Four hundred million on a ten-million film
A horror picture directed by a twenty-one-year-old made more this summer than most studio tentpoles, and made its distributor the fourth-largest in America.
SEPTEMBER 21, 2026
TopicBusiness of Culture
The CD is up fifty-nine per cent
American recorded music grew 6.9% in the first half. The fastest-growing format was the one the industry spent twenty years writing off.
SEPTEMBER 20, 2026
The growth is somewhere else
Global recorded music grew again, and the fastest-growing markets are ones the industry's infrastructure was not built around.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
The festival middle disappears
The largest events are more profitable than ever. Independent festivals are closing at a rate that has removed a fifth of them in three years.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
Animation follows the pipeline
Streaming demand outgrew domestic capacity, and the work moved to wherever the trained crews were. The leverage moved with it.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
Vinyl is a real business again
Physical formats were supposed to be a nostalgia trade winding down. They are the fastest-growing line in recorded music.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
The superfan is the business model
A small fraction of listeners generates most of the money an artist actually receives, and the industry has finally started building for them.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
The big screen got bigger
Premium formats are a small share of screens and a large share of opening weekend. The upgrade, not the ticket, is what theatres now sell.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
Publishing is Hollywood's R&D
A book that finds an audience has run the experiment a studio cannot afford to run, which is why option deals now arrive weekly.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
Documentaries lost their buyer
Streaming built a market for non-fiction features and then stopped shopping in it. What remains buys a narrower kind of film.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2026
Sync is the growth line
Streaming is the volume business and it grows slowly. Licensing a song to a screen is the smaller number that is moving.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2026
Streaming learns to weight a play
For fifteen years every stream paid the same. The platforms are now deciding that some plays should count for more, and the arguments are about who loses.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
Production follows the rebate
California more than doubled its film incentive after years of losing shoots. The early numbers suggest the money works, which is the uncomfortable part.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
The window reopens, slowly
Studios spent years arguing that exclusivity was dead weight. They are now lengthening it, having found the downstream numbers disagreed.
AUGUST 16, 2026
Catalogs are a rates trade
A song's cash flows did not change when the discount rate did. What a buyer will pay for them changed a great deal.
AUGUST 19, 2026
The rooms that build careers
Stadium touring has never earned more. The clubs where headliners learn to hold a room are the part of the business that is failing.
AUGUST 18, 2026
Why studios keep sending old movies back to theaters
Anniversary re-releases have become a reliable line of business, and the incentives reach from the vault to the marquee.
JULY 24, 2026
Old songs are winning streaming, and it's not nostalgia alone
Catalog music dominates listening because the platforms, the playlists, and the economics all bend toward the proven.
JULY 20, 2026