Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Farhad is off this week, so Kevin Roose, a Times business columnist, filled in.
Mike: Ahoy, Mr. Roose! As usual, Farhad is off gallivanting somewhere in the wilderness instead of working. I think he’s at a family reunion, which I like to imagine is just a room full of Farhads, wondering things aloud to each other instead of on Twitter.
Kevin: Family reunion! What a quaint, old-school idea. Imagine meeting your relatives in the flesh, rather than just seeing their embarrassing comments on your Facebook posts and promptly hiding them from your feed.
You know, this newsletter could also be considered a family reunion of sorts, given that you and I once bonded over a very intense game of Settlers of Catan. (Reader, I won.) Anyway, it’s great to be here, and I look forward to dunking on you in Farhad’s absence.
Mike: Hmm, I may come to regret this decision. O.K., on with the show!
So this was kind of an insane week in tech news, which is something I’ve grown accustomed to saying regularly in 2017. Over at Pandora, the chief executive stepped down, marking the end of an era for the struggling music company. It’s hard out there for a streaming music service when Pandora’s original offering has already been overtaken and subsumed into the stuff Spotify and Apple Music offer, but with even more perks alongside of it.
An aside: Jay Z dropped his new album, “4:44,” on Friday at midnight. Half my Twitter feed was filled with people lauding it, so I decided to sign up for Tidal, the streaming music service owned by Jay Z, to listen to the album. Right now, Tidal has an exclusive on the album, which is a smart way for Jay Z to get more people to sign up for his service, which is far less popular than Spotify or Apple Music.
But then I got this notification, which told me that I couldn’t listen to the new album if I signed up for a free trial of Tidal after the record was released. Apparently you have to be either an existing subscriber or a Sprint customer to listen to it.
It made me so mad I immediately canceled my subscription. Why is the music industry so broken, man? I can’t deal with it.
Kevin: I believe the technical music industry term for what happened to you is “playing yourself.”
But you’re not wrong — the entire business model of music streaming services is wild, as evidenced by the fact that even Spotify, the most successful streaming service in existence, lost more than $600 million last year. $600 million!
The only reason this business works at all is because investors keep pouring billions of dollars into it, in hopes these companies will eventually make money and pay them back. So basically, we have venture capitalists to thank for our infinite supply of Justin Bieber covers.
Mike: Well, I still feel awful, but at least I know I can still blame V.C.s for most of my life’s problems.
In other news, an insane and scary new malware attack spread quickly to infect many institutional networks this week, which…