AUSTIN, Texas—The biggest rockstar today at the music industry’s biggest get-together of the year was a Nobel prize-winning economics professor and New York Times columnist.
The most significant new detail about Apple’s long-rumored plans for an internet television service? Not the pricing, which channels it would include, or how it would actually work. It was this:
Twitter is experimenting with music again.
America’s most highly valued tech “startup” suddenly has no top bean counter. Uber Technologies chief financial officer Brent Callinicos is stepping down, according to an internal memo first cited by the Wall Street Journal (paywall). No replacement has yet been named.
Elon Musk’s Twitter game remains solid.
Nauseating demographic acronyms were commonplace in the baby boomer and generation X eras. Remember Yuppies (Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals) and Dinks (Dual Income No Kids)? Now there’s finally an acronym for affluent millennials, apparently. It is “HENRYs,” which stands for “High Earning, Not Rich Yet”.
Here’s what happens when you are a giant media conglomerate and you confirm plans to make a sequel to the highest-grossing animated film ever:
It wasn’t a great year at the US box office last year. Fortunately for the film business, international markets picked up the slack—particularly in Asia, and specifically, China.
A Los Angeles jury has ordered Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to pay more than $7.3 million to Marvin Gaye’s family after finding their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” infringed on the copyright of Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.”
The fifth season of Game of Thrones, which premieres on April 12 in the US, will be broadcast simultaneously around the planet.
Tesla has started 2015 on quite a shaky footing. Consider recent events:
This post has been updated.
The most valuable company in the history of capitalism—in nominal terms, at least—is joining America’s oldest and most prestigious stock index.
This post has been updated.
It’s hard to make money in streaming music, unless you are a rapper.
Net neutrality has only been law in the US for a few days and already it is creating an awkward situation for one of its biggest champions, Netflix.
You can expect to hear a lot more about the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable in the next few weeks as the US Federal Communications Commission decides whether to let it go forward. Here’s how the different sides in the debate are shaping up so far.
In January Netflix, the online video streaming site, used its quarterly letter to shareholders (pdf) to take aim at a rival. Not premium pay TV channel HBO, with which it is locked in an increasingly bitter battle for the best shows and movies; nor cable provider Comcast, with which it has squabbled over the future of the internet. Rather, Netflix’s missive called out a new adversary. “Piracy continues to be one of our biggest competitors,” it reads. “Popcorn Time’s sharp rise relative to Netflix and HBO in the Netherlands, for example, is sobering.”
Last week the US Federal Communications formally adopted stricter “net neutrality” rules that essentially will regulate the internet in the country like a public utility. (Here is a good, plain English explainer on what that actually means).
This week, FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, confirmed it would proceed with a plan to host the 2022 soccer World Cup during the northern hemisphere winter. It is a bizarre plan, for many reasons, and one that has already had a business impact.
John Legere, the CEO of T-Mobile US, gave a presentation to shareholders of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom—the American wireless provider’s majority owner—this morning in Bonn. It was the first time the US wireless industry’s most unorthodox, foul-mouthed, and all-around entertaining executive addressed his corporate parent’s investor day since 2012, when it was “pretty clear that I didn’t have the foggiest idea what any of the shit I was talking about was,” as Legere recalls it.
What if everything you thought you knew about the music business was completely wrong?
Hollywood is in a state of flux. 2014 was the worst year the US box office in almost two decades.
This post has been corrected.
