John McDuling

The music industry is in a strange place right now.

Twitter shares have nearly halved in 2014, wiping billions off the company’s market value and raising questions about its future.

DirecTV shares are down about 2% this morning, which is a surprise, because yesterday the company agreed to be bought by AT&T in a blockbuster deal worth $48.5 billion. In early-morning trading, the stock was hovering around the $85 mark, which is about 11% below AT&T’s bid price (which works out to $95 per share).

AT&T just confirmed it has agreed to buy satellite TV business DirecTV for $48.5 billion (or $67.1 billion when you include the debt it will assume as part of the deal).

Shares in��World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. are getting absolutely crushed today—the stock of the wresting and entertainment company is down 42% and now underperforming the market in 2014. That’s not just bad news for the Connecticut-based company’s colorful CEO, Vincent McMahon. It’s also dispiriting news for people who hope content providers will eschew their relationships with cable companies and sell content directly to consumers over the internet.  

This post has been updated. 

This article has been corrected.

Speculation about why Jill Abramson was ousted as the top editor of New York Times is currently in overdrive, continuing a time-honored tradition of the media getting extremely excited about itself.

Amid the current technology boom, big tech companies are flush with cash. And now we have new data on what they’re actually doing with some of that money.

Just when it looked like the New York Times Company was finally getting its act together… a huge personnel change comes along to shake things up completely.

By tomorrow afternoon, it will be a full week since reports first surfaced stating that Apple is poised to buy headphones-cum-music streaming operator Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. And the digital music industry remains utterly perplexed about what this rumored  transaction is actually about.

Maybe it’s self-medication?

It’s looking like the first domino from Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable is about to fall, with pretty much the entire financial media reporting over the past 24 hours that AT&T is closing in on a $50 billion bid for DirecTV.

This weekend we argued that Americans are finally beginning like soccer. Today, the US’s flagship domestic competition, Major League Soccer, inked its biggest ever deal for television rights.

On the hit 2012 album “The Heist,” by the Seattle hip-hop outfit Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis, the track titled “Jimmy Iovine” rails against the music business, accusing record labels of exploiting artists. ”We’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars,” the lyrics go. “After your album comes out, we’ll need back that money that you borrowed.”

No, soccer is not going to displace baseball as America’s national pastime, or American football as the national game, or even basketball as the country’s third most popular professional team sport.

Even among tech analysts, who have become used to multi-billion-dollar price tags for tiny companies, the news that Apple may pay $3.2 billion for Beats Electronics, a headset maker and fledging streaming music service co-founded by rapper Dr Dre, provoked reactions bordering on outright ridicule.

There has been a massive amount of hype about the Alibaba IPO this week. And fair enough, it’s the biggest IPO in a long time (it could end up being the biggest ever), and it involves a massive and mysterious Chinese company.

The Financial Times is reporting (paywall) that Apple is close to securing a deal to buy Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. It would be the biggest acquisition in Apple’s history. The FT says the deal could be announced as soon as next week.

Shares in Tesla are falling fast today (they’re down about 10% at the time of writing) after the car-maker’s latest results failed to impress Wall Street. That’s despite a quarterly profit that was actually stronger than analysts expected. (One analyst’s bizarre explanation for why the stock nonetheless fell: Sales ”beat, but not by as much as people expected them to beat.”)

Tesla just posted a quarterly profit of $17 million.

AOL shares are getting smoked today—they’re down 21% after the company reported weaker-than-expected earnings.

Competition in natural and organic groceries has intensified in the US, and it’s hurting the company that has long dominated that business—Whole Foods Market.

Richard Plepler, the CEO of HBO, had lunch with Steven Soderbergh today, and according to Plepler, the acclaimed director, producer and screenwriter had a memorable description for the premium channel. “HBO stands for good shit,” Plepler recounted Soderbergh as saying, during an interview at the New York Ideas forum (an event hosted by Quartz’s sister publication, The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute). ” That’s what HBO is all about. You do good shit.”