Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos

Pop CultureJuly 30, 2024

20 years ago, Apple won music and Amazon won books. How’s that working out?

Founder

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos

Book publishing, video games and recorded music all faced the enormous power of the internet 20 years ago. Their financial fates have wildly diverged. Duncan Greive contrasts outcomes for three culture giants.

It’s 20 years since Auckland punk band Stereogram’s Walkie Talkie Man had its career arc bent way up after being chosen to soundtrack one of that year’s iPod commercials. It was part of an iconic series, featuring silhouetted figures dancing to the songs, with the iPod the only object in colour. Just one unremarkable data point in the unrelenting march of Apple to becoming the colossus of consumer hardware and software it is today.

Those ads were hugely significant in pop culture at the time – Apple was the hottest brand in the world, and its beloved CEO Steve Jobs a huge music fan. He profiled like a classic rock boomer – a teenage collector of Dylan bootlegs who dropped acid and dated Joan Baez in his 20s. He was a Beatles fanatic who interviewed Mick Jagger on stage at the launch of iTunes for Windows; all this was core to his identity.

Infamously, Apple gave away a new U2 album to all iPhone owners in 2014, one they did not ask for and many wanted rid of. This was after Tim Cook had taken over, and might mark the moment its interest in music waned, even as its business grew exponentially. Still, during a crucial period – the aftermath of Napster’s decimation of the physical media business – Apple was perceived as a wildly cool company, in no small part because of its relationship with music – largely due to the way iTunes, the iPod and then iPhone made it more accessible than ever.

Down to the river

It’s 30 years since the founding of another tech giant: Amazon. Its founder Jeff Bezos lacked the wild charisma and counter culture cachet of Jobs – he was a computer science grad who ran a hedge fund by the time he was 30. There he met his future wife Mackenzie Scott Tuttle, who had studied under Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and would go on to become an acclaimed author in her own right.

The pair quit to start an online bookstore – though not because of Scott’s relationship to the form. Instead it was because, according to NPR, they were “relatively cheap, they don’t spoil and [are] pretty sturdy to ship”. Amazon was extraordinarily good at selling books online, stocking a vast range, pricing cheap and often shipping free, becoming loved by many readers while viewed with deep suspicion by many publishers and authors.

Amazon moved from there to CDs and video games and toys before becoming the “everything store” we know and have complicated feelings about today. That is a brief version of the origin story of this enormous global business which runs from cloud computing to advertising to logistics to streaming TV and movies. All built on the book.

Yet for all that, the book world never felt about Amazon the way the music industry did about Apple. The company got into wars with publishers and authors, bankrupted both chain stores and indies alike. Its general theory of satisfying customers by crushing margins to increase volumes was viewed with suspicion by most of those who made, loved and sold books.

Can it all be so simple?

To this day Amazon’s reputation as a heartless company which cares nothing for culture persists, while Apple is popularly perceived as a relatively benign overlord – the maker of dazzling devices, and one which transfers the issues with creaky culture industries to the apps which run on its beautifully engineered machines. On that basis, you’d think publishing should rue the day Amazon chose books, and be envious of Steve Jobs’ fascination with song.

I’m here to humbly suggest that belief is dead wrong. To illustrate why, consider three charts, starting with gaming revenue.

Revenue for books (even this is incomplete, as like-for-like figures aren’t public):

And for recorded music.

What you see here is three commodities. All remain hugely impactful in culture. But two have broadly retained or significantly expanded their economic foundations, while the third remains a shadow of its former financial scale. I’ll attempt to explain why, as I think it all ladders back in part to those two tech titans.

Video games have become the dominant entertainment medium. This has been driven by competition both between games and between platforms, along with the explosive growth of mobile gaming. Gaming has steadily risen from an esoteric hobby associated with teenage boys into a mainstream activity with its own media (Twitch), sales platforms (Steam), user generated content worlds (Roblox) economic models (in-app purchases, in-game currencies), adding up to a cut-through in which roughly two thirds of US adults say they play video games.

Books have remained largely physical media, with e-books mirroring and complementing the printed form. The rise of streaming TV and movies has led to expanded markets for rights for both fiction (Game of Thrones) and non-fiction (Killers of the Flower Moon). Where social media has impacted books, it is most prominently associated with the #booktok phenomenon, a new promotional channel opening both classic and modern books up to a new generation.

Music remains perhaps the most kinetic cultural force in the world. Taylor Swift has more fame and generates more revenue than any other individual in pop culture. Live music has exploded particularly post-pandemic, with theatre artists packing arenas and arena artists selling out stadiums. Previously regional genres like reggaeton, country and afrobeats have vast global fanbases. Music was the driving force which underpinned TikTok, and remains a massive part of YouTube usage.

Digital love?

A case can reasonably be made that all have culturally thrived in the digital age. Yet their economic fortunes are reflective of a very different reality to practitioners. To be clear, it has never been a great time, being an author, musician or independent game developer. It has always been a winner-takes-most economy, and likely always will be (and arguably, should be). But the gulf between cultural impact and financial reward exists, and it’s largely down to how the public accesses the work.

For books and video games, it’s mostly through sales (or, in mobile gaming, in-app purchases). The book world is alone in culture in that the most common engagement with the form is still through physical media – hardbacks and paperbacks, whether bought online or in a store. By contrast, video games are downloaded, DVDs are mostly streamed, and, despite a recent revival, vinyl and CDs are a tiny proportion of consumption compared to streaming music.

Video games remain tightly connected to the hardware they run on. Premium titles for the latest generation of PlayStation, Switch or Xbox have established $100+ as a price point and can sell tens of millions of copies. Mobile games operate within Apple and Google’s app stores, either purchased outright or funded through a massive array of microtransactions for everything from extra lives to special digital outfits.

Music, by contrast, is nearly entirely a subscription phenomenon for consumers. Pay a single price and get access to almost everything ever recorded. It has become a form of user-generated content, with millions of artists and songs uploaded, most getting a risible number of listeners. It has a huge presence on YouTube and TikTok, yet the majority of the upside is captured by the platforms, which sell advertising around music, rather than artists or labels.

Spotify, the subscription company which had a major role in the current paradigm, is locked into a toxic relationship with the music industry, with entangled shareholdings and revenue. Toxic because despite its close ties, many artists feel Spotify grossly under compensates them for their work. Spotify, for its part, has to give up around 70% of its revenues to music rights holders, and therefore spends a lot of its time trying to get its audience to listen to anything but music – hence the bet on podcasting, and now audiobooks.

Still, it’s telling that there is a hard cap of 15 hours on the amount of audiobook listening which can happen within a Spotify subscription (and that audiobooks are a relatively niche part of the publishing revenue pie). Book publishing has resisted becoming a subscription all-you-can-eat product, and rightly so. Video games are much the same. Despite Sony and Microsoft launching subscription products, video game publishers are much more committed to sales than bolstering subscription models.

The sound of the crowd

They’re right to do so. Music offers a cautionary tale – with artists battling for attention in a wildly crowded market, and forced to use platforms that either want you to listen to less music (Spotify) or for which music is just a small part of their much larger businesses (Apple, Amazon, YouTube). It’s driving artists to some behaviours they can’t possibly want – big artists releasing endless colour vinyl variations to hose their most ardent fans; smaller artists setting up subscription services to sell access to their demos.

All because all music fans, from the most obsessive to the most casual, pay the same amount in the digital realm. Whereas with books and video games, the more you love the form, the more you pay.

The origin stories of this situation are complex. Books are just a really nice physical product, and the experience of reading one on a glass screen is manifestly worse. Gaming benefits from specialised hardware, and it so moreish that fans will happily pay up to keep a streak going.

Music fans, meanwhile, were often buying a whole album just to listen to one or two songs. Radio had proven that, for many, listening to a variety of artists together was a more preferable activity than consuming a whole album.

Still, this was not an active choice, made by music rights holders as a collective with a considered assessment of their interests. Between Napster and iTunes and then YouTube and a nascent Spotify, there was existential dread about the financial basis for music. They took the deal because they felt like they had little choice. By contrast, books and video games had arbitrary but meaningful differences in choices, and took different paths.

To be clear, revenue is not the whole story. Creative vitality is more than just finance and distribution, and the opaque way money is carved up by the giants of video games, book publishing and music labels brings complexities of its own. Indisputably, though, the more that flows to the rights holders, the better.

It’s also important to note that these worlds are now much more complex than the formats alone, and being sold over rented is hardly a guarantee of a better deal. They’re often dictated by the cut the platform takes. This varies wildly in the unregulated libertarian idyll of the internet. Substack takes 10%; Google Play, Apple and Steam, mostly 30%; Amazon for ebooks, 35%; YouTube takes 45%-55%; Roblox around 75%, which still beats the miserable shares from Meta and TikTok.

Still, the gold standard, highest cultural impact format for music, books and video games remains the album, the book and a console game. Now, two or three decades on from some crucial inflexion points, we live in the shadow of those junctions. Down one path lay individual sales, down the second, all-access subscriptions. Despite subscriptions being a great consumer product and a brilliant technology business, they seem to work much less well for creators.

Looking back, it’s interesting the extent to which the philosophy and interest of two companies were crucial in all this. Amazon built its business on selling you things, and wanted to do the same in digital – so it created the Kindle, a superb piece of consumer technology that also wants to sell you individual units of digital culture. Apple just wanted to sell hardware, and take a piece of every transaction – hence first iTunes, then the app store.

The creation of music, books and gaming is not all that different. A certain amount of vision, individual and collective effort, to create products which bring joy to millions. But the financial underpinning and incentive structure of these three disciplines is wildly divergent. And the role of two companies, with very different relationships to culture, helps explain why.

Keep going!

Pop CultureJuly 29, 2024

‘I am tired of this prison version of myself’: 15 minutes with Gypsy Rose Blanchard

Alex Casey

Senior writer

Gypsy Rose Blanchard talks about the failures of the prison system, becoming a mother with the entire world watching, and returning to a normal life in infamy.

In the first episode of Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup, Gypsy and her then-husband Ryan are being followed by a couple of persistent paparazzi as they attempt to leave a shoe shop, just nine hours after her release from prison. “How was your first shopping trip Gypsy?” one of them asks. “Any plans?” asks another. Within minutes, the photographs and videos they take will be all over the internet – this is the first public sighting of Blanchard since she went to prison in 2016.

It was a truly shocking series of events that led to Gypsy Rose Blanchard becoming a household name. A victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Gypsy was forced by her mother Dee Dee to have unnecessary surgeries and take medications she didn’t need, use a wheelchair and shave her head for over two decades. The abuse culminated in Gypsy pleading guilty to second-degree murder of her mother, a crime which saw her imprisoned in Missouri for eight years.

The harrowing chapter quickly was quickly immortalised in several true crime documentaries as well as drama series The Act. Following her release from prison at the end of 2023, Gypsy Rose invited cameras to follow her re-entry into society in Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up. Whether navigating her IRL relationship with her penpal-turned-husband, or being followed by paparazzi into her family home, it’s full of fascinating and uncomfortable insights from a life in the eye of a truly singular storm.

With a few caveats around topics we couldn’t talk about (take a wild guess) and some customary opening small talk about New Zealand and Lord of the Rings (Gypsy is a big fan), here is our conversation about leaving the prison system, becoming a mother with the entire world watching, and returning to everyday life in infamy.

For the people that would say “why would I ever watch a TV show about her?” – what would you tell them about who Gypsy Rose is now, versus the Gypsy Rose they know?

The reason for doing the show was to show people that even I am tired of this prison version of myself that everybody had been seeing for years. I wanted to break the mould of what people saw when they thought of me. I think by showing people that I’m human, and that my past does not define who I am now as an individual, I’m going to break away from those prison images and move into something a little different.

These last six months have been a growth period for me. On the show, you see that everything is an adjustment for me. The emotion is so raw in the show, because I was able to be so comfortable with the crew. I was able to be vulnerable in my emotions and let that show on screen. I think that is something that people are going to associate me with – a sense of just being normal human with those normal human emotions.

How do you feel about all of those raw emotions being captured on camera, especially the more difficult parts of your relationship with [ex-husband] Ryan?

It’s hard, because there’s always been this love-hate relationship with the media for me. The love part of it is showing me in my truest form. And the hate part is definitely whenever someone wants to mischaracterise me. Having all of this play out on camera, at least I can look back on it. I’ve seen this the entire show, and I can pinpoint certain points where I’ve since gained a different perspective on my behaviour or a situation that took place. The benefit of it is that hindsight – except it’s not just 20/20, it’s also on your TV.

Most people don’t have these emotions play out in such a public forum though. Is there any part of you that just wants to be left alone by the cameras, and by people like me?

Thankfully, everybody has been so nice to me. I have not run into anybody on the street, or in person, or on Zoom, where the interaction has been negative. The fact that everybody’s been nice has made it a positive experience. It’s the negative comments from trolls on social media that’s the hard part.

You left social media at the start of the year and have since returned – how are you coping with being back online?

It was a much-needed break. Since then I’ve picked up a couple of better coping skills to tackle social media, because it really is such a horrible world that you have to have very thick skin to navigate. I am just as human as the next person the majority of the time, so I try to ignore it. But every once in a while, there’s that one comment that I do get wrapped up in and reply to. Thankfully, I have my family to fall back on, so we all talk about it, and we go from there. For the most part, I try not to look at the comments too much.

Outside of social media, there’s so much media out there about you that is totally out of your control. How do you feel about shows like The Act?

I still haven’t seen The Act all the way through. I’ve seen 30 minutes of the first episode. It’s really hard, because this was my life, so watching people recreate things that I went through is really hard to watch. Of course, you can always be over-critical of the acting or of certain things that didn’t ever take place, so I just try not to watch too much of that stuff. I just stick to documentaries that I know I participated in and that I feel do my story justice.

Aside from all this media attention, what has been the most surprising thing about returning to everyday life for you?

Time stopped when I went into prison. So the technology, the language, the slang that people use, everybody progressed over the last eight and a half years, and I stayed the same. Coming out to a whole new world where the teenagers have different slang, I didn’t know what a lot of it meant. I still say “cool”, you know, it’s like I’m still stuck in the 2000s. The phones are different, the cars are different. It’s like you step into the future, it’s a real adjustment.

I saw you just last week on The Kardashians. What was it like entering that kind of crazy media machine?

It was really nice to meet Kim. She’s very down to earth, and I was really surprised by that. She’s so famous, so of course I was a little nervous. But we sat down, we talked about prison reform, we talked about my experience in prison and the things that I would like to have change happen within the prison system. She is such an advocate for prison reform, and that’s an area in which I want to sort of break into. So getting to sit down with her and getting a few ideas to bounce around with her was really, really good.

What are your current plans for that advocacy work? Is there something specific that you are looking into when it comes to prison reform?

Hopefully I can get involved with certain agencies like The Innocence Project. There’s all these different people that come together collectively to sit down and figure out what the flaws are and what laws need to be changed. Of course, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know much about that stuff, but getting involved with the right kind of people is the first step.

And from your first-hand experience, what are those flaws in the system that you encountered?

I feel like there is not enough emphasis and help towards mental health therapy. When I was in prison, I was not treated as if I was a person that went through trauma. They said that I was not that bad. When I saw the parole board they asked me, “how are you doing? Are you in any kind of therapy?” And I was like, “with respect, your facility turned me down for mental health therapy”. I absolutely needed therapy, I don’t think people should be categorised like I was. If someone went through trauma, they should have therapy to work on that trauma.

Is that trauma something that you’re working through now, do you have access to those sorts of resources?

Yes, I’m in therapy, and it’s going really well. I give my therapist all the pats on the back for listening to everything that I have to offload.

Also, congratulations on your recent pregnancy announcement – how are you feeling at the moment?

So far that this pregnancy has been a breeze. I bypassed all of the morning sickness, so I didn’t experience that, but the fatigue is kicking my butt. But it’s been a really good pregnancy so far, and we’re just hopeful for what the future has in store.

How do you feel about becoming a mother yourself, especially with all the attention that will be on you?

I’ve entered into a more protective mindset. I’m honestly much more self aware about what it means – not only for me, but for my family and my future family with my child. What will my level of interaction with the media be? How will that play a part in this new role as a mother? Those are all things that I am taking very seriously. I always get asked, “how do you feel about being a mother when you didn’t have such a great role model in your own mother?” For me, I’ve learned what not to do. Growing up with a mom that was, you know, not the best, I have seen what a good mom is in my stepmom. I call Kristy the mother I always wish I had. People like her and my dad are great role models to support and guide me on this journey.

Am I also right in thinking that it is your first birthday out of prison this weekend?

Yes, Saturday is my birthday, I’m turning 33.

What are your big birthday plans?

I know that I’m gonna have dinner with Ken [boyfriend, baby daddy] and my dad and my sister and Kristy and maybe my brother. I think they have got some plans for my birthday, but it’s going to be a surprise. I might go see a movie. If it’s still going at theatres, I definitely want to go see the newest Planet of the Apes movie.

Watch Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up here on TVNZ+