May Contain Editorial Content

Oh, hello everyone from the internet! This post has been updated as of October 21, 2014; see the epilogue section below for a follow-up and an important correction.

I love podcasts so much that I started one. And I'm also terribly picky about UX and UI, as you can imagine, so I was excited to give Marco Arment's Overcast a whirl. Downcast was my mainstay: its feature set was fine but it was just... kinda... ugly.

Overcast offers a free version, and one can pay $5 to unlock a number of features. The features include things like a smart equalizer and downloads over cellular. And like most podcast players, if you're new to the genre (or just looking for something new), it offers a directory. Overcast offers both a straight A-Z searchable directory as well as a curated selection of programs, called a “Starter Kit”. The curated selection is what I want to talk about.

The Starter Kit is broken up into categories. As I was scrolling through these lists, I noticed something: there was a severe lack of gender diversity in almost every category.

I was curious if it was just me or not. So I went into each section and identified any hosts or co-hosts whose names are traditionally female, and verified those that were socially associated with either gender. If a description did not include any names, I chose to count it as not having female hosts or co-hosts. Here's where things netted out as of August 27, 2014.

  • In the comedy section, there are 9 podcasts, and 1 with a female co-host (Helen Zaltzman).
  • In the tech section, there are 10 podcasts, and 1 with a female cohost (Gina Trapani).
  • In the stories & variety section, there are 7 podcasts, and 1 with a female host (Ophira Eisenberg).
  • In the public radio section, there are 8 podcasts, and 1 with a regular female host (Terry Gross). Notably, some shows such as BBC Newshour have rotating hosts of all genders, and some shows in this section routinely feature contributions from women.
  • In the pop culture section, there are 7 podcasts, and 1 with female co-hosts (Claudia Dolph and Audrey Kearns).
  • In the philosophy section, there are 8 podcasts, and 1 with a female host (Krista Tippett).
  • In movies & TV section, there are 9 podcasts, and 2 with female hosts (the Verity! podcast with Deborah Stanish, Erika Ensign, Katrina Griffiths, L.M. Myles, Lynne M. Thomas, and Tansy Rayner Roberts; Erika Ensign once again, on the Babylon 5 podcast).
  • In the games section, there are 8 podcasts, and 2 with female cohosts (The Indoor Kids with Emily V. Gordon, and Isometric with Brianna Wu, Maddy Myers, and Georgia Dow). (Please see note in Epilogue below.)
  • In the business section, there are 8 podcasts, and none with female hosts.
  • In the turns out section, there are 8 podcasts, and none with female hosts.
  • In the politics section, there are 6 podcasts, and 3 with female cohosts (Emily Bazelon, Brooke Gladstone, and Arianna Huffington).
  • In the health section, there are 9 podcasts, and 2 with female hosts (Jillian Michaels and Monica Reinagel).
  • In the Apple development section, there are 8 podcasts, and none with female hosts.
  • In the Relay.fm section, which is a podcast network, there are 5 podcasts, and none with female hosts.

Note: after I initially wrote this in early August, the “retired greats” section (with 6 podcasts and no female hosts) was removed and replaced by Relay.fm. 

So, out of 108 distinct podcasts (2 Relay.fm shows are listed in two places), only 15 feature women in a regular host or co-host capacity. The Verity! podcast has the largest roster, with 6 female co-hosts (and all talking about Doctor Who? I subscribed.) This is a disappointing number.

The Obligation

Overcast written by a prominent person in the Apple dev community - Marco Arment, in this case. I also couldn't help but think about Vesper, the note-taking app headed up by John Gruber, also prominent in the Apple dev community. With these two apps, at least, there is a common ground: they have editorial points of view.

All apps entail design decisions, but for users they've typically been confined to the feature set or aesthetics. Vesper didn't have syncing for quite a while, and some people were quite upset by that. Overcast can be criticized for its feature set or its pricing model, but since Overcast includes editorial content in the form of this podcast directory, it can also be criticized for its podcast selection.

The main issue here is: is Overcast obligated to present a diverse list of podcasts? I say yes. Here's why.

The directory screen opens up as soon as you hit the “add” icon to subscribe to something new. Thus, lots of podcast show art shows up right away. It's visual, it looks great, and it has a prominent position. It has a lot of power. Thus, it blows the opportunity to expose people to ideas and shows that they might not have otherwise heard. A lot of these podcasts do sound like they could just be Marco's favorites - there's a lot of Apple nerdery and so forth. That starts to feel insular.

Most importantly, a Starter Kit or directory is a natural tool to help with that insular nature. As I was noticing this problem, I also took a look at my own list of subscriptions - it was all white (!), and mostly men. So where would I turn to next, logically? The built in directory! And yet the tool let me down there.

I must note that searching, which is a feature in Overcast, does help with this a bit - doing a search for “women” or “black” brings up quite a few podcasts from people of color and women - but this is something I must actively seek out. The directory can help and should help, particularly given this app is written by a fellow white guy.

Notably, I tweeted @overcastfm about the origin of this list but did not receive a response. I also contacted Downcast, and was informed that their directory is sourced straight from the iTunes RSS feeds.

Making this Better

So, how can this be addressed?

One thing I must point out is that it's quite possible that the podcasting community writ large is white male biased. I haven't seen any research on that yet so, if you're aware of any, do let me know. If it's true, that doesn't excuse an app like Overcast from promoting and encouraging diversity amongst its user base.

The most visible and supportive idea is to seek out more diverse podcasts from Overcast users and feature them in the directory. This is good for Overcast and the podcasters too. For Overcast, it starts to shift the editorial voice to one of discovery and diversity instead of (arguably) insularity. For the podcasters, they get a bigger audience (so Squarespace will pay more for ads!)

Another way is to not have a Starter Kit at all. This feels like a miss, but it's also an option.Without a directory, no one is steered in any direction. Notably, the directory also makes assumptions about its users - like that they'll be interested in Apple development podcasts. This may or may not be accurate of the population as a whole.

One other idea: smarter categories. Something more customized would be great; Overcast could learn that I give a shit about women's rights and start recommending great podcasts for that.

Finally, the nature of placement in the Starter Kit is unclear; Relay.fm is an entire podcast network and has its own entire category. So another option is to offer paid placement and then get a diverse podcast category in the app that way.

Cloudy

I criticize Overcast because I think the app is good. It's not great, but it's good. I haven't been compelled to pay $5 for the full feature set, and a lot of that is actually due to this editorial decision - not the missing features. But that's the risk with apps that have more of a voice than just a feature set: some people may love it, and others may not.

Epilogue

I'm very happy to share that the great Erika Ensign, co-host of the Verity! and Babylon 5 podcasts, shared this article on Twitter in October 2014:

Shortly afterwards, it got to Marco Arment – the aforementioned author of Overcast. Details emerged, and soon the Overcast Twitter account put this call out:

That tweet was RTed far and wide and as such, the responses to that tweet have been pretty amazing on the whole. However, there have been a few people debating the usefulness of including women based on this article.

The great news is that the Starter Kit, as of yesterday (!) already has more women's voices represented. That's a good thing. It's good for Overcast listeners, it's good for the podcasting community, and as I joked above, it's probably good for Squarespace too.

I deeply appreciate the thoughtful responses from Erika, Marco, and Jason Snell (who compiled some of the Starter Kit), and of course, all the listeners. Here's hoping this is a first step towards a more diverse and more inclusive community for people of all genders and races.

Correction: The original article did not include Isometric in the gaming section, and I apologize for the oversight. That was an error on my part, and the original numbers have been updated above to reflect this.

Beats Control

This is a post in a series evaluating streaming music services. Have a peek at Me & Music, and cold Rdio.

I'll be honest with you: I had used Beats a bit prior to their acquisition by Apple. But once Apple bought them, I thought I'd give them another go. I was also simply interested in using different things day-to-day just to gain other perspectives.

Beats is better than I remember. It's excellent for music discovery - probably the best discovery experience I've had since Pandora 11 years ago -  but it is missing a couple of features I care about. It's delightful enough to use and has so much personality that I'm very tempted to use it anyway and just forgo the rdio features I really want.

The Sentence

Easy to love.

Easy to love.

By far, the best thing about Beats is The Sentence. It's a Mad Libs for your music, basically. I can choose a sentence like, "I'm in the car and feel like chilling out with myself to vintage soul & funk." This works way, way better than I expected.

I had come to rely on the simple love/hate ratings of rdio and Spotify, but felt they weren't really doing anything. Beats offers that too. But instead of a radio devoted to an artist or genre, The Sentence is the main way into a radio-like interface. (There are other ways, and they're pretty good too.) With this entry point and the love/hate, I feel like Beats actually kind of understands my musical tastes. This, despite having almost few items in my collection (never bothered) and going solely on ratings and an initial "tell us what genres and artists you like" with one of the most awkward UIs in the world.

The Sentence has introduced me to loads of deep cuts and songs I just haven't heard before. Whereas with rdio, it's gotten so good at predicting me that it just doesn't surprise me anymore on radio stations - even "Paul FM". Beats definitely tries more. Sometimes it misses, but sometimes it introduces me to artists I've never heard before - like Quadron. And then it's all worth it.

One nice touch to note: one rainy morning I started The Sentence, and each of the first five songs had "rain" in their title and/or in their choruses. I don't know how they did that or if it was just a coincidence, but damn, it was a nice touch. It at least gives the impression that there's a person out there on the other end.

Not everything is amazing with The Sentence. It's got a somewhat fidgety UI. The "blanks" for the Mad Libs are limited. And, I can't just save a Sentence for later use. Despite all this I love it anyway.

Silence in the Library

Well hey, at least the pause button is big.

Well hey, at least the pause button is big.

When it comes to using my library of music, Beats foists a good-but-not-great UI and listening experience on me. This is the area where Beats could do a lot better.

It gets simple management right. There's the ability to download tracks for offline use. I can love and hate songs and tracks. I can follow artists (meh). I can add things to a playlist. The interface carries over the "voice" of The Sentence and discovery features. This is polarizing. On the one hand, it's nice to see a different approach to the Now Playing screen. On the other hand, you can't see the album art easily, so too bad. You can see that most of the controls are as expected and stylized. Even though I have grown quite accustomed to seeing album art and only album art on the play screen, this is surprisingly functional.

Overall library management in Beats is nothing to write home about. I prefer to sort by artist, and I can do that. Each album and song is readily available to play and shuffle. It's table stakes.

Not Present

Beats falls down on a number of little, annoying things and a couple of great big things. First, the little stuff:

  • The music isn't equalized across songs. Some tracks will be VERY VERY LOUD and others whisper quiet. I thought we solved this years ago?
  • There's no way to pivot from an artist or song to a radio filled with recommendations based on your selection. (I see this as a philosophical choice, but I still miss it.)

But here's what keeps me from just using Beats all the time: the lack of a play queue, the fact that almost no one I know uses it, and on everything but a phone the experience is pretty shitty.

Let's talk play queue: this is elementary stuff. I should easily be able to line up a few tracks together and then tell the thing to go. I shouldn't have to bring in a playlist construct for this. rdio does this perfectly: you press a song, a menu pops up, you choose "Play Later". Done. It's perfect. In lieu of having a play queue, I didn't bother making playlists or anything of the sort; I simply listened to more music via The Sentence, or album tracks sequentially.

I rarely use the social features of rdio or Spotify, but I missed having something like that here. "Following" people on Beats is a part of the social aspect but it seems half-baked. And when doing a search against the people I follow on Twitter, not very many came up as options to follow; this isn't the case on rdio. (Clearly, I run with an rdio crowd.)

Let's talk about something that rdio gets right that I feel is so, so important: its seamlessness.

I can start a song on my phone, pause it, and then hop over to my computer and finish it. Or, I can control the phone remotely from the computer. This is glorious and is exactly how a streaming service should work for me. It's about the music, not the device; it transcends the technology.

Beats doesn't offer this. Worse, its player options on non-phone platforms out and out suck. The laptop version is a Flash-based (!) web player (!) that doesn't allow you access to your library (wha?) And, the iPad version is straddled with the same limitations. It's almost the opposite of rdio: the seams are showing. Beats is a phone-only service.

To get around this, I'd usually just forego control of Beats on my Mac or iPad. Inconvenient.

Missing Persons

When August rolled around, I concluded my time without rdio and signed up for the service once again. And you know, I missed using Beats right away.

A few weeks prior I dipped into rdio just to check if something was there, and its interface stood in stark contrast to Beats. rdio is clean, simple, and beautiful (even with its flaws). Beats, by contrast, was more brash, helpful, and opinionated. The color choices, the language in the apps, the interactions... these all contribute to an app's personality. And frankly, Beats just makes me feel cooler. rdio feels more perfunctory by comparison: if I was going to build a streaming service and hire a good designer, I would expect to build rdio. Beats is what would happen if I hired a great designer who really understood her subject (music!) better than I did.

Beats is simply more interesting. Despite its missing features, despite its terrible non-phone clients, despite its bugs, Beats got me more excited about finding new music than rdio almost ever has. That's all worth something to me, and even though I'm back with rdio for August, I'm not sure if I'll still be with it come September.

Cold rdio

This summer I chose to use other streaming music services in lieu of rdio, my favorite forever and ever. I wanted to do this mostly to see how good the other options were, and if I was really getting the best service for me.

Writing comparisons like this is hard. I don't want to book into checkboxland, where I'm just comparing features. On the other hand I've been let down by other comparisons that throw their hands up at the end and say, "Well, that's it! You pick one!" With that in mind, here's where I'm coming from.

How I Listen to Music

I listen to music daily. I listen to a mixture of music and podcasts during my lengthy work commute. I listen to music during my runs. I listen to music when I'm folding laundry and doing chores. And lots of times I listen to music, of course, when working at a computer. So for me, being able to access music on multiple platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) is a requirement. 

I like to think that I have a collection of music available anywhere, anytime. In short, if I think of a song I'd love to be able to type it in and play it without delay. I'd also like to have a body of songs and artists as "mine", so a collection or library is a must.

My listening habits gravitate towards either entire albums, or a bunch of random songs. For the latter, I enjoy having radio options - particularly if they provide all the controls I expect (including jumping to a previous song). I also really love a queue, because I might think of a dozen or so songs I'll want to listen to in a row, and then play them all.

When I'm listening to radio stations, I really want a mixture of stuff I know and stuff that I will like. Thus, a service needs to start to learn and understand not just what I like but why I like it, too. Plus it has to surprise me! Throw in something left-of-field because I'm okay with that.

Social features aren't important to me, but seeing what my friends and colleagues are listening to (like rdio offers) is fine.

I expect everything reasonable except The Beatles to be available, and I also know some artists won't put their new stuff on streaming networks. For them, I prefer to buy MP3s direct so they get the most profit.

When I started this experiment, I decided to try Beats Music for two reasons: 1, a lower price than rdio when purchased annually - and discounted at Target; 2, I had used Spotify a few years back and hated it. However, I chose to add Spotify to the rotation as well and give it another go. Note that I used the paid subscriptions for each of these services and not the free, ad-driven ones when available.

While I didn't tell myself I'd never use rdio during this experiment, I essentially didn't.

Cutting to the chase

rdio is the best. Yes, it offers the features and library I want but most importantly, it's a pleasure to use.

In spite of its significant flaws, Beats is my second favorite and a very close contender. The Sentence is far and away the best music discovery tool I've seen on these services, and the whole thing has a distinct personality.

Spotify is, well, fine but it's not for me. It feels perfunctory. It's improved a lot since I last used it, but using it largely felt like using nothing to me - in a not-good way.

What you should get

Now the hard part. I know what I should get. Between these three services, what should you get?

If you care about social features or want the biggest service, just get Spotify. If you want the best all-around service, try rdio and Beats.

Next up

In future posts, I'll break down each of these services and talk about what worked and didn't work for me.

My inbox isn't a to do list

Let's make something clear: I love email. I have always enjoyed getting stuff in the (regular) mail, and when I first started sending and receiving emails on BBSes in the 90s, it was truly magical.

For a very long time I treated my inbox as a to do list. It's easy to see why: most mail apps are very similar to task management apps. There's a list of stuff. It can be labeled and organized and flagged and tagged. It has a bunch of things attached to it. But there's one important component  missing for me: context.

As an example, I have an email in my inbox right now with the subject "Worksheet". It's something I forwarded to myself from my Gmail account, so it appears to be from... me. Given that, what do you think it is? Yeah, yeah, a worksheet. But about what? When is it due? Is it due, ever? Who is it truly from? What do I need to do? What's the first action I need to take on it?

If I don't get that out somewhere else, preferably in Things, then all of that is weighing down my cognitive load. I look at "From: Paul, Subject: Worksheet" and see about 8 different tasks I actually need to do. And in that moment it overwhelms me and feels like a block, a thing I need to take care of instead of something I may want to do.

In addition, the flow of what comes into and out of my inbox isn't controlled by me, not directly. I get junk mail (requires processing), links to stuff to read (goes to Instapaper), email newsletters (sits in the inbox... for now), and various messages. All of it requires some action, usually much more than "just" replying, and my email client says none of that. None.

Because of those hidden tasks, my inbox is a terrible to do list for me.

PS: about those tools

Obligatory: I could certainly find tools that aid in this. Back when I was at a company using Jira (shudder) I wrote a little AppleScript to process incoming bug emails and convert them to tasks in my Inbox in The Hit List (an abandoned to do list app). And yes, there are apps and plugins and things that will just go ahead and make your inbox a to do list. But for my workflow, I strongly prefer to treat my to do list as a separate item from the flow of email.

Bigger and better than ever

Since the web became popular I've scooped up domain names here and there, thinking something would come of them someday. In the early days of my own domain, I considered splitting phonezilla.net (my personal site) into two sites. I wanted to test out my creativity and see if it made sense to separate my journal and personal information from my art and work. It didn't.

I wasn't quite sure where that second site would go. I experimented. But there wasn't a real goal in mind.

Sometime after that, web stats packages became available and popular. The parts of me that love numbers started to love these things and realized, "Ah! This is one of the reasons I'm doing websites! Because visitors." Note that - not people. Visitors. Hits. Page views. Referrers. All of that became increasingly important to me to the point that reviewing my site's stats became a daily ritual.

It grew from there. How can I get more people to read my stuff, or view my web projects? Getting listed on Yahoo!, sure. Trying to get on Cool Site of the Day, sure. Just getting out to more people. Not necessarily the right people - just people.

Over time, traffic to my site picked up a lot. Many, many more people were visiting my site in the early 2000s than now. But because of where I was at the time, I let one particularly nasty and relentless troll get to me, and I took all of it down. All of it. I found a risk to putting one's self on the web: getting hurt. And I got hurt, bad. My ideas of numbers and connecting with people and all of that was blown away by one person whose goal was to make my life miserable.

So I didn't have a website for a very long time. Here's the problem: I missed it. A lot. It ultimately took me about 7 1/2 years to figure out what my website could do, and should do, for me at this point in my life.

However, numbers

I mention all of this because of numbers. That part of me that still loves to obsess over numbers hasn't gone anywhere, so I check the stats for my site regularly.

But there's a twist now: if someone I respect favorites or retweets something I post (and especially if it's a link to something I wrote), that feels very good. It has at least as much meaning as a big day in the stats tab, if not much more.

More importantly, I interpret that as a connection with someone.

And that right there is why I do this.

Fresh Start

Personal finance software is generally dreadful, but in my household we've settled on You Need a Budget (YNAB) because it works closest to how we think about money. It's not perfect but it's certainly quite good.

We've been lost in a sea of budget software and planning for a while now, but we're finally getting to a point where YNAB and long-term plans are beginning to gel. It's starting. That doesn't mean we have it licked, and that means we do mess up.

With other finance software, recovering from a mess up is hard. It means a new file and complete reorganization, or reconciling out the wazoo. This is something YNAB is great at because of a single feature: Fresh Start.

Lots of people start over to reorganize, or because they stopped using YNAB for a while and just want a fresh start.

Fresh Start is great because it's got a positive vibe about it. It's not a monstrous, computer-y thing. The app simply says, "Hey, cool. Happens. I got this." And it does. It's a surprisingly human and guilt-free process, notable in both the software and financial worlds. Beyond little things like animations and copy, it proves that some features of products can be warm and helpful.

A Brand New Way of Seeing Things

I'm struggling to apply this same idea to my current state of GTD tools. The things I've felt in the past - my brain has it covered - are returning again, and outside of using Things for a daily check on what's up, my inbox is a mess of dozens of items. During my run this morning I pondered why this was.

Part of it is that I'm afraid to admit that this isn't quite working for me. It feels like I've failed this system in some way and, in turn, failed myself. While I will forgive myself, it would be lovely if Things offered a way for me to recover from this other than blitzing everything away manually. That process of deleting all my items? It's painful. Each swipe is a tiny reminder that I didn't get that thing done either.

I attach a lot of emotion to this, as you can see, and I suspect others do as well. If we set out to do something one way and it doesn't work, the question is, how long does it take us to recover and try once again?

UX experts do not need to code

One of several never-ending debates in UX circles is, "Do UX experts need to learn how to code?"

My interest in computers started in programming, in part because one had to program in order to use a computer in the 80s. But it moved away from code to a point where I now usually just do CSS tweaks on a Squarespace site. I'm comfortable with this.

This doesn't preclude me from conducting research on and designing for the web. But if I didn't have that background, could I still do my job?

I say yes, but I'll add a caveat: for any given project I have to know the domains of the client and what they're trying to do. If I'm working on a web project, I need to know the conventions, standards, and expectations of web users. But if I'm creating the interface for an object that isn't on the web - as I had the opportunity to do earlier this year - those conventions are useless.

Truly, my experience from art school has been more valuable to my career in many ways than programming: my understanding of typography, the visual arts, photography, and writing has been instrumental in shaping the way I communicate - that is, the way I design.

So, I say that UX experts only need to code if their job demands it (that is, they're really doing UI + other coding). It's foolish to say everyone in UX needs to code. But it's fair to say that everyone in UX needs to communicate well.

Letters to the future

Many moons ago I found Futureme.org, and it's become one of my favorite things on the web. It still exists, it still works.

The premise is simple: write yourself (or anyone really) an email, set a date in the future for it to be delivered, and then... wait. It's like making yourself a tiny time capsule. I initially found it useful for little bets and predictions, but once my son came into my life I began to write lengthier emails about the way I was feeling at the time. So, it has become a nice alternative and supplement to my regular journaling.

The best part of the experience for me is that I've mostly forgotten about all of my letters, so when they arrive, it's unexpected. The farthest one out for me will arrive in August, 2031.

I just hope I still have my email address then.

Lower Prices, Crappier Experience

Last year I spoke about the risk of JCPenney when then-CEO Ron Johnson changed everything without any input from customers. As a result, the guy was canned and as I predicted, the clearance sales are indeed epic. (Their clothing from the Johnson/Wooster days was not amazing, but was certainly good enough and definitely fit well.)

So then, I'm enjoying said clearance sales. A month or so ago I wanted a new blazer, and I found one in store that I liked. I checked online and found it to be the same price on their site, but of course, they participate in the "everything is on sale always, every day, with coupons" phenomenon now; I played along and got a deal.

But here's the thing. The blazer exists at my local store (I tried it on!) but it was substantially cheaper for me to order it online... and have it shipped to my local store. Now, you'd think, "Oh, they'll just pull the one from the floor and offer it to you later that day like Target does, right?" Nope. My order went to a distribution center, and they sent a new one to the store. The same store where they already have one.

That's incredibly inefficient and bad for several reasons.

  1. First, and most importantly, JCPenney had me ready to buy in store and lost me. They could have had my money right away. Instead they made me wait a week or so. Thankfully, this isn't something I wanted immediately. Their loss.
  2. Second, JCPenney does not price match their own website. They're competing against themselves. Stupid.
  3. Third, they took on the cost for picking, shipping, and storing the item to the store. I don't know how much that is. I know they have built up this distribution system, and it now may cost them almost nothing... but this was unnecessary as they had the damn thing in the store!

In this case, JCPenney penalizes customers buying in store versus online price-wise, all for the sake of immediate gratification. And what did Ron Johnson do to combat this zaniness? He set all prices the same in-store and online (and with rounded numbers too, like $40 instead of $39.99). Simple. Clear.

Note that it didn't address any of the technological problems here - the poor e-commerce experience, the poor mobile site, the worthless app - but it was an attempt to address the problem. It failed. And while I know I got a better deal, I got poorer service and a worse experience as a result of it.

Face the Music

A few days ago I read that Sprint was partnering with Spotify to promote a few deals. Here they are.  If you're a new Sprint customer and get an HTC One phone, you get 6 months of Spotify free and then a discounted rate after that. If you're an existing customer you can get 3 months of Spotify free and then pay the usual 10 bucks a month.

AT&T has partnered with Beats on a similar offer. It includes a free trial and a discounted rate too.

I opined on Twitter the other day that these actions are the carriers dipping their toes into the so-called "fast lane" of the internet. These partnerships favor one store over another: if you use Google Play, rdio, Slacker, iTunes, or any other music service, the carriers will not give you any discount. Thus, both AT&T and Sprint are establishing these partners as their preferred music services.

If you're wondering where this could go, I could direct you to this corporate dystopian piece by T.C. Sottek, but instead I'll just point you to something that's already happening at Cricket.

Muve Music

Cricket, a regional carrier, offers Muve Music. This is not a new program, and Cricket's customer is a very different one (today) than AT&T or Sprint's. But there it is: unlimited talk, text, data, and music. Wait. Music? Yep. And while Cricket will happily cap your full-speed data each month, Muve Music is exempt:

...you can enjoy Muve Music, picture/video/audio messaging, and use of My Account without having to be concerned about your Full-Speed Data allowance.

While Cricket's Muve Music is nowhere near in the same league as Spotify or even Beats - though they want to be - you can see the pattern here. There's a carrier with a preferred service that just happens to be blessed with full-speed data outside of the "slow lane" internet. It's all perfectly legal, of course. And this is not a new offering; it's been available for a few years.

Choice

These combinations hurt people and they hurt competition. They hurt people in different ways. For instance, I can stick with rdio, which I really do love, and pay $10/month. Or I can switch to Spotify for three months and pay $0. The music libraries are likely similar enough for me so the cost to me is that my collection isn't portable (lock-in) and Spotify's UI isn't as pleasant as rdio's. Is that worth $30 to me? Not currently, but it might be to you.

On the Cricket side of the fence my scenario would be way worse. I could stream rdio all I want each month but my full-speed data - that is, everything I do online except Muve Music and account management - would be shot dead right away. I'd have to consciously plan out my data usage and load things up on wi-fi. That's a lot to ask for and, frankly, shifts network management from the carrier to the user.

Don't worry. Instead of that rigamarole, I can choose to pay nothing extra and so long as I have a Muve-compatible phone, not worry about any of it. (I'd worry about Muve's music collection, self-reported at 10 million tracks, instead.)

Competition-wise, Spotify, Beats, and Muve are all in favorable and dangerous positions. Favorable because they instantly have a competitive advantage over other streaming music services on their platforms. Dangerous (arguably) because it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to imagine Sprint granting preferred-speed status to Spotify ("rdio is slow? Too bad. Try Spotify, it's free with your plan!") and AT&T doing the same with Beats. Acquisitions then feel like foregone conclusions.

And then...

It makes business sense that AT&T wants to do its own video streaming service. It means an increasing amount of lock-in and loss of choice. It's something I expressed concern about at the scale of fitness trackers, but it goes all the way up to phones.

The carriers already have us locked to their networks. The carriers already have us locked to their phones (although this is starting to loosen). Add in the most popular services that people would want to use phones or tablets for and... well, we're back to this.