UK record labels enjoyed a 10.6% surge in earnings in 2017 to £839m, thanks to the digital popularity of a new generation of artists including Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Dua Lipa and Stormzy. It was the fastest growth since 1995, when Oasis, Blur and Pulp created a high-street CD sales frenzy. Music companies enjoyed a 45% year-on-year increase in subscription streaming revenue – from £239m in 2016 to £347m – as an industry hammered for a decade by illegal piracy now enjoys the success of music lovers turning to legitimate services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.
Author: Douglas McLennan
We All Depend On Online Recommendation Engines. But They’re Broken
Today, recommendation engines are perhaps the biggest threat to societal cohesion on the internet—and, as a result, one of the biggest threats to societal cohesion in the offline world, too. The recommendation engines we engage with are broken in ways that have grave consequences: amplified conspiracy theories, gamified news, nonsense infiltrating mainstream discourse, misinformed voters. Recommendation engines have become The Great Polarizer.
Entertainment Companies Reported Their Gender Pay Gaps. It Isn’t Pretty
Much of the media focus has been on the size of the salary gaps. But what really tells the story about ingrained gender inequality is the disparity in bonus pay (men receive 67% more than women at Warner Bros., 88% at Live Nation, 68% at Turner Broadcasting) and the disproportion of men — usually in the region of 70% — in the upper quartile of earners.
Washington’s Holocaust Museum Announces Billion-Dollar Fundraising Goal
The fundraising goal is gutsy for an organization of the Holocaust Museum’s size and relative youth. Its operating expenses were $116 million in 2016, according to tax filings that reported a federal grant of $53 million. In comparison, the Smithsonian Institution, which completed a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign last year, reported its annual budget at about $1.3 billion, or 13 times that of the Holocaust Museum.
Why Is It So Difficult For Women Artists To Get The Attention They’re Due?
One of the biggest stories in the art world in the past two or three years has been the rapidly growing number of female artists who are getting solo shows, career surveys and retrospectives at well-known museums. But at America’s biggest and most prestigious museums, the pace of change can seem dismayingly slow.
Trying To Get A Better Understanding Of Consciousness
“Some say the gap—between nerve cells and life, the brain and the mind, objective reality and the subjective—will never be understood, because such understanding is beyond our human capacity. But I think it is possible to answer the question of how the brain becomes the mind. We just need to change our thinking.”
Pleasure Junkies – Scientists Argue Over Our Responses To Art (and Porn)
Julia F. Christensen, a neuroscientist at the The Warburg Institute at the University of London who studies people’s responses to dance choreography, argued that many of us have been turned into “mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot” provided by social media, pornography and sugar. She offered up an unconventional solution: art, which she says engages us in ways these other pleasures do not and can “help overwrite the detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving.”
Ode To The Magic Of Libraries
The census of American libraries spans a wonderful diversity of institutions, from modest municipal book rooms and mobile libraries to the grand collections of such hallowed places as the Morgan, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Smithsonian. Surveys of library users reveal a passionate attachment to these institutions, one that is voiced in very human terms. The word love is an emotion often expressed toward libraries, and not just for National Library Week. Libraries are places in which people are born—as authors, readers, scholars, and activists. (Think Eudora Welty, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and Ian Rankin.)
A New Golden Age For The Irish Novel?
There is an expectation of what the Irish novel should look like, the themes explored and the style in which it’s delivered. And it’s not that our present day authors are moving away from tradition but they’re doing what Irish literature does best: challenging style and subject matter. The result is a literary age that is full of possibility.
Two Tween “Franchise” Plays Break Broadway Box Office Records
The Harry Potter play, based on a new story by author J.K. Rowling in collaboration with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, announced Monday that it had set a Broadway record for the strongest preview grosses: $2.1 million in ticket sales for the week ending Sunday at the Lyric Theatre. The Potter news came on the same day that Disney Theatrical Productions announced that its stage musical adaptation of “Frozen” had broken a house record at the St. James Theatre for the second week in a row. After grossing $2,246,997 for the week ending April 1, “Frozen” went on to gross $2,275,395 the following week.