The results of a late July poll on moviegoing confidence levels were alarming. The National Research Group survey, closely watched by studios, showed that the overall comfort level had tumbled from a pandemic-era high of 81 percent to 72 percent in the span of just three weeks amid the delta variant.
Source: Delta Variant Disrupts Moviegoing Comfort Levels as Studios Worry
Like it or loathe it, this sound tracking dynamic is likely to play a key role in what the future of music consumption looks like. But it is not all sonic dystopias; personalization, algorithms, user data and programming also have the potential to reinvigorate music passion.
One of the country’s oldest cultural institutions is now writing the book on how to adapt to a brave new world. Only a few years after being labeled a digital laggard, the Library of Congress is bringing its hundreds of millions of documents’ worth of history to citizens across the country in ever more innovative ways. The success story is one that other government agencies, from the federal level to the local, should consider.
This audio-subscription percentage has more than doubled since 2015, when just 23 percent of Americans said that they subscribed to an audio service. Worth mentioning, however, is that the figures — reported by Edison Research — aren’t solely indicative of subscriptions, given that multiple individuals could (and often do) share entertainment accounts.
Source: Nearly Half of Americans Pay For Audio Entertainment, Study Finds
According to inflation-adjusted data from the Recording Industry Association of American, total recorded music revenues in 2020 were $12.2 billion, which is approximately 46.2% lower than the industry’s 1999 peak-year total of $22.7 billion. That strongly challenges assumptions that the music industry has already completed its return to glory.
Source: U.S. Recorded Music Revenues Are Still 46% Below 1999 Peaks
By changing the way music sales were counted, SoundScan changed the way music was sold. It established a clear and transparent way to count sales that couldn’t easily be gamed by stores, which in turn changed the practice of tabulating sales “from a subjective methodology to an objective methodology,” says Jim Caparro, former president of Polygram Group Distribution.
Source: How SoundScan Changed Music, Driving Metal, Rap and Alt-Rock Up the Charts
IFPI and WIN, working together on behalf of the global recording industry, have announced that their global repertoire data exchange service (RDx), built and run for Repertoire Data Exchange Limited by PPL, is now “fully operational.” RDx provides a supply chain for performance rights data among record companies and music licensing companies (MLCs) to help improve the accuracy of revenue distribution to rights holders when their music is used.
Source: IFPI and WIN’s new data exchange service RDx now ‘fully operational’
Antiquated crediting systems are now wildly out-of-step with today’s tech-driven music landscape. But most crediting solutions leave glaring problems unsolved: plug-ins, for example, struggle with low adoption rates and serve largely as a temporary fix for problems that require permanent solutions.
Source: Muso.AI Partners With Music Story to Overhaul Metadata, Crediting
When we look back on 2020, Hollywood will probably think of it as a pivotal time for the data produced by such things as streaming entertainment and social media but data analysts and strategists have been working with talent agencies for years to uncover powerful opportunities for their clients.
Source: Hollywood Agencies Use Analytics to Create New Revenue Streams
It’s the first time that journals have guaranteed that they will accept the recommendations of another body with no further review, says Chris Chambers, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University and one of the founders of the peer-review organization, called Peer Community In Registered Reports. The service will add to the existential questions facing journals, says Jason Hoyt, CEO of PeerJ, an open-access family of journals that has signed up for the initiative. “What are you paying publishers to do, exactly?”