The new chair of the FTC and antitrust 2.0

Article | April 7, 2020

If that does happen, Cinemark and AMC Entertainment might reopen their theaters for the traditional blockbuster summer movie season. AMC CEO Adam Aron hopes customers can return by mid-June, and analysts at B. Riley even upgraded Cinemark to a buy and noted the company should be able to "control cash flow and get through this shutdown period without any adverse liquidity events."

MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

Article | April 7, 2020

The market disconnect between the proliferation of independent content creators and the consolidation of brand IP into the hands of ever-fewer major players is growing increasingly stark. On the one hand, independent artists are the fastest-growing sector of the music market. User-generated content (UGC) has proved a huge success during lockdown for the likes of TikTok and Roblox. The traditional brand celebrity spokesperson has ceded ground to the influencer, and even they to the micro-influencer. Content proliferation has driven increasingly niche content to niche audiences, finding smaller fan bases to resonate with instead of attempting the now nigh-impossible cut-through to mainstream popularity. This is the paradox of small: the long tail accounts for a growing share of content consumption, but the fractional economics of on-demand environments means that those in the long tail earn too little to be economically sustainable. Access to the means of distribution may have been democratised, but access to meaningful rights income has not.

Article | April 7, 2020

Sometimes the statistics around how many people are streaming music – and how many are paying for it – can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Recently, for example, we’ve seen one story suggesting that Amazon was “on course to overtake Apple Music” based on comparing an Amazon figure from January 2020 with one from Apple that hadn’t been updated since June 2019. Another story claimed that “Pandora has overtaken Apple for second spot” in subscriber rankings, which mistakenly compared the former’s number of active listeners (most of whom don’t pay) to the latter’s paid subscriber count.

Article | April 7, 2020

PlayStation 5 event date was previously postponed due to the intolerance and injustice that plagued the USA. While Sony lead the way, as a beacon of solidarity, several other companies followed. At that time, the best people could do is stand beside one another. However, recently some of the features of PS 5 were revealed. An advertisement on Twitch, along with an official post from PlayStation, confirmed the event date. Scheduled on June 11th, one can expect people to be extremely hyped up for this. The fact that everyone had to wait too long for PS 5 makes this news much more exciting.