Thursday Nov.17, 2022

🎤 T-Swift’s Ticketmaster drama

It’s hard to shake it off (John Leyba/Getty Images)

Hey Snackers,

The Scrabble dictionary updated its list for the first time in years. New additions include useful words like adorbs, zoomer, and zonkey (a half zebra, half donkey).

Stocks edged down yesterday after Target warned of weaker spending going into the holidays. Still, US retail sales jumped a better-than-expected 1.3% last month.

Swifties

T-Swift’s world-tour rush crashed Ticketmaster, highlighting the reach of Live Nation's concert empire

Alexa, play “Bad Blood”… Taylor Swift fans have major beef with Ticketmaster. On Tuesday, the Live Nation-owned ticket platform suffered outages after millions of Swifties tried buying tickets to Taylor’s 2023 “Eras” tour, her first in five years. Presale tix were going for $49 to $500 on Ticketmaster, but resellers quickly began listing seats for as much as $21K+ on third-party sites like StubHub. Some police stations warned fans about a surge in ticket scammers.

Fans said they were forced to wait hours for site access — and many still couldn't complete their transactions, despite having a presale code.
Ticketmaster said the problems were a result of “historically unprecedented demand,” and it extended the presale event for an extra day.
FYI: Swift’s “Midnights” became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single-day when it dropped last month.

Pop-star performances… at Super Bowl prices. The live-music industry has had a show-stopping comeback since the pandemic hit. Last quarter, Live Nation’s revenue climbed 63% from 2019, and it’s on pace to notch record ticket sales this year. But as more Americans splurge on experiences over objects, concert prices have surged nearly 15% from prepandemic. It's good news for Ticketmaster, which is said to make up 70%+ of ticketing services for major venues like Madison Square Garden.

It's hard to be a hater of the top player… Music fans may be mad at Live Nation, but its live-music dominance makes it hard to escape. In January, Live Nation was accused of snubbing venues that didn’t use Ticketmaster. Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Ticketmaster was a "monopoly" after the Swift drama. But the backlash hasn’t curbed demand: Ticketmaster sales for 2023 shows are already on track to surpass this year’s.

SBFED

Lawmakers want SBF to testify as FTX's collapse puts crypto regulation in the spotlight

Place your right hand… on the crypto white paper? Sam Bankman-Fried has been called to testify. The House Financial Services Committee said the FTX founder is expected to speak to lawmakers next month about his now bankrupt exchange's spectacular collapse. SBF was a regular on Capitol Hill, lobbying for centralized-exchange-friendly regulation. He spent $40M in the last election cycle, mostly on Democratic candidates and causes. Now the so-called wunderkind could be forced to explain how customer funds disappeared (reportedly up to $2B):

FTXtradition: American and Bahamian law enforcement (FTX is Bahamas-based) are said to be in talks to bring SBF to the US for questioning — separate from the House hearing.

Mr. SBF goes to Washington… but this time he’s in the hot seat. Before FTX imploded, lawmakers had been working on the SBF-favored Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA). The bipartisan bill would give commodities regulators (aka: the CFTC) additional crypto oversight. But critics said it would prop up centralized exchanges like FTX while hurting decentralized ones like Uniswap. Now the bill's future is in doubt:

SB-effed: The Blockchain Association, a crypto trade group, said the DCCPA has SBF's stink on it, and predicts elected officials will want to distance themselves. And yet…
Better than nothing: Sens. Debbie Stabenow and John Boozman, the bill's backers, are doubling down, saying FTX's fall hastens the need for regulation.

The sunk-cost fallacy is a powerful motivator… and so is embarrassment. FTX's bankruptcy left elected officials in an awkward position: do they push forward regulation once championed by crypto's now “villain” du jour, or walk away from months of efforts only to start anew? Stabenow and Boozman have chosen the latter. Meanwhile, Binance’s CEO is also calling for regulation — just not through the DCCPA.

What else we’re Snackin’

Targeted: Target shares plunged 13% after it unboxed a 50% profit decline and cut its holiday forecast because of slowing sales. It also said that “organized retail theft” cost it $400M+ in profit loss this year.
Ultimuskum: Elon reportedly sent a midnight email ultimatum to Twitter staff: work “long hours at high intensity” or quit. Employees had to click a “yes” link by 5 p.m. ET the next day if they wanted to stay at the company.
Cointagion: Genesis stopped issuing new loans and halted withdrawals for its crypto-lending product as the FTX “contagion” spreads. Gemini, the Winklevoss twins’ crypto exchange, said it would also halt some customer redemptions (Genesis was a key partner).
Pack: Amazon confirmed it’s laying off corporate employees, a rare move for the ecomm leader. It said that the econ environment, coupled with pandemic hiring sprees, means “certain roles are no longer necessary.”
War: NATO said the Russian-made missile that hit Poland was likely a stray fired by Ukraine’s air defenses, not a Russian strike. The news eased fears of a wider war.

Thursday

Jobless claims
Earnings expected from Alibaba, Palo Alto Networks, NetEase, Ross Stores, BJ’s, Dolby, Macy’s, Gap, Kohl’s, Weibo, and Williams-Sonoma

Authors of this Snacks own: Uniswap, and shares of Amazon

ID: 2598095

Latest Stories

Jack Morse

45m

Adidas inexplicably decides 2024 is the right time to jump back on NFTs

Adidas is reportedly teaming up with Stepn, a web3 company that promised to reward users who engaged in physical activity like walking and running. The collab, announced this morning by Stepn, kicks off with the release of 1K Adidas-styled NFT sneakers. Current price: roughly $2,500 a pop.

Stepn made waves back in 2022 as a pioneer of “move-to-earn” games.

The solana-based app rewarded active users with tokens — though they’d have to have purchased a pair of NFT sneakers first. Some early adopters bragged about making hundreds of dollars a day by walking, but critics said the game relied on Ponzi-scheme like economics.

The Stepn-Adidas “phygital” sneakers release hits as the NFT market suffers a 30-day period that’s seen trading volumes fall nearly 40%.

Adidas partners with crypto fitness app Stepn, both NFTs and merch coming

The Stepn-Adidas “phygital” sneakers release hits as the NFT market suffers a 30-day period that’s seen trading volumes fall nearly 40%.

Matt Phillips

Iran, oil, high rates are a bummer

At the risk of stating the obvious, the market has really started struggling. Last week’s hot inflation report, and the spike in interest rates it generated, seemed to get the sell-off rolling. Military strikes between Israel and Iran haven’t helped matters, as they’ve kept oil prices elevated. The market hates it, given the role oil plays keeping inflation high — and the Fed potentially on hold. The S&P’s 1.2% decline Monday pushed the index below its 50-day moving average, confirming the loss of momentum.

Pay up

Hey, big spender

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas

Forget driving away advertisers and charging for blue checks only to give them out for free, Elon Musk has other ideas to not make money on Twitter, aka X. Today he floated charging new users a “small fee” to deal with the platform’s seemingly intractable bot problem.

Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.

Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2024

Old heads might remember that way back in 2022, ahead of buying Twitter, the billionaire had pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.” Guess we’re in the “die trying” era.

Allegra Rosenberg

Page Turner

Fan
fic
book
boom

“There is just a really bright voice that comes from fan fiction.”

Jack Raines

Beta boom

Banks thrived with rising rates, but can't win with stable ones

Net interest income in focus for earnings season

U.S.-WASHINGTON, D.C.-SENATE-HEARING-BANK-CEO

Millie Giles & David Crowther

Which states have the highest tax rates?

Millions of people will be spending today frantically preparing to meet tonight’s 11:59 pm deadline. Indeed, those in the throes of filing can delight in the IRS’s promotion of “improved customer service”, as the ~100m who’ve already sent returns can enjoy less procedural promos from the likes of Krispy Kreme.

But if lower taxes are a priority for you: where should you move?

Today is Tax Day. The IRS expects ‘tens of millions’ of returns to be filed at the last minute | CNN Business

Jack Raines

The biggest fund in the world is going absolutely nowhere near private equity

The Norwegian government announced on Friday that Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the nation's $1.6T sovereign wealth fund, should not add private equity investments to its portfolio, rejecting the fund management's recommendation to add private equity allocation in November 2023.

The last few years have seen an uptick of institutional investors, such as pensions and endowments, increasing their exposure to PE. However, high fees and difficulty tracking investment performance have made the Norwegian government wary of investing in the field.

With private equity funds already struggling to return capital to their investors during a period of record-high inflows, restraint by the Norwegian government may prove to be a shrewd decision.

Norway wealth fund will not invest in private equity, government says

With private equity funds already struggling to return capital to their investors during a period of record-high inflows, restraint by the Norwegian government may prove to be a shrewd decision.

Matt Phillips

Goldman Sachs shatters expectations as the bank roars back from the brink

Tom Jones, David Crowther

The Coachella hype is starting to fade

Ticket sales have underwhelmed for the California music festival

Samsung has dethroned Apple as the top smartphone seller... again

William Coulman, David Crowther8h

Max Knoblauch

Adobe is paying $3 a minute for AI-training video of people touching things

Adobe is pushing its way into the growing business of generative AI video, joining OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Imagen 2.

The new tools will roll out this year, according to Adobe.

In contrast to its web-scraping rivals, Bloomberg reported that Adobe is paying videographers up to $120 for stock footage used to train the model.

High-priority subjects include: footage of people showing emotions, clips of people touching things, and anatomy shots of eyes, hands, and feet.

AI companies are growing increasingly wary of copyright lawsuits, as giants like YouTube threaten possible litigation if AI is trained on their videos. Plus: AI is learning so fast that the data used to train it could be completely tapped by 2026.

Adobe's working on generative video, too | TechCrunch

High-priority subjects include: footage of people showing emotions, clips of people touching things, and anatomy shots of eyes, hands, and feet.

Pivoting to AI is going to take longer than company leaders think

Rani Molla9h

10%

Tesla is laying off more than 10% of its roughly 140,000 person global workforce, according to a company email viewed by Electrek and Business Insider. The news comes after disappointing first quarter delivery numbers and a report by Reuters that the company is canning its long-awaited mass-market car.

David Crowther

13h

Netflix is still trying to nail movies

Netflix’s new movie chief is already shaking things up. Just two weeks into his tenure, Dan Lin has laid off 15 employees in the film department (~10% of its staff) and reorganized the division by genre instead of budget level, as the streaming giant looks to produce a wider spectrum of films.

Lin’s new vision for one of Netflix’s highest profile departments comes amidst a wider strategic reshuffle at the company. Gone are the days of limitless budgets, blank checks and endless A-list packed action flicks. A new era — complete with a password sharing crackdown, multiple price hikes, a foray into advertising, and much tighter departmental purse strings — has been ushered in by the world’s largest streamer.

The leaner, new Netflix shows up most clearly in the company’s cash spending on content: last year Netflix spent $13.1 billion on content, some 21% less than the $16.7 billion spent in 2022.