💾 Floppy forever

We probably heard the words “only on Spotify” ~266x yesterday during the company’s Stream On event — and we were happy to, because we did it for you.

So what went down?

Mostly, the biggest changes in roughly a decade to the app’s design: Now, instead of a bunch of album covers, the home screen will look more like an endless, vertically scrolling mishmash of autoplaying content from Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, and Audible.

• Spotify’s product chief said the new feed is intended to help users save time, but, as The Verge’s Alex Heath also pointed out, that “seems antithetical to an endless feed.”

Beyond music, Spotify wants to make it easier and more engaging for people to discover and consume the podcast, video, and audiobook content it’s invested in over the years.

The company also said…

… it now has 500m+ users; is aiming for 1B by 2030; is nearing $40B in payouts to the music industry; and now accounts for 20%+ of global recorded music revenue, up from under 15% in 2017.

2022 compared to 2017:

• 57k artists on Spotify generated $10k+, up from 23.4k.
• 10.1k artists generated $100k+, up from 4.3k.
• 1k+ artists generated $1m+, up from 460.
• The 50,000th highest-earning artist on Spotify made $12.58k, up from $2.84k.

Also neat: In 2022, 281k+ songs were streamed 1m+ times each on Spotify.

But it wasn’t all feel-good hits

On Twitter, many users said they just want the app to keep things simple.

The Future of Music Coalition criticized Spotify for bringing the Jonas Brothers on stage to announce new features when smaller artists are the ones who need help monetizing.

Others have questioned the early success of Spotify’s move into audiobooks, which has been hurt by the company’s predicament with Apple.

Want more: Check out our deep dive into the economics of Spotify.

Our latest video: How bad are private jets for the environment? Also, TBT to the time Kylie Jenner’s $72m Bombardier BD 700 took a 17-minute flight, making up ~25% of an average plebe’s annual carbon footprint.

Once upon a time, before the cloud, flash drives, or CDs were invented to store our files, there was a humble plastic square called a floppy disk.

Released in 1971, the floppy disk (which today’s young’uns might recognize only as the “save” icon) allowed people to transfer data and programs between computers.

Although the last major manufacturer, Sony, stopped making floppy disks in 2011, there’s still some tech that relies on the remaining supply, per Wired.

The floppy disk is still used in:

• Airplanes like some Boeing 747s and 767s, and Airbus A320s
• Medical equipment and embroidery machines
• San Francisco’s subway system 
• Chuck E. Cheese animatronics (but not for much longer)

Floppies were even used in the US nuclear weapons program up until 2019. And, they can be a medium for some pretty cool art.

While the world goes digital…

… one man holds his ground. Tom Persky runs floppydisk.com from a California warehouse filled with hundreds of thousands of disks.

• He sells ~1k floppy disks per day (3.5-inch disks are most popular)
• Almost 25 years ago, disks sold for as little as seven cents; now, Persky sells 3.5-inch disks for $1 each
• The site also recycles disks, completes data transfers, and resells used or broken disks

Welp, we said the word “floppy” too much and now it sounds weird. Here’s why it’s called that, BTW.