Emails, Tasks, and Meetings

The idea, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, isn’t to cut out the big music labels or compete directly with them by signing acts to recording deals.

Spotify does imagine, however, that over time, a growing tier of music acts, or small independent labels, won’t use the big labels for distribution. Instead they’ll work directly with the streaming service.

If that happens, the thinking goes, Spotify will be able to command better terms from the small acts and labels than it gets from Universal Music and the other giant labels. But the small acts and labels will end up keeping more money than they would have in the earlier arrangements because they won’t have to pay the big guys to bring their stuff to Spotify and other outlets.

During the HomePod’s first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day. Apple declined to comment.

Apple often says it doesn’t strive to sell the most units in any particular category and points to revenue and user experience instead. During the opening pre-order weekend, the HomePod grabbed 72 percent of revenue in the smart speaker category. 

But in February and March, its share of revenue slipped to 19 percent, according to Slice Intelligence, compared with 68 percent for Amazon. Google Home and Sonos Ones garnered 8 percent and 5 percent of revenues, respectively. (Slice estimates sales by monitoring credit card data, loyalty card use, e-commerce receipts sent to email inboxes and other information.)

Are you creating a writing culture? Said in a way that I think makes more sense, is writing a core value of the company (team)? I hope so because I think it really matters and can help.

Writing is risky. So what culture doesn’t value risk taking? If you want to be sustainable the easiest risk to take is sharing ideas through writing.

The first people to stop writing in a company are often those that were there the longest or the execs. Writing is important for everyone. Execs need to write, and do their own writing. Don’t farm out to others to fill in the details from an outline. Having others do your writing for you is for when you’re a head of state making speeches every day and for when every word matters, not for business writing even for the largest of companies.