Tag: alexa

Lullabies and walled gardens

There’s still a bit of walled gardens going on in the device and voice control space. About two years ago, in London, we acquired an Amazon Echo, and found that Alexa voice assistant could be used to play songs through either Spotify or Amazon Music, but not through Apple Music, which we then used.

And so, we got rid of Apple Music and took a subscription to Spotify. And among the things we would make Alexa do was to play the daughter’s lullabies on Spotify. And that is how, at the age of two, Berry spoke her first complete sentence, “Alexa, use Spotify to play Iron Man by Black Sabbath”.

We don’t have that Echo any more, and as a household are in a complete “apple ecosystem” as far as devices are concerned. Two Macs, two iPhones, an iPad and now a pair of AirPods. However, we had quite got used to Spotify and its playlists and its machine learning, and even though the India catalogue is nowhere as good as the one in the UK, we continued our subscription.

However, bands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden are critical for us, not least because their songs are part of the daughter’s sleeping portfolio. So we need something other than Spotify. And then we discovered that in India, Amazon Prime Music comes bundled with the Amazon Prime membership. And so we created the daughter’s sleeping playlist there, and started using it for bands not available on Spotify.

It was an uncomfortable arrangement, not least because Amazon Music is a terrible software product. Since family subscriptions are still not a thing with Spotify India, during periods of deep work the wife and I would fight over who would get Spotify and who had to make do with Amazon Music.

And then there is voice. Being in a complete Apple EcoSystem now, we found that Siri couldn’t control Spotify or Amazon Music, and for seamless voice experience (especially given I use it in car, using Apple Carplay) we needed Apple Music. And given how painful Amazon Music is to use, I thought spending ?149 a month on Apple Music Family Subscription is worth it, and took the subscription yesterday.

Since then I’ve been happily using it using voice control on all devices. Except until an hour back when I was putting the daughter to sleep. She requested for “baby has he”, which is her way of saying she wants Iron Man by Rockabye Baby (rather than by Black Sabbath). And so I held down the home button of the iPad and barked “play lullaby renditions of Black Sabbath”.

I don’t know what Siri interpreted (this is a standard command I’d been giving it back in the day when I used to exclusively use Apple Music), but rather than playing Lullaby Renditions of Black Sabbath, it played some “holy lullabies”, basically lullaby versions of some Christian songs. I tried changing but the daughter insisted that I let it be.

And so she kept twisting and turning in her bed, not going to sleep. I soon lost patience. Abandoning voice, I opened the iPad and switched from Apple Music to Spotify, where I knew the Rockabye Baby album was open (from last night – we hardly use the iPad otherwise nowadays), and started playing that.

Before Iron Man was halfway through, the daughter was fast asleep.

Voice assistants and traditional retail

Traditionally, retail was an over-the-counter activity. There was a physical counter between the buyer and the seller, and the buyer would demand what he wanted, and the shopkeeper would hand it over to him. This form of retail gave greater power to the shopkeeper, which meant that brands could practice what can be described as “push marketing”.

Most of the marketing effort would be spent in selling to the shopkeeper and then providing him sufficient incentives to sell it on to the customer. In most cases the customer didn’t have that much of a choice. She would ask for “salt”, for example, and the shopkeeper would give her the brand of salt that benefited him the most to sell.

Sometimes some brands would provide sufficient incentives to the shopkeeper to ensure that similar products from competing brands wouldn’t be stocked at all, ensuring that the customer faced a higher cost of getting those products (going to another shops) if they desired it. Occasionally, such strategies would backfire (a client with extremely strong brand preferences would eschew the shopkeeper who wouldn’t stock these brands). Mostly they worked.

The invention of the supermarket (sometime in the late 1800s, if I remember my research for my book correctly – it followed the concept of set prices) changed the dynamics a little bit. In this scenario, while the retailer continues to do the “shortlisting”, the ultimate decision is in the hands of the customer, who will pick her favourite among the brands on display.

This increases the significance of branding in the minds of the customer. The strongest incentives to retailers won’t work (unless they result in competing brands being wiped out from the shelves – but that comes with a risk) if the customer has a preference for a competing product. At best the retailer can offer these higher-incentive brands better shelf space (eye level as opposed to ankle level, for example).

However, even in traditional over-the-counter retail, branding matters to an extent when there is choice (as I had detailed in an earlier post written several years ago). This is in the instance where the shopkeeper asks the customer which brand she wants, and the customer has to make the choice “blind” without knowing what exactly is available.

I’m reminded of this issue of branding and traditional retail as I try to navigate the Alexa voice assistant. Nowadays there are two ways in which I play music using Spotify – one is the “direct method” from the phone or computer, where I search for a song, a list gets thrown up and I can select which one to play. The other is through Alexa, where I ask for a song and the assistant immediately starts playing it.

With popular songs where there exists a dominant version, using the phone and Alexa give identical results (though there are exceptions to this as well – when I ask Alexa to play Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, it plays the live version which is a bit off). However, when you are looking for songs that have multiple interpretations, you implicitly let Alexa make the decision for you, like a shopkeeper in traditional retail.

So, for example, most popular nursery rhymes have been covered by several groups. Some do the job well, singing the rhymes in the most dominant tunes, and using the most popular versions of the lyrics. Other mangle the tunes, and even the lyrics (like this Indian YouTube channel called Chuchu TV has changed the story of Jack and Jill, to give a “moral” to the story. I’m sure as a teenager you had changed the lyrics of Jack and Jill as well :P).

And in this situation you want more control over which version is played. For most songs I prefer the Little Baby Bum version, while for some others I prefer the Nursery Rhymes 123 version, but there is no “rule”. And this makes it complicate to order songs via Alexa.

More importantly, if you are a music publisher, the usage of Alexa to play on Spotify means that you might be willing to give Spotify greater incentives so that your version of a song comes up on top when a user searches for it.

And when you factor in advertising and concepts such as “paid search” into the picture, the fact that the voice assistants dictate your choices makes the situation very complicated indeed.

I wonder if there’s a good solution to this problem.