New numbers from NPD confirm what we’ve known for a while: The first quarter of 2020 was a very good one for gaming companies. The primary driver is, you guessed it, COVID-19. As stay at home orders have been enacted on the federal and state levels, people are coping with the ongoing daily horror that is life in 2020 by playing video games. Lots and lots of video games.
Source: US video game sales have record quarter as consumers stay at home
Music creation marketplace Splice – whose music production platform is used by more than 3 million people – has acquired tech firm Superpowered, which powers the audio for thousands of apps that, it claims, have been installed billions of times. Founded by Patrick Vlaskovits and Gabor Szanto, Superpowered has previously raised financing from investors like TechStars Music and counts key clients such as Tencent, Beatport and others.
Success for Disney has long been defined by its enormous box-office grosses, like the $2.8 billion earned by “Avengers: Endgame.” But now, as CEO Bob Chapek put it last week, its Disney+-Hulu-ESPN+ division is “our company’s top priority and the key to our growth,” where the metrics are less dollars and cents and more subscriber growth and social media clout.
Source: ‘Hamilton’ Is the Surest Way for Disney+ to Challenge Netflix at the Event-Streaming Game
Profits at Sony’s pictures division, which spans film, TV content and channels, climbed from $489 million in the previous financial year to $628 million in the year to March 2020. Revenues at the division climbed from $8.87 billion to $9.32 billion. That stood in contrast to the sharply slowing figures at group level.
Source: Sony Pictures Profits Climb to $628 Million As Group Earnings Slide
Source: WSJ News Exclusive | LiveXLive to Join Podcast Fray With PodcastOne Acquisition
Even the most optimistic predictions don’t foresee any traditional concerts returning until late this year at the very soonest, and realistically, it will be at least 18 to 24 months before arena-sized crowds gather — if anyone can find an arena’s worth of people who dare. So where does that leave the live-music industry?
Source: What’s Next for Lockdown Live Music? Pay-Per-View Tours, Crowdless Concerts, Virtual Merch and More
Last year at this time, Disney was celebrating the record-breaking arrival of “Avengers: Endgame” in theaters. On Tuesday, with movie theaters closed worldwide, along with theme parks, Disney said that its quarterly profit fell more than 90 percent. And that was for a period that was only partly affected by the coronavirus.
Source: Disney Takes a Pandemic Hit, and There’s Worse to Come
Slow Ventures, a VC firm focused on the tech space, is launching a new product to help creators more easily monetize their live streams. While Slow doesn’t typically serve as an incubator, it has been readying a new product in the wake of the lockdown across California that is bound to have a special resonance at this moment in time. LiveStack is a platform that enables any creator to set ticket prices and subsequently host a live broadcast.
Deadline was slipped a net profit participant sheet on “Yesterday” showing the movie is still in the red by as much as $88 million, despite an estimated profit of $45 million for the studio. A net profit participant sheet specifically shows the film’s profitability in regard to a person’s specific deal, and it’s often loaded with heavy expenses that aren’t necessarily subtractions to a film’s bottom line, rather just to that specific participant’s deal.
Source: ‘Yesterday’ Net Profit Statement Shows It’s The Same Old Song On Hollywood Accounting
The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and SAG-AFTRA have distributed $62 million to musicians from their Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund (IPRDF). The Fund secures owed royalty payments (from “non-interactive digital streaming providers”) on behalf of non-featured performers, including session vocalists and musicians. This $62 million payout is the largest that the Fund has produced since being established in 2008.
Source: SAG-AFTRA and AFM Distribute Record $62 Million via IPRD Fund