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đŸ”„ Zuck-ing the trend

Plus: Drake & the deepfakes, and immersive movie trailers

Author

Oli Thomas
April 30, 2024

This week got a bit numbersy, caught up in the mixed fortunes of the big players announcing their quarterly earnings results. Spoiler: they all did really well, but investors were less happy about some of them.

Fear not, we emerge from it and get stuck into the deeply intellectual debate about Drake releasing songs to p*ss off Kendrick Lamar.

Elsewhere, the streamer move for sports’ rights continued with Apple about to bag global rights to next year’s FIFA Club World Cup. Noone really knows what it is. But its football. So it will pull a massive audience
or will it??

Enjoy. And as always, feel free to share any feedback on what’s working for you and what’s not.

Vamos 👍

The winners & losers from the Q1 earnings

  • Hot off the back of the Netflix earnings the week before, we had announcements from a number of the other big tech companies

  • Spotify’s Q1 results were positively received - with a significant ramp up in revenues and profits leading to a 10% initial share price bump, before landing at around 5% up on the week (up 2x on a year ago)

  • Alphabet also saw a share price bump after beating expectations both in Cloud and YouTube ad revenues. YouTube in particular is showing massive potential - with more viewing in the US than Netflix and on track to be the largest TV provider in the country by 2026

  • Meta, on the other hand, despite revenues growing 27% and net income doubling, has seen its share price level out around 12% down. Wall St reacted badly to Zuck’s honest assessment of plans to invest in AI and the long-term outlook for returns on those investments

Read more here

Bartlett’s Flight Studio launches for podcasts

  • It’s fair to say the DOAC team know a thing or two about growing podcasts, so it’s a nice little play seeing the setup of Flight Studio, in which they’ll be building a video-first podcast network and building out the IP of these brands into e-commerce, live events and more

  • At the centre of this is exclusive sales rights to DOAC, which gives them immediate appeal to brands and a high volume of audio and video inventory (DOAC has had over 350M views on YouTube)

  • A number of influential people have signed up to create podcasts within the network, many of whom have been guests on DOAC

  • Attached to this is also Flight Fund, a $100M fund that will take equity stakes in some of these emerging brands

  • Great move, expect big things

Read more here

Apple takes Club World Cup rights

  • Apple TV+ are set to get worldwide streaming rights to next Summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, which is due to take place in the US

  • The price tag is rumoured to be around $1bn for the worldwide rights, though its unclear whether this is just for next year’s tournament or for subsequent events (the following one is scheduled to take place in 2029)

  • If you have no idea what this tournament is, we hear you. The Club World Cup has traditionally been an annual event played between the winners of the seven regional tournaments (Champions League in Europe, and the other regional equivalents). The audiences aren’t that big, and noone really cares

  • However, FIFA are trying to change this by introducing a new format - now involving 32 teams, including 12 from Europe, which should see many more of the big names involved

  • Given next year is the inaugural run out of this new format, Apple is taking a fair bit of risk in punting $1Bn on it; but as we’ve seen with Netflix’s acquisition of the WWE rights and the ongoing value of the Premier League rights to Sky and TNT Sports - live sports is a key component in driving paying subscribers

  • As a big Apple fan, I kind of hope this works out for them. But as things stand, would I subscribe to Apple TV+ for the Club World Cup? No.

Read more here

Drake resurrects Tupac in rift with Kendrick Lamar

  • Drake used AI to insert verses into a new song using the voices of Tupac and Snoop Dogg

  • There’s a whole history of beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar which provides the backdrop to this, but the interesting thing here is not Hip Hop spats but an A-list artist using AI in their music to generate unlicensed voices of their peers

  • As one commentator puts it : “an artist as big as Drake using AI to create music, when he knows the world is watching him sets a dangerous precedent — especially in an industry of creatives more scared than ever that their work could be replaced by a few well-written algorithms. Drake could open the floodgates setting the foundation for an inevitable AI norm when we need to be very mindful of this new emerging tech”

  • Watch this space for much more to come in AI-generated music (and the royalties fallout that will follow)

Read more here

Immersive movie trailers

  • Warner Bros blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire launched a Roblox game in March - touted as the ‘first immersive movie trailer’ on the platform - which has now racked up 6.9M visits to date with players spending on average 8 minutes playing

  • Its a great example of how traditional media can leverage new media to build awareness amongst younger audiences in a much more seamless and entertaining way

  • The movie has generated c. $500M in box office revenues and has now surpassed the original 2021 Godzilla vs Kong film

Read more here

Source: The Gang