Matt and Ross Duffer are the brothers behind the hit Netflix show, "Stranger Things"; as part of our Cops on TV series, professor Kathleen Donovan connects the dots between TV dramas and our attitudes about police; there's a new battlefront in the fight for subscribers between Apple and Spotify.
Frank Ocean heats up the battle between Apple and Spotify
The release of Frank Ocean's album, "Blonde," is just the latest chapter in the ongoing fight between Apple and Spotify.
Spotify and Apple are two of the big players in the music streaming world. While Spotify has about twice as many paid subscribers, Apple is gaining fast and has some advantages when it comes to marketing. And that may be why Ocean ultimately decided to debut his much-anticipated album exclusively on Apple Music.
To get the latest on the battle between music streaming services, Frame senior producer Oscar Garza caught up with Lucas Shaw. He’s an entertainment and media reporter for Bloomberg News, and he explained the history of the tenuous relationship between Apple and Spotify, as well as why certain artists are driving the companies further apart.
Interview Highlights:
What exactly are Apple and Spotify fighting over now?
That would be for exclusive music. Apple introduced Apple Music last summer and in the year-plus since then it has emerged as the clear competitor to Spotify, which is the largest paid streaming music service in the world.
And central to Apple's strategy in adding users — beyond being pre-installed on hundreds of millions of phones around the world — is exclusive deals with top artists like Drake, Chance the Rapper and, most recently, Frank Ocean.
Spotify has routinely decried this practice, saying it's bad for the industry — that's in part because it does limit the availability of an album, and it's in part because these exclusives seem to have enabled Apple to catch up to Spotify very quickly.
But all these albums do end up on Spotify eventually, right?
Most of them do. Some artists, like Taylor Swift, are demanding that Spotify limit their new music to its paid tier. Spotify customers have a free option, which has advertising and most of the music, and a paid option with access to any music you can think of, and there are no ads.
But Spotify, to date, has refused to do [offer exclusives], and so they've missed out on some music. But most music goes on Spotify, whether it's after a week, or three weeks, or five months.
Apple Music has grown its subscriber base to about 15 million users. That's about half as many subscribers that Spotify has. But is Apple growing at a rate that has Spotify worried?
Yeah, I think that's the bigger concern. I think one of Spotify's executives said last week that they're up to 39 million subscribers, while Apple's at 15 million. But Spotify got to 39 million in eight or nine years, while Apple's gotten almost halfway there in little over a year. So that's what concerns Spotify.
And, Apple Music is part of Apple, which is the biggest, or most valuable, company in the world, and has a lot of money to pour into this venture and to compete with Spotify, which is private and depends exclusively on music to make money. Apple makes most of its money selling iPhones, iPads and other gadgets.
Is there any evidence that Apple is converting Spotify subscribers to its music service?
Most of the people in the music industry I've spoken with believe that Apple has brought in new customers to pay for music — rather than stealing from Spotify. It's just expanding the paid universe. That being said, even before Apple Music launched, Spotify has both publicly and privately accused Apple of anti-competitive practices.
Thanks to iTunes, Apple was once the most powerful player in the music business. The music industry was really scared about piracy at the time. Steve Jobs convinced all the labels to sign up to iTunes, and then iTunes became the dominant way that people interacted with music.
Spotify's been a threat to Apple because Spotify has in many ways replaced iTunes, it's a surrogate for ownership, and Spotify sees Apple trying to reclaim its dominant position and is worried about it doing so, because Spotify doesn't actually make any money yet.
Spotify doesn't make any money?
Spotify generates about a little over a billion dollars in revenue, but it's not profitable and its losses have expanded. Because of the way these music services are structured, because of how much money they have to pay back to rights-holders, it becomes really hard for an independent music service to be profitable on its own.
That's why you see a couple of the biggest players in music, YouTube and now Apple Music — subsidiaries of big tech companies — that view music as a way of selling other things. Spotify doesn't have that luxury. Music is its way of selling music, and until it can figure out how to make money, it's always going to be in a precarious position.
The Duffer Brothers on early failures before 'Stranger Things'
Unless you're living under a rock, you've probably at least heard of "Stranger Things."
It's become one of the most talked-about TV shows of the summer, and today Netflix announced what fans were hoping for — the series has been picked up for a second season.
The supernatural thriller is set in a small Indiana town in the early 1980s. The show has been compared to some of the great sci-fi and adventure films of that decade, including “E.T.”, “The Goonies” and “Stand By Me.”
Yet the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, were still in kindergarten when those films came out. So, who are The Duffer Brothers?
"The Frame’s" James Kim went to their offices to find out how they got their start, working together on set, and how their careers almost came to a stop after their first feature film never made it to theaters.
Interview Highlights:
On how they work with each other on set:
ROSS: As brothers, you still get in plenty of disagreements, but I think that generally we work stuff out.
MATT: We're not just brothers, we're twins, so I think we're maybe closer than most brothers.
ROSS: Right, we did film school together, we made movies together in film school, so we've been doing it so long that it feels.
MATT: And we do sometimes get sick of each other. [laughs] It's inevitable, yeah.
On making films together since they were kids:
MATT: We grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and we started making movies in the third grade. We just fell in love with movies really, really early.
ROSS: They were terrible, though.
MATT: Yeah, yeah, our first one was like an adaptation, a feature-length adaption of like "Magic: The Gathering," which was a card game we were into. [laughs] It's really, really bad.
ROSS: It's just us hitting each other with plastic swords.
MATT: We didn't have editing equipment, you know, we just were playing Danny Elfman music on a tape recorder. But it was very fun and very creative, and that's what we did every summer. We refused to go to summer camp, so we just would wander around and make these movies.
ROSS: I just remember that feeling of going out with our friends, we were all nerds, and we'd go into our backyard — maybe it was the woods, or maybe it was the middle of a tobacco field — and it'd feel like you're in the middle of nowhere. There was always this sense of, like, We're going to get into some grand adventure while we're out here, and I think that part of it was trying to recapture not just the feeling of what it felt like when we watched these movies, but also the feeling of what it felt like when we were kids and it felt like we were going on all these amazing adventures. Obviously, we didn't encounter girls with supernatural powers or we didn't find a treasure map.
MATT: We wanted to, though, really badly.
On their early success and failure in Hollywood:
ROSS: We wrote a script in college.
MATT: It was called "Hidden," and we ended up selling it to Warner Bros. So that was the first film that we wrote and directed together that nobody has seen.
ROSS: It sold in this dream scenario for someone recently out of college — there was a bidding war between studios, and it felt like we suddenly went from being unemployed to being in "Entourage" or something. [laughs] It felt like this amazing dream come true.
MATT: We had studio heads yelling at us, it was crazy, and we were 26, like, "What?"
ROSS: Yeah, it was unbelievable to us at the time, and then that ended up going from a dream experience to crashing and burning. We didn't know what the hell else we were going to do with our lives, this is all we knew how to do. We felt like we'd been preparing to do this since we were little kids.
MATT: We literally had no idea what else to do, we had no other skills. [laughs] And we're a little delusional, but you have to be, a little bit, right?
ROSS: But I remember with "Hidden," I was worried I couldn't even get a job at Starbucks.
On their first feature, "Hidden," and how it never made it to theaters:
ROSS: Looking back on it, for us, it was using that low point as an advantage. I don't think "Stranger Things" would exist without it, because it was us being disillusioned with movies, the things we fell in love with, and then seeing this other opening in television that, if we really want to tell the kind of stories we want to tell, maybe we were just looking in the wrong place.
Finding the imperfections in "Stranger Things":
MATT: I think we're very hard on ourselves and hard on our work. We're really tough on everything we do.
ROSS: Even when "Stranger Things" was finished and we couldn't touch it anymore, we saw all these problems still and we were begging Netflix to go back in and fix stuff. They were like, "Guys, stop, just leave it alone." But it was torturous, honestly.
MATT: It's still torture.
ROSS: It's still torture, all I see is the problems with it. [laughs] But I think that, in the end, when we're writing, eventually you have to let it go, but I think that it was us both learning to listen to our own voice and not worrying about what other people thought, and also just being our harshest critics served us the best.
Season one of "Stranger Things" is currently streaming on Netflix.
Study shows impact TV crime dramas have on perception of police use of force
This segment is part of The Frame's #CopsOnTV series about how police are portrayed in both scripted and unscripted television, and how TV can impact the public’s perception of law enforcement. Click here to see the rest of the series.
Separating fact from fiction in TV crime dramas, well, it isn’t always easy.
The most recent episode of This American Life features the voice of Tammy Burdine, a paralegal who works on civil cases for a personal injury lawyer named Jack Bailey in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her firm was assigned to a criminal case by the Public Defender’s office, but Bailey's firm was not used to prosecuting such cases. Here's Burdine in an excerpt from the episode:
If you watch the TV shows, the Law & Order, the Criminal Minds, they have evidence. We have evidence in the civil matters. So I assumed the rest of it was coming, maybe in a box or a big envelope. And it never came. It just didn't.
Her reference to procedures depicted in TV crime dramas illustrates the way fictional TV shows can skew our perceptions about how the justice system — and law enforcement — work. Even for people who work within the justice system.
And the majority of citizens don’t ever have to interact with police in a major way. So what many of us understand about police is learned through what we see or read in the news. But a recent study shows that fictional TV crime dramas also have a significant impact on our attitudes about police, specifically when it comes to use their use of force.
Kathleen Donovan has been researching this topic. She’s a professor of political science at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York and co-author of the study called "The Role of Entertainment Media in Perceptions of Police Use of Force," published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior.
When she joined The Frame, she shared her research about how most people form their perceptions of police.
Interview Highlights:
On entertainment media as an educational resource:
If people are going to be learning about the reality of crime then hopefully they're learning about it from news stories that are reflecting reality. What we brought to the table was the fact that, no, a lot of folks are spending a lot more time watching entertainment media than they are watching news programming, and they're getting a lot more in-depth stories. You follow these characters and you get invested. That leaves a mark on people. So we weren't going against the grain in terms of saying the media is shaping how people view crime and offending and the police. But we were adding to the fact that it's not always coming from sources that maybe we would normatively like it to be.
On the biggest misconceptions sparked by watching TV crime dramas:
By far the largest impact was on perceptions of how effective the police are. In the content analysis, the way police are shown in these shows is that they're incredibly effective. They're really really good at their jobs. The clearance rate is the official statistic used by police departments, which is that you make an arrest for a crime. These police departments in these shows are having clearance rates of 90 percent and above. The reality is that it's nowhere near that. It's no fault of the police department, it's just that crime is complicated. Murder, which tends to be the most popular crime committed on these shows, the police departments do have pretty good clearance rates on that 50-60 percent. If you're looking across all crimes, you're looking more like 25 percent. So people who watch these shows tend to think that police are a lot better at their job in terms of clearing crimes than they are in reality.
The other big thing we looked at was specifically use of force and misconduct. A lot of the shows were showing police officers engaging in force and the way that force was portrayed was such that it was necessary: the suspect is a bad guy, we just need to beat it out of him. It's almost always portrayed in a justified light. Again, not to say that the police department is not doing that, but that they're engaging in force a lot more in these fictional shows and it's shown as an appropriate approach. The ends justify the means. We also found that people who watched these shows also thought that these police officers were likely to use force only when necessary and that misconduct is not really a problem particularly when it comes to false confessions. So in general, viewers of these shows tend to have very pro-police attitudes.
On cops portrayed as heroes on TV:
The interesting thing is that these cops are often shown doing bad things, but always for the right purpose. One of my favorite instances in one of the crime dramas that was analyzed in, I believe it was the "Mentalist," where the main character actually kills somebody. He ends up spending no time in prison for this because it was somehow justified.
https://youtu.be/p8cgYEgRaos?t=1m51sIf you look, Gallup for example, asks every once in a while for trust in various institutions like the government, courts, things like that. And the police is one of them. The police and the military tend to rank very highly. Writing storylines like that is comfortable for people.
On the accuracy of shows and distinguishing between real life law enforcement:
I think that if you ask most people about crime dramas and whether they thought these shows were accurate, they'll say, oh I know that it's fictional. But the problem is, they don't have other places that they're getting this information from. They're not getting a lot of interaction with the police officers on a day to day level. So that's sort of what's at the top of their head when they're answering questions, these survey questions about police departments.
These shows, to some extent, have bolstered the notion that they are not wildly inaccurate. "NYPD Blue" used to tout the fact that the plot lines of their shows were ripped from the headlines...The problem was that those headlines were always sensational. That's really the fundamental problem here is that they're showing these really rare types of offenders and really rare crimes when that's not what the reality of offending and police departments look like.
On why the entertainment media shows mostly white offenders:
Pretty much all the survey data out there shows these big gaps between blacks and whites in particular. If you talk about use of force and discrimination in police departments, blacks are much more likely to think that's a problem or to perceive it as happening in their area than whites are. So in terms of the analyses and the paper, absolutely they are overwhelmingly white. Their offenders in general are fairly inaccurate in a couple of different ways: race is a big one and they also tend to be middle-class to upper-class. They often have stable jobs, seemingly no previous criminal history and they're either just a total psychopath or they think that committing a crime is a good solution to a problem they have. They're even too male. Females are overrepresented as victims and males as offenders. So it's skewed in all these dimensions.
But the race aspect is very interesting because other scholars have spent a lot of time looking at, in particular, local TV news. Some of those content analyses find that blacks are either overrepresented in crime news stories or they're portrayed in a more negative stereotypical light. Then we've also got these crime dramas in which all the offenders are white and sort of normal in other respects — like I said, had a job and no previous criminal history. What you were saying before about producers of these shows wanting to show police officers in a positive light. I think that same thing applies to offenders. If they were showing too many minority offenders that, again comparing to national statistics on race, are being overly cautious in trying to not come across as racializing crime. And — I have to give credit to my sister for pointing this out to me as she works in Hollywood — there's also a dearth of minority actors. They're underrepresented in Hollywood, so she said that's probably part of the problem too.
On the effect of skewed perceptions of law enforcement:
One of my favorite series of questions that I like to show my students is the Gallup perceptions of crime question. Crime has been going down since the mid 1990s steadily. Now, some cities obviously have had problems, Chicago being an obvious example. But nationally we live in an era that's as safe as it was back in the early 1960s and people just don't know that. Gallup asked them, is crime going up or down or stayed the same nationally, and people think it's up or stayed the same. That has been fairly unresponsive to crime rates. This isn't a problem just for the police or crime. It's a problem more generally for people understanding important political issues. When those misperceptions are informing attitudes on policies and choices for politicians, that's when we have problems. So it is a bit troubling, but, again as we noted already, people do overwhelmingly support the police so if I were a police officer out there I wouldn't be worrying about how they're being portrayed in crime dramas.