How form dictates content

I, V, M. Yeah. Yeah. And then when people who lament oh albums are dying and stuff like that, right.

And why that is definitely true. But it was also we show people why the album was it wasn't like a deep conceptual artistic concept or something. Yeah, exactly. It was basically a quirk of the medium.

The fact that the matter is vinyl records had only so much space. So bands had to create that many songs along the way. Somebody had the smart idea of, hey, what if we tie all of these together with the theme or something of that sort or get as common producer for all them, like the Beatles did. So and so forth.

And, and by quirk of medium, almost the concept of an album was born is just that today. So the physical restrictions of a cassette or a record are more longer there. So this music is coming to an almost like a different form. And if you look at music itself, I find like right now when we're living through an age where there's so much internet technology happening and changing almost daily basis or rather yearly basis, there's so many different trends that are happening.

For example, because of Spotify, which is now the most popular form of media consumption or audio consumption in the world today, artists are incentivized to bring the chorus as early as possible. So that because on Spotify an artist gets paid only when 30 seconds of a song is played. But it's like, and if you have like a long meandering intro for your popular music, that's never going to happen because people are going to skip because people are going to go into the next slide. So there's more and more of an incentive.

In fact, there are charts to show and people have done this kind of analysis that over the last 20 years or so, the chorus of the top 100 Billboard songs has come earlier and earlier in the song, sometimes even starting the song with the magic of data science. Yeah. I mean, imagine, I don't think about even the Rhapsody would have been released like in the streaming age. Yeah, absolutely.

And these are all especially, especially with just fascinating thought experiments to some time go. No, there's similarly another one which I just was thinking of. There is a set of new songs that, so an example is someone like Bacha who's a music composer. Now this guy, he's pretty much one of the cutting edges as far as India is concerned about what he's doing.

So the chronology of him coming out with this new song, so the song was Jugnu. And coming out with that new song, he already had a partnership with YouTube Shorts which was launching at the time. And they wanted something that would be a hookstep that was specifically designed so that people could emulate it and put it on YouTube Shorts. So the song was constructed so that it could have a specific music section that could lead itself to be emulated as a hookstep on YouTube Shorts, which is seven seconds long.

So that's a strong, that's been constructed specifically for a new age video. Exactly. And I was going to, I mean, India, the cultural context is YouTube Shorts, but around the world that's picked up. And more music is being discovered in fact, I don't know if you know, there's a record executives in, you know, one of those and all that in the US.

Large part of their day is actually spent on TikTok because new musical trends and discoveries are happening on that platform. And if you think about, and the TikTok trends are also bringing back old songs crazy, anyway, you guys, and example of that, like that, that the whole trend certainly brought that song back in a big way and it's really important to be able to talk about it again. Yeah, yeah, Fleetwood Max, even though some of these have completely, yeah, because of the social, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, if you think about it, if you just expand the time horizon a little bit, like from the 80s onwards, pretty much with the advent of MTV, music has pretty much been, I mean, for most of its music has been just audio, but you can argue that with the advent of MTV and definitely with the advent of YouTube, that music is now in distinguished, I mean, that the video is as important a part of the song.

And this is taken to an extreme and this really illustrates the larger point that I wanted to bring to the table. Like, if you take a band like, okay, go for instance, right? Okay, go for those of you who don't know, they're a band that makes decent music, but extraordinary videos. Like, if a new okay go video releases, people go to watch the video and also miss the song because they do astonishing things with their videos.

You can say that that's a band that they're sure they're still an artist, they're still a musician, they're still popular, that's it, but for them it's more about video in some sense, they compete more with other video rather than other musicians. Right? So this, to me, is an example of, you know, you add examples like your Vatsha example or other people who do similar things like this on TikTok. In fact, this is a nice article that I think I had written in Mint a few weeks back, talking about exactly this and how it's affecting Indian composers and all that.

You have like Vishal, Bladi and all wondering, Salim, Suleiman, wondering that now they have to compose volume with songs with, I'm just loosely using the song TikTok ability in mind. Obviously, it's the same song, whatever it is. Does the song have that little hook or that little moment that can be used to do a silly dance or go viral or interesting? Yeah, you need like seven seconds to cook off a section in the song for it to go anywhere.

Yeah. Another aspect of how song discovery is happening is song discovery is actually happening through TV shows and being OST TV shows. Yeah. Right?

In a lot of shows, you can't always have your entire song playing over there in the background. It needs to fit a certain moment. Yeah. It may not be as short as a seven second book step, but you need a section that specifically caters to a mood.

Yeah. Right. And so there are a lot of bands that are also constructing songs that can actually be good OSTs as well. Therefore, it can become game followers while seeking out those songs from the show.

Yeah. So if you just to summarize this little bit on music and keep in mind, this is just one aspect of media itself. It's like music is very much a reflection of the media of the times in some sense. Yeah.

Classical music might have, I say this because we shouldn't romanticize over romanticize any either's music because it is extremely contextual to that either in the limitations or I mean, in some sense, those bugs do end up becoming features. Classical music probably had a lot of instruments because at that point of time, there was no amplification and it needed that many level of musicians to fill an entire hall with music and there was no recorded music or anything at that point of time. Maybe rock and roll evolved because of certain other imperatives. Yeah.

So you know, so when I find ever since I came across this one band, I forget their name, but this band figured, Hey, listen, 45 is going to pay us only when we hit 30 seconds. What's the point of composing the 31st second? So all their songs are 30 seconds. Oh, man.

They have an album of Beatles, the new songs, all of which are 30 seconds. They recently recently released an album that has like a hundred or 150 songs, all of which are 30 seconds. So in the long arc of music, you'll have some music knobs that are like, Oh, how can you like me? But in some sense, the perfection of what the economics and imperatives of this, you know, I find this completely fascinating.

Like music at one point of time might have been written to be performed. The Beatles are a great example of this for this first six or six, first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six albums were meant to be performed to audiences. And then let him go like this shit. We are going to just let's make the best music we can forget about whether it can be performed unless you're a studio to the max.

I think that's the final point of this that there are influences that the medium does on the music, but there are also greats who are breaking that saying that, you know, what I'm going to create my music, which will be irrespective of the medium and another example, along with lead me, Kati is again, something I mentioned, Bohemian Rhapsody. The biggest opposition was that it was too long and the record label did not want to put the song in the first place because it's too long for radio play. And it was too complicated to produce on stage. Yes.

The whole thing was that this song is not amenable to the medium of the time and the band's actually said screw it, we're going to do whatever the hell we want to and created a masterpiece. So first, the masterpieces are created by the hearing to the medium or breaking away from it. I have one question here. Okay.

No question because I don't listen to, you know, don't listen to popular music, obviously but most songs tend to be under five minutes, right? Or around that month. And that is probably a relic of the fact that the earliest vinyl records, 78 hour record, were four or five minutes, that's the most they could. But even to this day and age, you rarely have popular songs.

You know, I'm not talking about, so there are Pink Floyd numbers and there are, you know, the Queen and broken the thing, but most songs are four or five minutes long, right? Yeah. Yeah. Is there something deeply inherent in the human sort of attention span that it's a natural thing in three or four minutes?

I've seen movie songs, everything is three, four, five. I don't think so actually because if you rewind back, classical music was not four or five minutes. It was an entire sweet, sweet amount of hours. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that in Mozart's time, they wouldn't have imagined that a song could be something as short as four minutes. Remind me of, yes, yes, Minister Humphrey takes Jim Hacker to a performance at the Opera and Jim Hacker absolutely hates it. He's never beat an opera at all.

So it turns out it is lasting for 90 minutes. And so Jim Hacker, like, you know, it's as long as the football game. So when it doesn't end at 90 minutes, he calls it injury time. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm sorry. I just want to go for a minute. No, let's wait a minute. Let's wait a minute.

I think it's quite nice. Yeah. But yeah, that's what I mean, while still most songs across the board are that long, I think the other thing that the medium has also done is that created areas and spaces for, like, for example, prog music, which is famously not four or five minutes songs, most of them can be 12, 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes songs as well. And the whole point is that because that's also a combination that the medium has given in some way where something like prog would be something very niche that we have people who would want to listen versus now, because of the fact that the medium allows for multiplicity of either having a playlist where I have five minutes songs or 30 minutes songs, which I can kind of put together.

The medium allows for that, which allows for me to actually like vary my choices. And I think that, and more and more, I mean, we have only recently entered into the streaming era comparatively, like, it's only been four or five years since when streaming has become viable. So I think more, the more tiny spent over here, I think that norm will also start breaking down potential. Yeah, absolutely.

And the point is we don't know what the future is going to hold. We don't know whether the streaming era is going to be the ultimate in, you know, the ultimate medium that is. I think it started with music and people go on and talk about other aspects of media as well. I think the point is there is content and then there is a media and the content will always be dictated by the media.

And there is no point hanging onto rules or notions because those were built in the past and they were relics of, you know, and other people say, for example, who songs these days are X or Y or something. That's because at that point of time it was built for a different kind of era. There are no albums being brought out. They say, there is no reason for an album.

What is the reason for an album to exist? If your favorite musician is giving you one song every couple of months and doesn't actually have to compile them into an album together. There is no imperative for him or her to put them together and sell them in a physical format in the store because the economics are completely different. Similarly, if another artist is making stuff for TikTok first, then yes, because that's how people are discovering and consuming music these days.

And who knows how it will happen in the future? Maybe in the future music will be inseparable from video, for instance. Today that's kind of already happening to most popular music where the video is like, you take a song like, would I want to do by the Arctic Monkeys, for instance, that was like Arctic Circle. So that video is so iconic that it is impossible to separate the song from that imagery.

Again, these are just some, you know, you know, even when you take songs that you're really like, also, I always forget the song, the one with the guy makes the machine for the music. Oh yeah, we got a mint that I don't like. It's an album machine. What a reference that works.

Yeah, so marble machine, the whole thing is the song is quite, I mean, it's catching, you can listen to it, it's fine. But there's nothing extraordinary about the song itself. But the video is what makes the song too extraordinary. The video and the faculty constructed a machine to make the song.

You'll find it utterly fascinating. And that's the other thing. Sometimes you listen to a song and then you're like, okay, it's a decent song. And then you discover another aspect of this.

So it was made through artificial intelligence. Or it was, you know, or this is another song played backwards. So the video of the song that actually matters. Yeah, completely.

Absolutely. I think we should take a little break about now because that's an imperative of the podcast format and we come back and just apply this thesis to a few other aspects of media. I suppose, yeah. See on the other side.

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We have to take these breaks because it's not a radio show and that's another thing that's interesting. I mean, people think that podcast is just radio one-to-one, but it's completely different. I'm just wondering if this was actually a radio show, how so many things would be different. One, we wouldn't be able to do the nonsense that we do.

Two, it would be a lot more fast-paced. And three, and this is another interesting is that there is no fixed time as such for a podcast. We can make this 20 minutes long. We can make this one hour long.

We can make it two hours long if we want. That sound that you hear is actually our producer crying. And that's kind of the same thing with internet, a video on demand in some way in the sense that a sitcom has to be exactly what, 22 minutes long? Each episode has to each half an hour episode as a single.

22 minutes and the rest is for advertising. Yeah, and the rest is for advertising. Right? So this places an artificial limit almost.

I'm using the word artificial over here for both the content and the advertising itself. Like advertising themselves have to be 15 seconds, 30 seconds or 60 seconds. If the advertising has an idea that it makes a 65 seconds, you need to trim off those five seconds because there is no ad slot that fits into a neatly. Whereas on YouTube, there is no problem like that.

And you're seeing that on Netflix. And it's fascinating to me sometimes when you see the length of various episodes in a series, one can be 47, one can be 45, one can be 60, even if needed, one can be done. It couldn't have happened back in the day. Again, freedom given because of the format and another thing that Netflix has brought to the table for instance is because of the change in nature in which we consume content, which is more likely to binge a series rather than wait for it episodically.

That's changing how writers are writing the series as well. They're now made for bingeability rather than the last, possibly weekly big show was Game of Thrones possibly. And you can see how that was built for a huge hook at the end so that people would discuss it for a week and come back when it's due. Right?

So, what about quickly, quickly get on to the next, I want to quickly see what the next series is, sort of like how Sydney shall use the writers novels. You just quickly want to see what the next thing is like binge it and finish it. And that's where also, I mean, there's so many nuances of creation of content, video content that have come into play is that specifically, I mean considering that two of us at least have spent some time in advertising, it has distinctly changed advertising medium. But what also it's done across content is the aspect of why there was an initial understanding that all content will have to be really short content to work.

The point is this that the attention needs to be grabbed in the first few seconds and then the content can be as long as it needs to be for that to work. And so now what's that done is that I like the number of the new YouTube channels that I watch require, they almost like kind of provide a summary upfront where there is a small hook and summary and there is also a bait that kind of works the video to the end because there's the narrative will reach its eventual conclusion over there. And once you're hooked to the channel, once you're a regular subscriber, like you said, there is no set length in any which way. There are episodes that can be 10 minutes long, 20 minutes long, 30 minutes long, you're still going to come back and subscribe because you know the hook that you're looking for no longer is the time, but the narrative flow.

The other thing that fascinates me with respect to digital video particularly is the kind of innovations you can have within that which they wouldn't have been able to teach you in filmmaking school, say 10 or 15 years back. Is that the medium inherently has changed the content? Like I'll give you a couple of examples. One is a Bandersnacht sort of example where you can choose your own timeline and story, something that goosebumps used to do back in the day, if you remember with those book, choose your adventure and the second thing.

And I don't know if you guys have seen this set my own special on Netflix, the late night post set my own. I haven't seen it yet yet. So it's a pretty nice special and I'm not going to give, it's not a spoiler as such, not for the narrative, but it's a spoiler for format. So, he's set my own, obviously, in the late night post, the deep political in his content, but he was talking 40 minutes without political content at all.

And you could feel the tension in the room when he was going to drop the T word. And then he was like, okay, I'm sure you guys are all just waiting for me to talk about politics, but maybe there's some people who don't want to see me talk about politics. So tell you what, so for people who are watching this at home and don't want to hear me talk about politics, a button should come over here just about now. And when you're watching Netflix, you have a button over there.

Like a skip intro, you have a skip politics, you have a skip politics button that comes on the screen. So this is not a video by itself. There's not a standard video. So, you have a comment on this, you can download a torrent of this into an ad, you won't be able to use that.

It's a feature that's built into Netflix. So then you press that skip politics, you skip 10 minutes ahead and then that point of time, he says, welcome back all those people who skipped politics. Oh, you missed a lot. And then he goes on, like, now this is a medium innovation, right?

It can't happen on his, you know, and I'm sure you can, I can battle off many examples of this from the world of advertising where a feature above of the medium was turned into a feature and used in a very interesting way. Like the sweet voice of hunger example or something. Speaking voice of hunger, there was another one, one of my favorite examples from an advertising world on using the medium or certain way was there was, I mean, advertisers are constantly under pressure because most advertising people have come from the school of learning television advertising and always struggle with this. So I mean, the constant struggle is how do I make an ad to fit seven seconds?

Yeah, for YouTube. For YouTube. And this is where I think it was Audi, South Africa, Audi or Porsche, South Africa to run an ad for Porsche in that seven seconds. They basically did this thing where they showed in Porsche, that's the rating from 0 to 100 in 3.4 seconds.

And they're less less the rest of that. That's the ad. So they actually did 3.4 seconds worth of ad and the rest three and a half seconds was just like, that's how fast the Audi can go. So they were like, you know, we don't even need all seven seconds.

Yeah, so what I love about examples like these is that it's made for the medium. And like that's a lesson like I try to give students or clients by the way, like create something for the medium. Like even today, like a musician today, okay, like it's not like I'm making music in the 70s anymore. Like what are the platforms you're going to be on?

You need to be seen on TikTok. You need to be seen on YouTube. You need to be seen on 45. You need to make content with the imperatives of that medium with how those mediums are being used to be like, sure, you learn all your scales and all that.

That's the basics. But just doing that may not be enough anymore. You do need to adapt your content to the imperatives of the medium in some way. And this is very true of writing as well.

I mean, the three of us have seen writing quote unquote, I would not write it. I guess evolve or devolve depending on your point from long form blogs. I think he was looking at you to trying to be clever and snappy on Twitter to maybe these days taking a screenshot of something and putting text on it on Instagram. What is just emoji?

Oh, just emoji. Like what is incredible about this and along the way, you can add in other quote unquote mediums like SMS and all that. How each of these have a different vocabulary of their own, you know, like the transition from blogs to piece. Okay, you blabbered on and on for that.

I'd like to like what's your experience because you've eased humor in both mediums. I don't know much about Facebook and Instagram. I don't use but Twitter and blogging. So blogging, you tend to ramble on and you tended to use a lot of unnecessary language.

It is I did, right? So you want to describe something and you go on and on. And oftentimes when I revisit my own blog, I find that mildly irritating. So I'm sure my readers did too.

But you know, you just, that's what blogs are. You just sort of skip and you Twitter doesn't do that. So Twitter, you have to be very concise, very snappy and earlier it was 140 characters. But then Twitter started allowing threads and threads.

So there are really a lot of excellent threads, you know, different kinds of threads, threads which tell stories, threads which give information, threads which build, you know, sort of, you know, disseminate entire histories of things. That's not very minimal as well because you want to, you want to fit a lot of stuff into maybe 10, 20 or 30 quid. So your narration style become very minimal. You stop using unnecessary words to tend to choose your words very carefully.

You want your tweets also to have some kind of a cadence because if you're writing, you know, half a thing and one tweet and the other half in the other. No, no, no. So you are just going to cut it out. You're going to have to have like that each tweet by itself should have a meaning, should contain a set of information that's complete and the entire series also then makes sense.

So you're basically composing 140 character paragraphs for each of your 280 characters. It's almost like each aspect of Twitter has a different syntax and grammar of its own. This is hashtag itself. And while a lot of this might seem silly, the fact of the matter is a lot of the communication for business and like, geo-quality happens on that platform.

Right now, arguably the stuff that the Ukrainian government is putting out on Twitter is far more effective than any formal governmental communication ever in history. And how do you teach something like that, you know, say a foreign policy writing class or something like that, which would be used to telegram something for a long period of time and now along comes Twitter, like the imperatives of a hashtag. And I'm just going back to our early days on Twitter, you know, the golden era of 2009, 2011, 2011. Yeah, like, which was 140 characters.

Right? So you even have more. Yeah, and the grammar of using a hashtag, for instance, that had someone unsaid sort of, you know, you put something random and then you put a hashtag, right? So you just sort of people just inherently got it and would, you know, just be profit.

Yeah. And there's another aspect that also really comes across to me from there, which was how the quotes of using the medium actually became internal references by themselves. Yeah. Like one great example for me is the whole point of also in BKPD, I mean, it was there everywhere.

So when we used to talk there, we used to have this channel called IRC and we used to talk on that. And that's why if you wanted to say something with a lot of emphasis, you would like put exclamation marks, but then what would happen is especially like not really, but people put exclamation marks, they would drop the shift at some point of time. And so it's not putting the shift. It's suddenly coming as 111 111 111.

Right. So it then became a real thing where instead of someone wanted to say something with emphasis, they literally put exclamation marks put once afterwards and literally type 111 111 after that, because that all the emphasis, because I'm putting so many ones that it's become a 1 million 111 111. Amazing. Right.

So similarly, there are other phrases like porn porn, and hodil in the crypto world, it's a whole, which are all like, because of the stress of the situation, you're actually making those typos and those typos are becoming the terms that are owned by the space. Yeah. I like looking at, you know, I hate to like go back to marketing in some ways, but if you look at how some companies have adapted to the digital age very well in terms of the communications, the great way to illustrate what you're talking about. Like I look at companies that legacy companies that have been successful in the digital age, it's one thing to look at digital first companies because they understand the internet inherently.

So I take inspiration companies like the New York Times, which has been legacy for a long time struggle to adapt to the internet finally got their shit together and I was like absolutely thriving. And how they're thriving, if you look at it, and it's a great analysis in, you know, how they, in how they use media is seeing how they adapt their content to different mediums in some way. There is a Vanguard old paper, which will always be what it is, right, which doesn't necessarily need to change the website has something. If you see their Instagram, it's way more likely, it's way more interesting on YouTube.

They have a lot of 360 videos. They're a great example of a company that adapts content according to the medium with the tone of the medium and all that. Washington Posty, Washington Post TikTok, by the way, is hilarious. They have just, they have only memes over there.

Their bio on TikTok is literally like VR newspaper or something like that. And if it has one character called Dave, who goes on making fun of the news of the day, and it doesn't even, it sometimes isn't even tangentially connected to the news, but that kind of tone works on that medium. Who would have thought, like imagine 50 years back, for 15 years, imagine like 10 years back, one of the most respected newspapers in the world is going to make jokes and short videos online. It would have been absolutely ludicrous.

But hey, that's how mediums evolve, people's consumption evolves, whatever works, I think it's a matter of whatever works. And it's also, I mean, this is where the term like digital natives comes into me about how much, how, I mean, digital or any platform natives, like understanding what the platform is like and understanding what the space is like and how you can kind of evolve inside it. And a lot of companies get some, the few legacy companies that I've gotten it right, and most of them who get it wrong, are always people who are trying to approach a new medium or a new content platform with legacy thinking. And that's where all the mistakes happen because you're trying to be as, because you're having clever in one particular medium or one success in one particular medium, but legacy thinking is what's holding you back because you have to, it's not, it's not transferable.

You have to really construct it from the ground up and you need to get people who understand the medium natively to kind of do that thinking. 100% agree with you on that. And companies who do think through that, I mean, that you can do this thing for, you know, in many unexpected places, it could be, like we've all been to that friend's house who's got like a interesting, say Wi-Fi society or something. Like that becomes a media point, like another one which we could answer is you didn't break it up, it's actually stock takers.

There's some very interesting stock takers. Like Ferrari's stock taker on the NYC is actually race RECE. Yeah. There are a couple of other very interesting ones like cheesecake, I don't even know cheesecake at this list.

Harley Davidson is HOG, which stands for Harley owners group, which almost shows that loyalty to building a community and Franklin Templeton is Ben, by the way, because they're simple, is that of Ben Franklin? Yeah, I think even famously from the case study, South West Airlines is love, LUV, because they originated from Lovefield in somewhere in the Southern United States. I don't remember exactly where. And that also is part of the thought about how they wanted to be like all the stuff.

Is lovefield in Dallas? Yeah, I think it's in Dallas. Yeah, lovefield in Dallas, I think. Yeah.

So that's what that's their stock tick and that becomes part of the company's ethos as well, which is something that they brought over there. So yeah, you're very true. Yeah, Steinway Pianos is LBB, it stands for LUV and Vitoven. That's why the average budget group is car.

So this fascinating is almost like you're squatting on some very interesting, this becomes another place for the company to show what it stands for. Like Facebook wanted to rename itself from FV to meta as a stock ticker itself. I'm not sure whether this happened yet, but yeah, fascinating. I think, and this is across media, like you look at how news has changed over the last year, you start with the example of New York, but if you look at how people are consuming news, this is especially gensy, they're consuming it more on tick-off slash Instagram.

So you see the success of Instagram first and first journalists like a FEDO who suffered instances or yeah, which is more in line with how millennials, millennials, like I saw, or she's like, one of the defining characteristics of millennials or the digital generation is that they have absolutely no loyalty to form. Right? Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point.

And so especially someone of my generation, I still do not get Instagram. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would use Instagram because you can't forward it, you can't quote, tweet or do anything like that. You literally cannot do anything except post-super picture of yourself. And so how about becomes a feature in that?

Yeah, and people just, oh man, they buy Sun for example, he doesn't look at WhatsApp at all. He just, he's just Instagram, he's going to reach him, he's going to reach him on Instagram. He's going to look at WhatsApp. Yeah, it's like the point you made in the ring is a very interesting one.

What is it that you said? Live, you have loyalty to form. No loyalty to form. That's what I really like.

It's like tomorrow something else might come up and this generation is adaptable enough. It'll be how okay till now we were getting our news through two dimensional videos and now we're getting it through three dimensional videos in the matter. So they will find a lot easier to adapt than say people who've been using and that senses, I guess, I guess, allegory for marketing managers as well who've been stuck with print for so long and suddenly so much changes happen in such a short period of time that they've got Facebook, so it's only Instagram, Instagram, Instagram, they've got it sorted now, something else has happened. That's why millennials are truly following the code because they might have loyalty to form their extemporary.

Yeah, it's almost like an extract meta lessons from here and that's what I take away from all of this. There is some part of music that at the end of the day, what is music supposed to do? If you get into that and then bare-cannety satisfied, it's not necessary that you need to go to a store and buy a CD for it or you don't even need to stream it from, there are some, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people, their music listening times actually when they play games because it's from the games that they are, yeah, so music is supposed to be supposed to make you feel happy or whatever it is that you can consume it from any number of sources. That's what, I mean, actually I'm glad you brought that up because there's something that I mean, as possibly the only somewhat dedicated gamer in this group, gaming as a form, what was, I mean, I just finished a couple of games which were pretty monumental, I mean, I'm myself playing them and in that particular thing, what games have traditionally been expected to be, they are games, they are trivial, frivolous pieces of code that you indulge with for a few seconds or a few minutes are at a very minimum, a couple of, like even any regularity.

The thing that, the form, the way the form of the platform has changed in such a major way that they have massive narrative tools, they are massive tools that are consuming, consuming other, like for example, I instantly learned how to play poker because as part of one of the games that I was playing, a required mission, required him to play poker with another player. And so I learned how to play poker so I could play it in the game and therefore now I have learned that you are at form. I have a lot of music, I play like these sports games and sports games are a great place for music discovery. Like I get like, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's soundtrack are really rich and always evolving.

Just playing three different games, I have like constantly got my shazam on where I'm just constantly like getting the tracks and now what they've started doing is they're releasing soundtracks off the games on Spotify. And so you can actually like download the entire soundtrack and listen to them. So the games, the format of what a game is supposed to be and how they are played and how much involvement they have is tremendously changed. Like right now game, games probably the medium that requires a maximum, a single game is right now which commands a maximum amount of attention in something because say for example, you're playing a major game like I just finished a write down and that requires a minimum of 60 hours of gameplay time, gameplay time.

This is just like time that you spend in game. So for that, that's, that's more than two or two and a half full days. So you're playing that game over a couple of weeks and you're constantly, your brain is constantly out doing it and you're following the progress of it. So that medium itself is a world in such a massive way that the way the consumer is consuming the content and the impact that they are having and all the other kinds of content that are consumed through it, it's become a mega medium unto itself.

Yeah, exactly. It's like they say about video about this. So like you listen to the episode of Monday and then read all the articles and watch all the YouTube videos and all that. So I want to ask you to take one thing and I'm assuming if not now it'll happen in the future, are the media consumed within games like music for instance?

Can they be personalizing customers? I suppose I'm a fan of rock music for instance. Can I have more of that kind of music if I'm playing a game? So it's not, I haven't encountered a game that can be done that way still.

Although there is a, there are, so there was a certain, there are a few games like a game give two types of options. There was, I forget which game but it's quite early on actually, there was one game that allowed you to play your own soundtrack inside the game. So you could import your own music and play it inside the game when you're playing it. And the second thing being that there is, there are also now they have like EA games especially have this module called EA tracks inside the game.

And you can actually, once you listen to the whole soundtrack, you can go and enable and disable the songs in their soundtrack. So you can play your playlist in that order. Okay. Some games also have like, so you know this with Nike workout app, right?

They have a power song, right? So you know the first concept of a power song, Nike plus the fitness app had a thing where, say for example, when you're running or when you're doing any kind of strength, a physical exercise, if at some point you're feeling yourself flagging, you have the option to hit power song, which is your comp on song. So that actually gets you going to that difficult period, right? So Nike plus has that option.

And I think there are games also that allow you to have an option to, to fit a song at a point where there is major drama happening that you can actually play that thing with your pre-order song. I have a couple of points to add to this, but before that, I do want to, like you've been hearing the two of us blabber about music and all that for a while now. And why does genre really doesn't matter? Because you are a person who I know deeply, deeply loves music and looks at it and keeps a very open mind.

And as someone who's probably grown up listening to music in the quote unquote old way with the radio or records or even cassettes, how does this, how does all this evolution right now, how does it make you feel? Because at one level, the norms of the past are being shattered and people have no loyalty etcetera. But in some way, people are, I would say people are listening to more music now than ever go. So much easier.

So back in the day, for example, you told me that band X is great and I listen to it and I'm like, what kind of music is that? And it's heavy metal or it's something that normally I won't listen to. But you curate a list for me and sort of break it to be gentler. So I'm talking about the discovery aspect of it because it's virtually impossible back in the day.

So the reason I went through engineering college and I just didn't like any of the songs I heard, probably because the first few songs I heard were not really great ones. It didn't catch me at all. I made out all the great songs came along but they left no impression on me because my mind was already closed. So they were a little window where maybe so, but dozens of my classmates, they all, no one grew up listening to rock music.

They all got rock music when they went to engineering college and then they, so today it's a lot more different. You can share and listen, discover different kinds of music. So somebody shared some African music with me recently and I was mind blown. It's very fascinating in its own way.

It's some Cameroonian or Senegal. So one other aspect that I feel is really interesting over here is for me and I know it has two but a lot of people but this is particularly true for me. Music is very strongly associated with memories. So there are certain memories, certain types of music, certain form of girlfriends or certain form of experiences that I've had.

I have a song that I associate very strongly with a breakup or a bang that I strongly associate with a breakup and stuff like that. So therefore what this has done is bringing the game aspect but also bringing other life memories aspect. So there are certain songs like one great example which we all know is like Late Goodbye, by Cartier Boulevard, by Poets of the Fall. Late Goodbye as a song was a song that I encountered while playing Max Payne 2.

So you remember it for that? I remember it and because of the game, in fact it was so awesome that, you know, there is this one part and this is like, this is my favorite part of that particular game. You're actually hunting down and you're sneaking around and you're killing all these guys and that song is there as the song, that's the only song in the soundtrack of the whole game. And in there there is one part where you're actually sneaking by into a room and there are a couple of those thugs who are sitting and there's a grand piano over there.

And the thugs are actually sitting and playing an acoustic version of the song. So I actually remembered sitting there and hitting it for almost three minutes while that guy plays the song with my child and kid him. I'm like, very slow, I got killed. Like that's a beautiful version of the song.

So I'm literally waiting for him to finish the song. So for me a lot of these songs have, so when I listen to that song, I listen to a lot of the songs that I've discovered either in-game or during a show or during like, because of some memory, they evoke a certain memory. So it's not even the quality of the song anymore, it's the memory that is associated. And I will add to your point by moving away from music to podcast actually because there are some podcast episodes that I associate with certain moments or memories or something that like, for example, like there was a particular bugle episode where John Oliver made such a funny joke that I was cycling at the time and I was going at a pretty high speed that I swear I almost fell off my bike.

So I still remember. So now when I think that this is a flyover in JBL, I'm just going to be cruelly. So whenever I think of that flyover, I think of that bugle episode. Similarly, there's a certain Amit Varma episode, I remember and I know exactly what I was doing at that point.

So it goes back to what you're saying. There's some flights that I was taking up as listening to a particular episode. So yeah, the point on memories and not just music but media and gender like, as you remember when you were reading a certain book for instance, I know where I was going to say the first Harry Potter that I was ever reading or the fun. Yeah, that's also the other thing about how more than the quality of the song, the memory plays a thing more the quality of anything.

So I think simply by itself is a good example of that. A lot of listeners have actually told us that it's the vibe that we have and the camaraderie that we have that keeps them over some next questionable content that we can't do. Just one last point that I want to say, but it's not necessarily connected to the topic itself, but one thing I find fascinating about the evolution of media is that it's almost like this, that media is getting pulled into extreme. As we have more and more access to music, which is like on Spotify, for instance, you pay whatever 150 bucks a month and you have access to all the music that ever exists pretty much, it almost seems irrational that vinyl sales are increasing 100% year on year, which has so many disadvantages compared to a Spotify.

You have to have a clunky machine, you can't skip, you have audio quality, might be slightly lower at times, not compared to Spotify of course, but digital music in general, whatever the case may be. And the same thing can be true of like one fact that absolutely blew my mind when I read it is because of the trend of book recommendations that are happening on TikTok. Physical books in the US are increasing like 30%, 40% year on year, because of the whole phenomenon of book talk. So it seems fascinating to me that there are two polarizing things almost, right?

At the time when we have digital circuit of things that we want to go back to simpler times or maybe one way of thinking about it is we are very impatient with respect to discovery, but once we find what we actually want, then we go super deep into it. We spend hundreds of hours watching favorite creators on Twitch, for example, playing video games. And we have to read an entire author who's blog we have just discovered or we'll be in the entire series from the past that we just discovered has now come on to Netflix for the first time and buying vinyls and disconnecting from the madness of the internet for one other day, maybe one way of doing this. So I find this, we always say shorter attention spans get to the point and all that.

It's kind of interesting that long-form articles are being written and shared more than ever before. So yeah, that aspect of media always fascinates me. Yeah, that's definitely. That's precisely there with stuff like Juru Gins forecast or like stuff where long-form forecast, long-form content.

That's where I think it's come down to the internet. And once you have subscribed to the narrative form of the person that you're listening to, you're coming back for that because you're no longer just saying, oh, whether I like this episode or not, I'm just jumping myself inside this particular narrative flow. And I'll see where it goes. And so it's no longer restricted by time.

It's no longer restricted by form. It's no longer restricted by anything. I'll just take it under the ground. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think we can type after music history and this has more to do with artists management than it does with music in general. One of the criticisms that I've heard of modern music, apart from the music itself, that they are so made for transients and temporary success that nobody remembers a song a year later. Sure, it might be Billboard number one, that might have 100 million views of that sometimes. But nobody remembers the artist's stop to a point of time, whereas you have some artists that keep for a long period of time.

I can not necessarily because of the music, but because of the artist management, the job of an AI executive in the 70s and 80s was to nurture a band and artist building imagery building order, which is why in the 2020s you still have kids listening to K's screen, the Beatles are still relevant. Yeah, yeah. So maybe there's something over there. Interesting.

All of this. I think we should call it a day now. Yeah, that's a good point to call it a day. So I think we had a great conversation about understanding how the platform or the platforms that are available for have evolved content and how content continues to proliferate itself according to the form and even baking that form in some ways.

Yeah. So yeah, super conversations. Yeah. Yeah.

So stay safe, stay informed and contented and stay simplified. Wow. That was pretty much it. It's something that I'm meeting with you.

Thank you. Thank you. I can imagine the sponsor sponsoring Marines that one second stay, stay, stay, sponsor, stay away from me. See you next week.

Bye. Bye.