Lou Whiteman

If anything, I'd say long-term, they have less pricing power, but certainly they can continue this trend for a while because it's not unreasonable and it is a product people want.

I think AI can make a pretty good playlist for you, and I think they're doing that already.

That's what I was going to say.

These are mostly pass-through businesses, where a lot of the creation is out of their controls.

They are just a conduit for, in this case, music.

I do think that that holds up better.

I don't know, I'm actually not a Spotify customer, but I can tell you that my music service uses AI to suggest things all the time for me.

I mean, I do think the other side of that too is, is that arguably the creators deserve more here.

So one day there could be a day of reckoning in terms of profitability, but that's something we'll handle down the line.

It just seems to me that for every negative, there's a positive.

I don't know how much we can read into any of them.

Are we at risk?

Yes.

But I don't think we should take that as a prediction.

We should just take it as we're always at risk.

We like to think about this as binary, that either the consumer is good or the consumer is not good.

Really, what this is, is just the critical mass of every consumer out there.

If enough individuals feel confident enough that they can spend, then spending is fine and economy is fine.

If not, we're in trouble.

It's always just some mix, whether it's 70-30, 51-49.