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In other news... Spotify audio-books it to the library, Airbnb tries to get its house in order, and a new AI wearable remembers everything you say.
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ENTERTAINMENT
Once upon a Spotify… // Illustration by Kate Walker
Spotify opens a premium library
The Future. After taking the podcast industry by storm, Spotify is pushing in the chips on its nascent audiobooks business, including a free set amount of listening time to current premium subscriptions. While the novel approach to giving users access to audiobooks may send users rushing to the proverbial digital bookshelves (and send Spotify’s stock soaring), it could also upend the literary business in the same way streaming changed music forever.
Storytime
Spotify is offering 15 hours of audiobook content each month to premium subscribers — now available in Britain and Australia and rolling out in the US this winter.
While hours seem like an odd metric, the average audiobook lasts seven to ten hours, so users are essentially getting one to two books as part of their subscriptions.
If users want more, they can pay an additional $10.99 for ten more hours of audiobook content — an improvement on Spotify’s previous à la carte method.
And subscribers will have plenty to choose from — Spotify inked deals with the five big US publishers and hundreds of smaller ones, giving users access to over 150,000 titles.
Spotify has told publishers and authors the audiobooks will be given the full music treatment — algorithmic recommendations to users, promotion possibilities tied to podcasts, and demographic breakdowns of listeners.
But while that puts a lot of access and data in the hands of authors and publishers, many are worried the hours metric and payment model (publishers are paid royalties on titles by how many hours they’ve listened to) could devalue their work and ultimately hurt compensation.
Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor and a former executive at Google and Apple, compares this to how iTunes revolutionized music sales by teaching people to pay $0.99 for specific songs instead of purchasing the whole album — pay for what you want to consume, not what the artist wants you to consume.
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HOUSING
Rebuilding // Illustration by Kate Walker
Airbnb CEO thinks the company needs a renovation
The Future. CEO Brian Chesky says Airbnb is working on a raft of updates to get its “house in order.” The evolution comes just as the company has faced a mix of guest criticisms, host complaints, city regulations, and a changing culture around travel. While Airbnb may strengthen its service with the fixes, it may have no choice but to scale down to stay sustainable, too.
Fixer upper
Airbnb’s revamp focuses on “five common pain points,” according to Bloomberg.
Strengthening the core. Chesky says the company needs to ensure “consistency and reliability,” especially now that the company has scaled so much. That means uniform standards that still allow host individuality and a stronger customer-support system.
Lowering prices. This means not just cutting rental costs but also curbing the derided cleaning fees (and laundry-running and toilet-cleaning mandates). Airbnb is adding up-front, all-in pricing for guests and dynamic-pricing insights for hosts.
Controlling quality. Leveraging AI, Airbnb wants to ensure rental listings actually match with the physical location (a growing scam), so it can flag questionable properties. It also wants to use the tech to catch potential partiers (an enduring problem).
Rewarding loyalty. This is still a long way off, but Chesky wants the offering to encompass more than discounts — he wants the offering to make the main service even better for guests.
Supercharging experiences. As big-ticket cities like NYC kneecap the service, Airbnb wants to offer tour-guide-esque experiences that still give the company a presence and hosts another way to make money.
Chesky says Airbnb isn’t stopping there, hinting another major upgrade is set to be unveiled sometime next month. Maybe it’ll include something about the new tourist tolls popping up throughout Europe…
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Why not invest in a real estate portfolio where everyone wins?
Roots is the real estate fund disrupting industry stereotypes. And you know we’re all about innovation.
So, we checked out Roots — specifically how it’s creating a win-win ecosystem between landlords and residents.
Here’s the model:
You invest in the fund (get started with as little as $100)
Roots buys properties, fixes them up, and rents them out
Renters get invested in the fund for paying on time, taking care of the property, and being good neighbors
And it works. The fund is up 36% since July 2021.
At the end of the day, Roots is the only REIT that understands residents, pays their bills, lets them know when a leaky faucet could turn into future mold, and impacts the rentability of a property.
Roots also offers liquidity every quarter. Oh, and did we mention? You can get started for just $100 in only five minutes.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Courtesy of RewindAI
The Rewind Pendant keeps tabs on everything you say and hear
The Future. An upcoming wearable AI device wants to give people the power to record their every interaction and store it in their phones — giving them an external hard drive for their memories. The device joins a growing slate of announced AI wearables (a portable projection device from Humane, a ChatGPT device designed by Apple vet Jony Ive) but may be the one that spooks privacy advocates the most.
Play it back
The Rewind Pendant remembers everything.
On Monday, RewindAI co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker announced the $59 item — a device worn around the neck that “captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts, and stores it entirely locally on your phone.”
The Rewind app then uses AI to generate insights from the data and build a searchable database for users.
Siroker says the device will come with a feature that makes sure no one is recorded without giving their consent… but didn’t elaborate on how that could be achieved.
Unsurprisingly, the Rewind Pendant drew some passionate reactions, with Complex compiling a list of hilarious takes and more than one person noting the device was reminiscent of the all-capturing tech in the Black Mirror episode, “The Entire History of You.”
Spoiler alert for that episode: being able to pull up exact memories can have some innovative consequences. So… recall with caution.
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WFH, GFH (gift from home)
Even though many of us go into an office a few times a week now, we all know the bulk of the work gets done at home. Coordinating a group gift (for baby showers, birthdays, etc.) is easier to figure out from home, too.
Meet GroupTogether — the platform that lets you get everyone together (not IRL) to collect money and sign a card so you can send coworkers great gifts from the whole team.
Here’s how it works:
CREATE: Invite people to join your group gift or card via Whatsapp, email, or SMS
COLLECT: Share a safe link so your friends can click to pay and sign the card
GIFT: Make someone’s day with one of 150 eGift Cards or let them pick their own
It’s free and easy to use, so start gifting!
P.S. Happy belated birthday to our co-founder, Paul! We got your gift using GroupTogether ;)
Highlights
The best curated daily stories from around the web
Media, Music, & Entertainment
According to Whip Media’s 2023 Streaming Satisfaction Report, Max pulled in the greatest customer satisfaction for the second year in a row, while Disney can boast that Hulu and Disney+ came in #2 and #3, respectively. Read more → variety
Amid the post-writers-strike scheduling chaos in Hollywood, talent discovery platform Husslup is launching a staffing tool for the entertainment industry to ambitiously keep track of who’s hired on what project across every position. Read more → deadline
The era of the very long album continues as Kid Cudi announces his upcoming INSANO will have over 40 tracks. Read more → hypebeast
Fashion & E-Commerce
Axiom Space is collabing with Prada on the spacesuits for NASA’s 2025 Artemis lunar mission. Read more → engadget
Soho House has opened a proprietary clubhouse in Mexico City — its first-ever location in Latin America. Read more → hypebeast
Swiftonomics: after Taylor Swift wore New Balance 550s to the Chiefs game on September 24th, sales immediately increased by 22%. Read more → complex
Tech, Web3, & AI
Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, is raising $2 billion from Google right on the heels of a $1.5 billion investment infusion from Amazon — opening a proxy war with OpenAI-backer Microsoft. Read more → theinformation
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, a big investor in AI, says artificial general intelligence (a system able to match human intelligence and reasoning) will surpass all human knowledge in the next ten years (it sounds like someone is hoping for a major windfall). Read more → wsj
Meta’s AI-generated stickers are definitely NSFW. Read more → theverge
Creator Economy
Artifact, a new social app from the Instagram founders, now lets users generate AI images to accompany their text posts. Read more → techcrunch
The hot new online trend is generating your own 90s high school yearbook photos using the EPIK — AI Photo Editor app. Read more → fastcompany
X Social Media, an ad agency, is suing Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, in federal court. Read more → theverge
JOBS OF THE WEEK
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Frankfurt, DEU
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.