think a record player here a cd player there a pair of wired headphones one deleted
app at a time last one and this one this one actually bugs me probably the most the industry isn't responding to any of this by trying to get simpler or cheaper or more honest because why would you? It's doing the opposite. Raising the prices, consolidating, betting that you'll complain about it on a podcast. I'm pointing at myself. or screaming into the echo chamber of social media. And then we keep paying anyways.
I'm just venting here. I don't have a good answer for any of this. I really wish I did. I think the honest takeaway is just, you know, pay attention to What you're actually mad at because most of the time it's not the device It's You know, it's not the technology It's whatever is Running on it and whoever's cashing in on you not being able to put that thing down That's the show for the day if you want to keep up with it subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening. And
you can find everything else at tylerwoodward .me. If you want ad free episodes, Apple podcast, TWP plus. It's finally live. Finally got Apple to flip the switch on that. God, it took way longer than I thought it would. And if you want to buy me a cup of coffee just to say thanks and appreciate what, what I'm doing here, you can do that at tylerwoodward .me as well. So yeah, that's the show. Oh Also, go leave a voicemail Maybe you'll end up on the show Tyler Woodward dot me forward slash voicemail I'll catch you next week