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Books like Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel ‘It Ends With Us’ are blowing up with BookTok influencers—and seeing huge sales spikes that often send titles to the top of the bestseller lists. ‘It Ends with Us’ has become what Atria’s senior associate director of publicity, Ariele Fredman, called “the book of the summer”—despite the fact that it was published five summers ago.

Source: How TikTok Makes Backlist Books into Bestsellers

Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.

Source: The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books

Dapper Labs’ CryptoKitties are seminal NFT crypto collectibles. While there are older collections (such as CryptoPunks), CryptoKitties were the first NFTs to be minted using Ethereum’s ERC-721 token standard, and their popularity quickly congested the network. Now, amidst the recent NFT market resurgence, some of the oldest CryptoKitties are in hot demand again.

Source: Remember CryptoKitties? Classic Ethereum NFTs Are Soaring in Value – Decrypt

On Wednesday, prompted by an investigation by the Japanese Fair Trade Commission, Apple agreed to allow some companies, like Netflix and Spotify, to direct their users to payment methods outside its App Store when they sign up for subscriptions. The tweak, coming after a similar change last week, was a strategic retreat of sorts, said analysts that track Apple’s business.

Source: Apple Gives Ground in a Strategic Retreat From Strict App Store Rules

Anghami is a case study in how the music business is being gradually transformed from outside its core centers of New York, Los Angeles and London. While the notion of a Spotify-like service from the Middle East serving the Middle East may not sound revolutionary, it’s a departure from how the global music industry has worked so far.

Source: Why an Abu Dhabi-based streaming app is the future of the global music industry

While global market leader Spotify still has a healthy lead — its most recent total paid subscribers was around 165 million, announced earlier this year — No. 2 Apple Music may feel YouTube nipping at its heels: Its total, last announced in June of 2019, was 60 million. Amazon Music, No. 3, was at 55 million when the number was last updated in January of 2020, although its service is bundled with the extremely popular Amazon Prime.

Source: YouTube Music Passes 50 Million Subscribers — Up 20 Million in Less Than a Year

The livestreaming gold rush is far from over. As live gigs and festivals return, the future for this fledgling industry looks rosy, as artists around the world now know that they can leverage the global reach of the internet to allow fans to remotely view their performances.

Source: How does livestreaming fit in a post-pandemic industry?

Fiction has been adapted into popular films and TV for years – but now there is growing interest in bespoke scores for novels. The Scottish micro label Bibliotapes has made literature-inspired music into an entire business. The label’s objective – asking musicians to compose new scores to classic novels – is an idea so simple it could almost be a happy accident. Stuart McLean, who runs it, suggests that’s the case.

Source: Writers’ notes: the record labels remixing novels into music

Total movie consumer 2021 spending will rise to $60.4 billion — up from $46 billion in 2020 — with streaming subscription video rising and theatrical business recovering, according to Omdia, the global marketing research company. This year’s totals will still be down 8% ($5 billion) from 2019’s $65.4 billion level.

Source: Television News Daily: Global Movie Consumer Spend Rises, Streaming Grows

Netflix is eyeing a more traditional theatrical release for some of its future films, according to a report from JPMorgan out of CinemaCon. Analysts from the firm, who attended the movie theater industry’s largest conference last week in Las Vegas, said they met with management teams from several exhibition companies who said there is a “real interest” from the streaming service to play some of its movies in cinemas for an extended period.

Source: Netflix eyes more theatrical releases in bid to have ‘bigger cultural impact,’ JPMorgan analyst says