Inflation-adjusted music revenue peaked in 1999 at $22.4 billion at a time when the CD was also in its prime. That year CD sales alone amounted to $20 billion, more than twice the recording industry’s total revenue for 2018.
From Tape Deck to Tidal: 30 Years of U.S. Music Sales
Statista.com
Felix Richter
Over the past few years, streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have revolutionized the way we listen to music. According to recent figures published by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), streaming, both ad-supported and subscription-based, accounted for 80 percent of music industry revenues in the U.S. last year, up from less than 10 percent in 2010. At $5.9 billion, paid subscriptions accounted for the lion’s share of streaming revenue in 2019, which in total amounted to $8.8 billion. To put that in perspective, all physical music sales combined amounted to just $1.1 billion last year, with downloads adding another $856 million to the music industry’s total haul of $11.1 billion.
Interestingly, the streaming revolution hasn’t been the first complete shift in music consumption over the past 30 years. As the following chart, based on historical RIAA figures, shows, vinyl records, cassettes, CDs and downloads have all been the predominant form of music consumption at some point in the past three decades, with the compact disc’s reign particularly long and lucrative for the music industry. Inflation-adjusted music revenue peaked in 1999 at $22.4 billion at a time when the CD was also in its prime. That year CD sales alone amounted to $20 billion, more than twice the recording industry’s total revenue for 2018. After hitting a low point in 2014, the music industry started recovering: thanks to the steep increase in streaming subscriptions, 2019 marked the fifth consecutive year of growing music revenues.
Why couldn't Brooks Brothers be smaller, unique, well-made, potent, and interesting?
Why couldn't 346 Madison be the best store in the world and a giant f/ck you to every retailer who comes through New York City a few times a year? Why not be confident enough to be small and unique?
There are a lot of people who will spend money on quality and a lot who do care deeply about buying a suit made in Massachusetts or a shirt from North Carolina. But when you are trying to just move units at an outlet mall in Orlando or appeal to people with Targus briefcases shopping in an airport the whole made in America thing is probably not going to work out.
Investing in fine wines would have given you a return of 39% over the past five years, according to the Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000 index. The Liv-ex index tracks the prices of the most traded fine wines on the market and comprises of seven sub-indices, which are: Bordeaux 500; Bordeaux Legends 40; Burgundy 150; Champagne 50; Rhone 100; Italy 100; and the Rest of the World 60.
Breaking down performance into component parts over the past five years, the clear investment winner is Burgundy 150, which rose 76.9%. However, year-to-date returns have been dented with a loss of 6% over the past five months. Staying ahead this year with positive returns are the Champagne 50 index, up 3.2%, and Italy 100, which rose 4.6%.
If you want to take an international trip but avoid quarantine in 2020 it looks as though you'll have to get quite tactical about the destination you pick, be blessed with the right passport and get very familiar with government travel advice.
Instead of a clear and synchronized travel approach from countries, what's emerging is a confusing patchwork of national policies.
Bartleby - Imagine the post-pandemic misery of business travel | Business | The Economist
Let's hope it won't be so!
Imagine the post-pandemic misery of business travel
The public announcements could be worrying, at the least
GOVERNMENTS ARE keen to get employees back to work in order to limit the economic damage of covid-19. And some companies will also be eager to send employees out in search of clients. But a vaccine is unlikely to be ready for at least another 12 months. So the next business trip you make might be an endurance test. Imagine the public announcements that travellers will hear.
Ding dong. Welcome to the renamed Heathrow Waystation 5. We decided the word "terminal" might be a little off-putting to passengers in the current circumstances. Please check in your baggage so it can be disinfected: apologies to those whose suitcases are made out of genuine leather as there will probably be stains. But never mind, it will be a good excuse to go shopping when you get to your destination. After check-in, head straight to security for your nasal swab and temperature check. As everyone needs to stand six feet (two metres) apart, the queue currently snakes around the building.
When you make it through security, head to duty-free where you can choose from our extensive selection of hand sanitisers. Hope you ate before you arrived because none of the restaurants is open. Travel safely. Ding dong.
Welcome aboard Acme Airlines flight 107 to New York. I am your pilot, Captain Richards. Social-distancing rules mean no co-pilot as there is not enough room in the cockpit for more than one person. But don't worry; I brought a flask of coffee with me and I haven't fallen asleep on a flight yet. If I don't give you an update every 30 minutes, the cabin crew will hammer on the cockpit door.
We won't be able to give you our normal in-flight food and beverage service but please enjoy the complimentary bottle of water, packets of salted nuts and crisps, and the empty seat next to you. Just a warning, though, to those of you who have chosen to sit by the window. Passengers must observe distancing rules so you won't be allowed to squeeze past the person in the aisle seat if they fall asleep. In any case, only three people are allowed in the line for the restroom at any time. You may want to go easy on that water. If you need anything extra, the cabin crew will come and help you. Give them a few minutes as they need to don a hazmat suit first.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have arrived at JFK airport. We have good news and bad news. The good news is that passenger traffic is lower than normal. The bad news is that, given the need to disinfect the electronic passport reader after each use, the line for immigration is still two hours long. And no, you can't use your cell phone to catch up on calls while you are in the waiting area. Welcome to the land of the free. Be brave.
Good afternoon and thanks for choosing Hotel Purgatory for your stay. Our motto: you can check in any time you like but, if we hear you coughing, you can never leave. Your disinfected room pass is already available in a disinfected envelope. Unfortunately, as only one person is allowed in the elevator at a time, the wait time to get to your room is 60 minutes. By the way, the same delay applies in the morning, so if you are heading for meetings, you had better book an early alarm call. There are no baggage porters, so we hope you packed light.
To reduce the risk to staff, the room will be cleaned only after you leave, so make your own bed. Feel free to take home the shampoo in the shower: no one else wants to touch it. The spa, pool and bar are closed for obvious reasons, and there is no room service. Enjoy your stay.
Morning all and welcome to the 2020 Risk Managers' Conference. Or should that be the Risk Takers' Conference? Ha ha. Rest assured this is a fully sanitised room. This year's slogan: We Care About Your Health Because Your Employer Doesn't. When it comes to questions, we won't be passing round microphones, so please speak as loudly as possible. Panel sessions are difficult at the moment, so will be limited to two speakers at opposite ends of the stage.
We are afraid that a buffet lunch is unavailable so take a chance on one of the street-food carts outside the conference centre. Your choice will sort out the real risk managers from the also-rans. This wouldn't be a conference without exhibition stands in the foyer. Our sponsors will be delighted to see you, but only from a safe distance, and wearing a mask. Finally, please familiarise yourself with the exits behind me, on the left and right. Obviously they are there in case of a fire but they could come in handy if someone has a coughing fit.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "The road to hell"
"If you crave something new, something original, particularly when they keep saying, 'Less is more,' remember that I say: Too much is really just fine."
Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82
Called "the last of the adventurers," Mr. Beard photographed African fauna at great personal risk, and well into old age could party till dawn. He had been missing for 19 days.
Peter Beard in 1982. He was known for his photographs of African wildlife and for his exploits as a man about town. Gerard Malanga
Peter Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word "wild" was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island. He was 82.
His family confirmed that a body found in Camp Hero State Park in Montauk was that of Mr. Beard.
He had dementia and had experienced at least one stroke. He was last seen on March 31, and the authorities had conducted an extensive search for him.
"We are all heartbroken by the confirmation of our beloved Peter's death," the family said in a statement, adding, "He died where he lived: in nature."
Mr. Beard's best-known work was the book "The End of the Game," first published in 1965. Comprising his text and photographs, it documented not only the vanishing romance of Africa — a place long prized by Western colonialists for its open savannas and abundant big game — but also the tragedy of the continent's imperiled wildlife, in particular the elephant.
(3) The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal's 'library of exile' | Financial Times
Nice project on Exile from Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, now showing a the British Museum in London.
The predicament of the Exile is "as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place."
The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal's 'library of exile'
A migratory installation explores how the loss of homeland has inspired and encumbered writers
"Books brought from Odessa and Vienna, sent from dealers in London and Zurich, his lifetime of reading, are taken off the library's shelves and sorted and packed into wooden crates." Thus Edmund de Waal's elegiac account of the "confiscation" of his Jewish great-grandfather Viktor's library. Its theft by the Nazis in 1938 foreshadowed a new era of displacement, including that of Viktor himself, who fled Vienna for England with his family.
De Waal describes himself as "an artist who writes", though when we meet at the British Museum a week before the opening of his new installation, library of exile, he tells me he finds it increasingly difficult to separate the two activities. Today he is equally well known for his books, especially the bestselling 2010 memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which includes the account of the fate of his great-grandfather's library, and his work in porcelain. Library of exile, which he has described as the most significant sculpture of his career, consolidates the themes of diaspora, memory and memorial he has returned to throughout his art and writing; but it also serves to reconcile those twin practices.
A roofless pavilion about the size of a shipping container, it is lined with shelves holding some 2,000 books by exiled writers. On the walls are also four of de Waal's vitrine works filled with porcelain pots. The library represents a kind of communal autobiography of the displaced person through history, from Cicero and Dante to the European émigrés of the 20th century and present-day author-exiles such as Elif Shafak and Aleksandar Hemon.
The installation is itself migratory, having arrived in London following sojourns in Venice and Dresden. From here it will travel to Mosul, Iraq, where it will remain. Readers are invited to write their own name inside volumes that are meaningful to them (each book has an ex libris plate for this purpose). The most-read volume is the children's book The Tiger Who Came to Tea, whose author, Judith Kerr, arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933. Visitors are also encouraged to suggest further books, which de Waal will add to the collection. "We're here for six months, so God knows how big the library will be at the end."
The scope of "exile" is certainly wide. The World Health Organisation estimates that 1bn people — almost one in eight of the global population — are living as migrants, of whom 68m have been forcibly displaced. From Syria and South Sudan to Russia and Colombia, exile is a defining condition of our time; but it is also as old as humankind itself. De Waal picks out a leather-bound edition of Ovid's Tristia, written in around AD8. In the opening pages of this archetypal exile text, the poet describes a stroll in the warmth of his beloved native Rome: "Now the public squares, now the temples, and now the marble theatres — ". Suddenly the tone darkens, the skies turn ashen; he acknowledges that what he has written is only a memory, for he is writing from Tomis on the Black Sea, 900 miles away from Rome, where he has been banished for an unnamed crime. The violence of that transition, from the comforts of the metropolis to windswept barbarian misery, is one committed by Ovid's own memory.
It's a predicament that the late Edward Said understood: "The exile exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old." It's as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place.
It's as new as the last century, but simultaneously it's as old as time: film reviewing; moviemania as a way of life; picture-going as a paid passion.
Think of its ritualistic essence. We who call ourselves critics (or, in my case, will do so until New Year's night) sit there in the semi-dark being told stories. The "fire" flickering in front of us is a screen with moving images. Then, in true storytelling tradition, we go away and relate the stories to others.
I have been passing on film plots to readers — and parsing them — for 50 years now. That is an exact number. Like the year commemorated in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, my talismanic twelve-month, my moment of nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again, was 1969. A great deal happened in that year, both in movieland and elsewhere. Horror down below: the Manson murders. Transcendence up above: man went to the Moon. And I, mentally somewhere in between, went to a film called Marlowe, for reviewing which, in a now-departed magazine called Monthly Film Bulletin, I was paid my first professional shilling.
What a movie to start with! It featured a young, weird, shrilly gurgling kung-fu fighter in his first major international movie. He was Bruce Lee. He was fantastic. I believe — I certainly hope — that in what I wrote, I flagged Lee's stardom to come.
To my amazement, I was suddenly made richer by doing something I enjoyed. Seeing films for a living. A school friend, Robert Wynne-Simmons, with whom I had invented a board game that has since become quietly cultish ("The Gothic Game", relaunched this year as "Damnation"), had said to me in the months after we left university, "Why don't you try film reviewing?"
I didn't look back. In 1973, the Financial Times scooped me up from honourable toil at the British Film Institute, where I had spent 18 months as assistant-assistant-editor and contributing critic on the quarterly Sight & Sound, and assigned me the weekly movie whirl. I gave myself five years before the burnout I feared and expected. I even told my FT predecessor, David Robinson, whose move to The Times allowed me in, that I didn't expect to become a veteran.
Three decades later, when a colleague turned to me at the funeral of Alexander Walker, the illustrious and long-serving film critic of the London Evening Standard, and said, "43 years at the same newspaper! No one will ever equal that", I felt a veteran's surge of guilty competitiveness. 46 and a half years: that is the baton I now hand on to the next long-distance runner.
A hundred years ago, architects all over the world upped anchor and sailed into an era of maritime fantasy. Seduced by the smooth lines, painted steel, portholes and ribbon windows of cruise ships, many built the finest houses of the 1920s and 1930s on beaches.
They gazed out to sea as if longing for the nautical glamour of the transatlantic liner, just as shipping companies were vying to create the most lavish interiors, the sleekest profiles, the classiest balls and the fastest crossings.
It was the era of seaside architecture, an evocation of sunshine and bracing fresh air — and it set the standard for coastal living. In the 2020s and around the world, there is a new appreciation of a style that still influences what is built on waterfronts.
Art Deco by the Sea, a new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, explores that brief flourishing in Britain. But the UK was just a corner. From Miami to Havana, Puerto Rico to Biarritz, Cape Town to Los Angeles, local versions of Art Deco sprang up in the most desirable seaside neighbourhoods.
Air-traffic control in Europe is a mess according to Eurocontrol, the agency that coordinates it. The average delay per flight is tracking 76% higher than 2017, and four times as high as 2013. Last summer wasn't as bad as the sum-mer of 2018, which smashed delay records and created a travel slog. But warning signs about next summer are already percolating. Read the rest of the story on The Wall Street Journal here:
Marcel Marceau was known worldwide as a master of silence. The world-famous mime delighted audiences for decades as "Bip," a tragicomic figure who encountered the world without words. But during World War II, his skills as a mime came in handy for another reason: He used them to save Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Read the whole story here: https://www.history.com/news/marcel-marceau-wwii-french-resistance-georges-loinger
