TSwift Threatens a College Student, Spotify Pays Dearly, UMG Mutes Artists, Sports Bundles, and More!
Taylor Swift unleashes her lawyers on a college student. Spotify hands over $9B. UMG silences their artists and lays off their staff. Plus a (very) deep dive into sports bundles, and a roundup of news
Billionaire bullies college student with legal action over information that’s publicly available
From WaPo:
Taylor Swift’s attorneys have threatened legal action against a Florida college student who runs social media accounts tracking the flights of her and other celebrities’ private jets.
The accounts use publicly available data from the Federal Aviation Administration and volunteer hobbyists who can track the aircraft via the signals they broadcast.
Sweeney’s accounts fueled a free-speech debate in late 2022 when X, formerly Twitter, banned Sweeney for sharing what the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, said were his “assassination coordinates.” The accounts don’t say who travels on the aircraft or where they go once the planes land.
In December, Swift’s attorney at the Washington law firm Venable wrote Sweeney a cease-and-desist letter saying Swift would “have no choice but to pursue any and all legal remedies” if he did not stop his “stalking and harassing behavior.”
The letter itself is pure gold.
The lawyer, Katie Wright Morrone, said Sweeney’s accounts had caused Swift and her family “direct and irreparable harm, as well as emotional and physical distress,” and had heightened her “constant state of fear for her personal safety.”
“While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our Client,” Morrone wrote. She added that there was “no legitimate interest in or public need for this information, other than to stalk, harass, and exert dominion and control.”
Sweeney, 21, said he saw the letter as an attempt to scare him away from sharing public data. And the letter, he added, was sent to him when she faced continued criticism over the environmental effects of her flights.
Related: 💨🛩️ Taylor Swift Named Biggest Celebrity Polluter of the Year
“This information is already out there,” he said. “Her team thinks they can control the world.”
Fuck yeah, Jack!
The last time I checked, airplanes and airports were very secure.
Have you seen TS travel?
I HAVE. A small army of security and staff flanks her. Her “safety” and “distress” isn’t the issue; she’s not in control of this narrative (regarding her multi-jet usage and carbon emissions), and she’s desperate to change that.
She’s the biggest billionaire victim of all time, right after Musk.
And her bullying didn’t stop with a C&D to the kid. She employed a law firm to pressure Facebook and Instagram into disabling his accounts, saying they constituted harassment.
From LinkedIn:
Desiree F. Moore is a litigation partner and founding member and co-lead of the firm’s Digital Crisis Planning & Response (DCPR) client solution. She counsels high-profile individuals in proactively planning for and effectively managing crises of varying magnitudes, including data breach, education scandals, and celebrity disgrace events.
Celebrity Disgrace Events.
Facebook and Instagram claim they didn’t comply with the request but disabled his accounts anyway, saying they violated Meta’s privacy rules.
Cool. I think platforms should be able to operate any way they choose. Which means they certainly took down the other tracker that young Jack has on IG and FB, right?
Right??
Wrong.
The company has no such issues with privacy regarding Jack’s tracking of Trump jets and sharing the information on their platform.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Meta.
It should also be noted that there isn’t a single law that Jack has broken. That’s why the letters from the attorneys threaten legal action but stop short of doing anything about it. If he had broken any laws, there would be no C&D but an actual lawsuit.
A non-profit has now taken up his defense, which is good to know because while he hasn’t broken the law, Swift can inflict financial harm as he defends himself from sharing publicly available information that threatens her image.
Because, after all, she should definitely be able to advocate that her fans be more environmentally responsible while she takes 13-minute jet rides.
NINE BILLION DOLLARS
That’s how much money Spotify paid the music industry in 2023.
Two days after a solid report (602 million monthly active users) to investors that sent its stock up 8%, Spotify announced it had paid more than $9 billion to musicians and the music industry last year, its highest payout ever.
$9 billion represents 63% of the $14.3B total revenue Spotify reported in 2023. That percentage has fallen from around 70% in earlier years as the streamer diversifies its content to include podcasts and audiobooks.
The annual amount that Spotify pays the music industry has tripled in the last six years, totaling more than $48 billion since its launch.
So yes, there are problematic things about Spotify, but my biggest gripe remains with the labels who gobble up those billions and do almost nothing to develop new artists.
Irony
As I’ve said before, UMG pulling tracks from TikTok won’t hurt the big artists, but it will inflict a lot of pain on new artists who rely on the world’s largest platform for music discovery to reach new fans.
It’s especially ironic for those who were discovered on TikTok. Artists like Australian singer Peach PRC are mourning their channels being muted by the very company that discovered — and later signed — them thanks to their TikTok audiences.
Go Deep! A New Sports Bundle
Disney, Fox Corp., and Warner Bros. Discovery are joining forces to launch a sports streaming venture that’ll be a hub for each company’s sports programming.
Disney Fox Max+
Disney, Fox, and WBD decided to play for the same team.
The joint venture, co-owned by the three companies, will bring together sports programming from ESPN, ABC, TNT, FS1, and more acronyms than you can count on two hands.
Customers can watch games from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, FIFA, Formula 1, and nearly every other major sports league — roughly 85% of the sports rights market.
The still-unnamed service will launch in the fall, and pricing is TBD, but it’s expected to have a monthly cost close to Hulu Live or YouTube TV ($75 to $90 per month).
The service won’t stop each company’s independent sports streaming plans, such as Disney’s expansion of ESPN+ and WBD’s rollout of Bleacher Report, which will confuse some people.
The service, which will have independent management and branding, will act like a distribution hub for the three participating companies — it’ll license programming from the three participating broadcasters. According to Variety, the hope is to remake the affiliate fee market for streaming that’s been so lucrative on cable for decades.
Diving a bit deeper:
From WSJ:
ESPN, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery are teaming up to create a supersize sports-streaming service that will offer content from all major leagues, a deal that will reshape the sports and media landscape. The as-yet-unnamed service will be offered directly to consumers, who would be able to stream all of these companies’ sports content, the companies said in a statement, following a report in The Wall Street Journal about the new venture. Each of the companies will have one-third ownership of the new service, which is expected to launch in the fall. The companies didn’t announce pricing…
For Disney, the partnership with other networks adds to an array of strategic options the company has explored for ESPN. Disney is still looking for a potential strategic partner or investor and will maintain a plan to offer a stand-alone ESPN streaming app for those who don’t want the all-in-one bundle from the three companies, people close to the situation said.
There are risks to the tie-up. Disney knows as well as any the perils of a joint venture in media. It is now in the middle of trying to end its joint ownership of Hulu by buying out its partner Comcast, after years of difficulties. Also, the new service won’t include content from Paramount Global’s CBS or Comcast’s NBCUniversal. Citi analysts expect the new service to encompass about 55% of U.S. sports rights, according to a note published Tuesday.
A chief executive for the venture is expected to be named in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said. While no price tag has been set, it is expected to be significantly lower than the typical cable bundle, which often can run north of $100 a month…Subscribers of streaming services of the companies, including Disney+, Hulu and Max, will have the ability to subscribe to the new service as part of a bundle.
There’s a lot we don’t know, but there’s enough to make some quick points:
The most important takeaway is what this says about Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. Specifically, it seems both have finally understood the importance of managing churn regarding standalone subscription services.
It’s been an expensive lesson for them.
From Business Insider:
That chart is a dumpster fire of filth if you’re not Netflix.
Netflix, assuming an average churn rate of 2%, retains the average customer for just over 4 years.
Disney+, assuming an average churn rate of 5%, retains the average customer for 1 year 8 months.
Max, assuming an average churn rate of 7%, retains the average customer for 1 year 2 months.
The difference in time becomes much more pronounced when you multiply the time on service by the subscription fee; it becomes downright painful when you subtract the revenue gained from the cost to acquire the customer in the first place.
It’s always much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an old customer and even more costly to acquire a previously-churned customer who already decided your service isn’t worth it. But that last rule may not apply as strongly to streaming services: customers are already accustomed to dipping in and out, especially so for sports-centric services, which offer different sports in different seasons.
The solution?
Bundles.
If the customer always has something to watch, they’re not going to churn; not churning means not spending on customer re-acquisition, which justifies getting less from that customer per month than you might as a standalone service.
Think about Warner Bros. Discovery and their Bleacher Report sports tier.
It includes:
NBA
NCAA tournament
MLB
NHL
Hardcore sports fans may want all those sports, which extend year-round, but more casual viewers may find the limited inventory in any of them not worth the hassle and expense. But what if you could subscribe to one bundle and get access to a much wider variety of games so that you had something to watch any night if you wanted to?
One of the details yet to be disclosed is who is building this service and selling ads on it; I bet Disney is providing the backend for both. This privileged position is justified, given ESPN’s abundance of sports rights.
Warner Bros. Discovery must feel nervous about its rapidly shrinking bundle and dependence on traditional affiliate revenue. If Disney helps it pay the bills for sports rights that are not particularly profitable in isolation but still prop up other parts of their business, then that may be enough.
And then there’s Fox. Fox doesn’t have any genuine streaming service, so piggybacking on this effort keeps their sports rights viable. But sports rights tend to be inferior investments in and of themselves: they are best leveraged in service of something else, like Rupert Murdoch’s push to make Fox into a nationwide broadcasting network via the NFL. Fox, though, doesn’t have any auxiliary businesses that benefit from this bundle: they hasten the demise of their actual moneymaker.
It’s also worth talking (shit) about Peacock and Paramount+, which matter because they have NFL games. I take their lack of inclusion as further evidence that their executives have no idea what they are doing. Both services are subscale, provide minimal subscriber promise of ongoing content to justify staying subscribed month-over-month, and, in the case of Peacock, are in direct conflict with a key revenue driver for their parent company. The NFL, meanwhile, is not only the most ruthless in extracting every bit of value it provides from its contracts but is also only on for half the year! Are Peacock and Paramount+ simply going to accept that most of their customers will churn every year for half the year?
Whatever. This is an essential step to paying less than sports fans might have otherwise: bundles are a win for everyone, even if this bundle initially feels worse for everyone than the cable sports bundle ever did.
Usher is Culturally Relevant?
I read this interview with Seth Dudowsky, the Head of Music for the NFL:
AvA: Can you talk about the Artist selection process for the Super Bowl Halftime show, and the considerations that went into selecting Usher as the Halftime performer at SB LVIII in Vegas?
Dudowsky: For any event we work on we start with talking about what our goals are for a performance or for an event overall. We want to be as culturally relevant as we can. And with Usher, he’s been a cultural stalwart for 30 years. Re-inventing his legacy with his Vegas residency only adds to why this year is the perfect stage for him.
Okay, Dud-owsky.
THE NEWS DESK
Media, Music, & Entertainment
WMG is laying off another 600 (or 10%) of staff despite strong financial results.
Read More → wmgLive Nation increased its federal lobbying spend by 118% in 2023, from $1.1 million to $2.4 million as legislators upped their efforts to break up the ticketing behemoth. Read More → thehill
Disney+ has landed exclusive rights to Taylor Swift’s concert movie… and is releasing a Taylor’s Version on March 15th with five additional songs.
Read More → thrMinnesota Yacht Club Festival, a new event from C3 Presents, will feature Gwen Stefani, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Alanis Morissette; in St. Paul, MN.
Read More → mycfApple disclosed in a securities filing that Apple TV+ has driven an impressive 11% growth in its services division. Read More → theinformation
Fashion & E-Commerce
Six Air Jordans Michael Jordan wore during championship-winning games sold for $8 million at auction — the most ever paid for game-worn shoes.
Read More → forbesStanley is leveraging the TikTok fame of its big water bottles to build hype for its first apparel line. Read More → highsnobiety
Wilson has crafted a 3D-printed, airless basketball that’ll retail for $2,500.
Read More → fastcompanyAmazon may share its Flex delivery drivers’ names and photos with customers to help protect the drivers from being mistaken for home intruders. This comes after several have been shot. WTF?
Read More → theinformation
Tech, Web3, & AI
Roblox had 71.5m daily active users at the end of 2023. Insane.
Read More → roboloxMicrosoft is saying goodbye, Bing; hello, Copilot, as they go all-in on AI.
Read More → thevergeApple is prototyping a foldable clamshell phone.
Read More → theinformationBioscience firm BD actually invented the blood-testing tech that Theranos fraudulently claimed to have developed a decade ago.
Read More → fastcompanyMusicFX, Google’s AI tool has been used to create 10m tracks.
Read More → google
Creator Economy
New York has become the latest state to crack down on the algorithms that power social networks to break the addictions of teenage users.
Read More → wsjYouTube allows users to filter their feeds by the color of their thumbnails.
WTF? WHY?
Read More → thevergeBluesky, the decentralized X competitor, is finally clear for public signups.
Read More → techcrunch
