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Old 23-03-22, 06:44 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 26th, 22

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March 26th, 2022




More Students Watching Sports Through Piracy
Jerry Xia

Junior Anthony Chiu flips open his laptop and clicks on a link in his Chrome bookmarks bar. As the site loads, numerous pop-up ads and redirects appear, followed by a list of in-progress soccer, football and tennis matches, each with a link leading to an illegally pirated stream of the live event.

The illegal broadcasting of pirated sports streams, also known as cord cutting, lets people bypass paid subscription services like ESPN, Netflix or Hulu to access live sports content for free. The practice has grown increasingly popular among Paly students like Chiu, with the most common sports pirated being those with the highest viewership fees.

“The most prevalent (pirated) sports would be the sports that are most protected, like football and basketball,” Chiu said. “The Olympics are nationally televised and available everywhere for free, so there wouldn’t be any pirating of that because everyone can watch it. (For) things that are more protected, like boxing, where you have to pay 50 bucks for every match you want to watch, people are more willing to pirate.”

Chiu said despite the risks, he pirates football and tennis streams on a weekly basis to avoid purchasing an expensive ESPN live subscription.

Junior Asa Deggeller said because pirating sports streams is more convenient and saves money, the practice is common.

“I think a lot of people don’t have access to cable TV, and pirating is an easy way to access the sports stream,” Deggeller said. “I don’t think anyone wants to actually buy just one game or buy a subscription because they usually cost a large amount of money.”

Physical education teacher and football fan Jason Fung said while he doesn’t know of anyone from his generation who pirates sports, he understands the motives behind illegal streams.

“I haven’t really ever experienced that side of things, but I can only imagine it happens more often than not with the amount of money these (streaming) companies make and these organizations make,” Fung said. “Dana White had a big UFC fight this weekend, and I’m sure people are streaming it somewhere and not paying for it.”

Fung said while piracy may seem harmless, the practice can hurt legitimate sports entertainment companies and reduce broadcasting companies’ revenue by offering a free alternative to consumers.

“People are trying to make money out there and you’re trying to go against them making money,” Fung said, “Using UFC as an example, if you want to watch it, and you are interested, you’ve got to pay money, right? It’s not like you can go to a UFC fight live and walk in for free, so I think (piracy is) wrong.”

According to the market analysis firm Ampere Analysis, the sports entertainment industry has seen a $28.3 billion loss in 2021 with 51% of sports fans surveyed reporting that they pirate sports content at least once a month.

Chiu said he understands the harms of piracy but said it has a net positive impact for making sports easier to access for a large audience while only reducing the profits of large corporations by a small fraction.

“The proportion of people who pirate to the proportion of people who stream normally is very low,” Chiu said. “For people who don’t consistently watch a sport, it’s just a lot easier, and it doesn’t cost money. Pirating has really only become a thing since the Internet has become a lot more convenient.”

Deggeller agrees.

“The sports companies and the television networks are making enough money on their own,” Deggeller said. “I don’t think (piracy is) affecting their business negatively. I don’t think we should want to make it legal, but I don’t think we should go after it, just turn a blind eye.”
https://thecampanile.org/2022/03/17/...hrough-piracy/





UFC President Dana White Recalls Scary Story of a Death Threat for Shutting Down a Bar Pirating a UFC Fight
Rohit Raj

Piracy is a no-no for anyone making or hosting something on the internet or the media. It put to waste all the time and hard work that goes into making that event a reality. Watching it illegally can have legal repercussions, and Dana White is headstrong in his fight against piracy.

The UFC president appeared on the Impaulsive podcast, hosted by Logan Paul in Las Vegas. The 52-year-old UFC mogul talked about various topics in the podcast. One of the most exciting topics was regarding piracy in the MMA community.

Dana White talked about how he puts effort into removing illegal websites and individuals streaming the fight. He even recalled a story of him getting death threats for shutting down a bar pirating the fights.

When asked about piracy and his actions to deal with it, White stated, “You know, you have to be persistent, and you really have to go after people, you know? You can go out there and threaten all, you know, you put that thing up on the window on the f****** TV that says, ‘you know if you get caught pirating this event.’ It’s a different story when you f****** get caught. We caught a lot of people and prosecuted people for it. It’s a whole another f****** ball game. That guy’s calling me up, crying, begging me not to do it.”

Recalling his death threat, he stated, “This is a true story. Memphis Tennessee, we were doing, looking for a fight, we were doing this wrestling thing and apparently a guy on that street, I put his bar out of business, and they were threatened that if I walked out, they were going to shoot me. Yeah, if I walked out and did this f****** skit we were going to do for looking for a fight, they were going to shoot me.“

This isn’t the first time Dana White has been threatened for his safety. In fact, the UFC president was beaten up by a gang of thugs during a mugging that left one of his ears impaired for life.

Dana White and piracy have been a running topic for a while now. With the UFC being one of the most exciting things to look forward to week in week out, piracy levels also increase by the moment.

The UFC president has stated that he knows that the piracy industry will never really go away, but intends to catch a few and punish them stringently.

The IT and cyber security team of the UFC make a proactive effort to search for illegal websites and streamers. They ensure to get the ones caught, tried, and punished by law.
https://www.essentiallysports.com/uf...g-a-ufc-fight/





Emulators: Are They Illegal To Use?
John Paul M. Joaquin

Emulators are a retro gamer's savior. They are software programmed to give modern-day computers the ability to run like a specific operating system (OS) that is no longer available or hard to get in this day and age, like the SNES or the PlayStation 1 (PS1). Some emulators run modern-day OS as a replacement for the actual hardware that runs the system, like the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and the Xbox One.

Emulators are perfect for those wanting to play video games or access software no longer available on the market or are hard to obtain due to their datedness.

However, there are legal problems when using emulators as intended.

So what does the law allow and not allow regarding emulators?

Emulators: What is Legal and Illegal

Emulators, by themselves, are legal to download and use, according to Ghetto Gamer. These programs are legal because they do not contain any copyrighted code, meaning the code they use does not infringe on any copyrights in most cases, and they are basically useless on their own.

However, downloading ROMs, which are needed to use emulators, and using them via emulators is illegal. ROMs contain copyrighted material that belongs to the company that made it, and as such, they are unauthorized copies of their video games or applications.

A previous iTech Post article mentioned that the reason why game emulators are popular and in-demand is due to them being an easy way of pirating current software. These include games for current-gen consoles like the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and similar gaming consoles that can still be bought to this day.

According to an article from How-To Geek, U.S. copyright protects works for 75 years, which means major console titles like Horizon Zero Dawn, Halo Infinite, and Super Mario 64 will not be in the public domain for decades.
Emulators for Retro Games

Another reason why emulators are very popular among gamers is that they give the ability to play games that were released long ago, like the games played on classic consoles like the SNES, Sega Genesis, and the PS1.

However, due to the copyright protecting these games, the act of downloading ROMs for these games is still illegal. But then again, there is a stronger claim for emulating to fall under fair use if the company that made it no longer exists, per Tom's Hardware.

Mitch Stoltz, senior staff attorney at Electric Frontier Foundation, said that gamers who use emulators to play retro games from companies no longer existing are on "somewhat safer ground, especially if the game is no longer sold and there's no easy way to get it in playable form."

Sean Kane, co-chair of the Interactive Entertainment Group at law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, said that if there's no company to stand up and claim ownership of the game, it's likely that nothing will happen to a gamer who downloads an emulated version.

However, should there a company claim ownership of a particular retro game, then gamers will be forced to stop downloading the game's ROM or risk being fined or put in prison for copyright infringement.
How to Play Retro Games Legally

If you do want to play retro games but don't want the law catching up to you when you do so, consider checking mobile app stores for classic games-turned-apps.

Another option is to head to Internet Arcade, a web-based library of classic coin-based arcade video games from the '70s to the '90s. Or you can go to the Good Old Games store operated by The Witcher games developer, CD Projekt. This store offers classic and newer games. These classic games include Metal Gear, Heroes of Might and Magic II, and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.
https://www.itechpost.com/articles/1...-platforms.htm





Streaming Has Won the Hollywood Debate. Is Best Picture Next?

A few years ago, the entertainment industry was arguing over whether movies on streaming services even counted as a film. Now, one is poised to win the Oscars’ top prize.
Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling

Three years ago, Hollywood was engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight over the future of cinema — what, exactly, constitutes a film — with the Oscars as the boxing ring.

Netflix and other streaming insurgents insisted that the delivery route was irrelevant, that a film could be primarily viewed on an iPhone and still be a film. Theaters? Ticket sales? It didn’t matter.

The Hollywood establishment, or at least most of it, was incensed: Big screens, they argued, are part of the very definition of cinema. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” Steven Spielberg told a reporter at a European press junket at the time. “You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar.”

And now?

Unless the predictions are wrong and something unexpected awaits inside those gold leaf-embossed envelopes at the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday, a streaming service film — in a first — will win the Oscar for best picture. “CODA,” a dramedy from Apple TV+ about the only hearing member of a deaf family, is favored to receive the prize, having already won top honors at the predictive Producers Guild Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards and Writers Guild Awards.

A Netflix film, “The Power of the Dog,” could nudge past “CODA” to win the best picture trophy, awards handicappers say. But most are not predicting a win for nominees from traditional studios, including “Belfast” and “West Side Story.” Apple TV+ and Netflix have both campaigned aggressively, with Apple spending an estimated $20 million to $25 million to promote “CODA” and Netflix’s push for “The Power of the Dog” costing even more.

For an industry in turmoil, with tech giants like Apple and Amazon upending entertainment-industry business practices and threatening Hollywood power hierarchies, the welcoming of a streaming service into the best picture club would amount to a seismic moment. Television and film have been merging for years, but lines of demarcation remain, with the Oscars as one. (Last year’s winner, “Nomadland,” from Searchlight Pictures, a traditional studio, was mostly seen on Hulu, but only because a lot of theaters were closed; it played in roughly 1,200 theaters in the United States and had an exclusive IMAX run.)

Among this year’s best picture nominees, “I think there’s a lot of the academy that might not even know what is a streaming movie and what isn’t a streaming movie,” said the producer Jason Blum, whose Oscar-nominated films have included “Get Out,” “Whiplash” and “BlacKkKlansman.”

The digital forces that have reshaped music and television have been chipping away at cinema for a long time. “If ‘CODA’ and Apple win, which seems pretty likely, it will be in part because of Netflix, which has been banging on the academy door for years, and fighting the good fight — or the bad fight, depending on who you ask — to get streaming movies considered,” Mr. Blum said.

The pandemic accelerated the disruption. Traditional studios like Paramount, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney rerouted dozens of theatrical films to streaming services or released them simultaneously in theaters and online. For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, citing the coronavirus threat, allowed films to skip a theatrical release entirely and still be eligible for Oscars. The academy had previously required at least a perfunctory theatrical release of at least a week in Los Angeles.

This is about more than Hollywood egotism. The worry is that, as streaming services proliferate — more than 300 now operate in the United States, according to the consulting firm Parks Associates — theaters could become exclusively the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes. The venerable Warner Bros. has slashed annual theatrical output by almost half and built a direct-to-streaming film assembly line. Last week, Amazon boosted its Prime Video service by acquiring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the old-line studio behind “Licorice Pizza,” which is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.

In a year when Hollywood largely failed to jump-start theatrical moviegoing, streaming services solidified their hold on viewers. Global ticket sales totaled $21.3 billion in 2021, down from $42.3 billion in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association. (Theaters were closed for much of 2020.) Some theater companies have gone out of business, others have merged; the world’s biggest theater chain, AMC Entertainment, racked up $6 billion in losses over the past two years and its stock has dropped 66 percent since June. At the same time, the number of subscriptions to online video services around the world grew to 1.3 billion, up from 864 million in 2019, the group said.

One film that struggled at the box office was Mr. Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which received an exclusive run in theaters (per his wishes) of about three months. It collected about $75 million worldwide (against a production budget of $100 million and global marketing costs of roughly $50 million). “West Side Story” is now available on not one but two streaming services, Disney+ and HBO Max, where it has almost assuredly been viewed more widely than in theaters. But the film was never able to recover — among Oscar voters — from being branded a box office misfire. It received seven nominations, and is poised to win in one category, for Ariana DeBose as best supporting actress.

Mr. Spielberg’s also-ran presence in the current Oscar race makes the ascendance of streaming contenders all the more striking: a lion in the fight to keep the Academy Awards focused on theatrical films is pushed aside.

However unlikely, it is possible that “West Side Story” could come from behind and win the best picture trophy. So could Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” for that matter. Such an outcome would be a bit like 2019, when academy voters, turned off by an over-the-top campaign by Netflix to push “Roma” to best picture glory, instead gave the prize to “Green Book,” a traditional film from Universal Pictures.

In 2019, the Oscars-centered clash between Old Hollywood and New was so heated, particularly on Twitter, that the Justice Department sent an unusual letter to the academy warning that changes to its eligibility rules could raise antitrust concerns. At the time, there was a push inside the 10,000-member academy to come up with a reasonable way to ensure that only films with robust theatrical releases were eligible for Oscars.

Flickers of resistance remain.

“There are many great companies that are streamers that like to loosely throw around the word ‘cinema’ without supporting it as cinema,” said Tom Quinn, chief executive of Neon, the indie studio behind “Parasite,” which won the 2021 Oscar for best picture, and “The Worst Person in the World,” a screenplay and international film nominee this year. He was referring to the tendency by the majority of the streaming companies to limit a film’s theatrical release, opting instead to release it on their apps.

Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar Nominees

“Belfast.” In this charming memoir, the director Kenneth Branagh recalls, through a rose-tinted lens and black-and-white photography, his working-class childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland.

“CODA.” A shy 17-year-old is the lone hearing member of her rambunctious family. As she confronts a newly awakened desire to sing, her efforts to share her musical talent with her deaf relatives are remarkably affecting.

“Don’t Look Up.” Two astronomers discover a comet headed straight for Earth. When they pass along the bad news, the president of the United States has other things on her mind to pay attention to than the impending catastrophe.

“Drive My Car.” A theater director grapples with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya.” A chauffeur assigned by the theater company ferries him to and from work while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own.

“Dune.” In this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, the young scion of a noble family departs for a desert planet home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice.

“King Richard.” This two-for-one superhero origin story follows young Venus and Serena Williams in their ascent in women’s tennis, as they fulfill an ambition that their father had conceived before the two were born.

“Licorice Pizza.” In Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age romance, a child performer who has hit maximum adolescent awkwardness is aging out of his professional niche. His encounter with 20-something Alana, whom he instantly falls for, gets the story’s juices going.

“Nightmare Alley.” A grifter with empty pockets and a mysterious past joins the sleazoid world of 1930s back-road carnivals. He soon begins cycling through women, including a clairvoyant whose husband once had a successful mentalist act.

“The Power of the Dog.” Phil Burbank has been playing cowboy his entire adult life, raising cattle on his family’s Montana ranch for decades. When his brother George marries a widow with a teenage son, a lifelong family dynamic is disrupted.

“West Side Story.” Steven Spielberg’s remake of one of Broadway’s most celebrated musicals — a modern take on “Romeo and Juliet” — centers on the forbidden love between Tony and Maria, who are involved with two rival street gangs in Manhattan’s West Side in the 1950s.


For Mr. Quinn and others, it is partly an existential conversation. Letting audiences control the presentation of a movie is antithetical to everything movies are supposed to be, he said.

“The reality is seeing some of these movies at home on a portal — when you are in complete control, and you can turn them off, and walk away, and you can alter the way the film is edited by virtue of how you see it — it’s no longer cinema,” Mr. Quinn said. “At some point, the ubiquitous nature of streaming content being available at all times everywhere, at your convenience, with no commitment, it really does alter the relationship between the audience and the filmmaker’s vision.”

Even so, most filmmakers have waved a white flag. Martin Scorsese is making his next film for Apple TV+ and worked with Netflix on his previous one.

Because they don’t have to worry about ticket sales — subscriptions are what counts — streamers are often willing to spend more for projects than traditional studios. Increasingly, streaming services are where the eyeballs are, particularly young ones, which translates to “relevancy” in Hollywood’s mind.

The only thing streaming companies have left to do is deliver the ultimate Oscar glory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/b...-services.html





We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies.
Ross Douthat

Everyone has a theory about the decline of the Academy Awards, the sinking ratings that have led to endless Oscar reinventions. The show is too long; no, the show is too desperate to pander to short attention spans. The movies are too woke; no, the academy voters aren’t diverse enough. Hollywood makes too many superhero movies; no, the academy doesn’t nominate enough superhero movies. (A querulous voice from the back row: Why can’t they just bring back Billy Crystal?)

My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing. The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. It’s neither a difficult film for the art-house crowd nor a comic-book blockbuster but a film for the largest possible audience of serious adults — the kind of movie that was commonplace in the not-so-distant days when Oscar races regularly threw up conflicts in which every moviegoer had a stake: “Titanic” against “L.A. Confidential,” “Saving Private Ryan” against “Shakespeare in Love,” “Braveheart” against “Sense and Sensibility” against “Apollo 13.”

That analysis explains why this year’s Academy Awards — reworked yet again, with various technical awards taped in advance and a trio of hosts added — have a particular sense of an ending about them. There are 10 best picture nominees, and many of them look like the kind of Oscar movies that the show so desperately needs. “West Side Story”: Steven Spielberg directing an update of a classic musical! “King Richard”: a stirring sports movie lifted by a bravura Will Smith performance! “Dune”: an epic adaptation of a science-fiction classic! “Don’t Look Up”: a big-issue movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence! “Drive My Car”: a three-hour Japanese film about the complex relationship between a widowed thespian and his young female chauffeur!

OK, maybe that last one appeals to a slightly more niche audience. But the point is that this year’s nominees offer their share of famous actors, major directors and classic Hollywood genres. And yet, for all of that, almost nobody went to see them in the theaters. When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, “Dune,” barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore.

True, this was a Covid-shadowed year, which especially hurt the kinds of films that older moviegoers frequent. Remove the Delta and Omicron waves from the equation, and probably “West Side Story” and “King Richard” would have done a little better. And many of the best picture nominees were released on streaming and in theaters simultaneously, while “Don’t Look Up” was a big streaming hit for Netflix after a brief, pro forma theatrical release.

But an unusual crisis accelerating a technological transformation is a good moment to clarify where we stand right now. Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year’s best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters.

Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren’t just watching the decline of the Oscars; we’re watching the End of the Movies.

A long time coming …

That ending doesn’t mean that motion pictures are about to disappear. Just as historical events have continued after Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the End of History, so, too, will self-contained, roughly two-hour stories — many of them fun, some of them brilliant — continue to play on screens for people’s entertainment, as one product among many in a vast and profitable content industry.

No, what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.

This end has been a long time coming — foreshadowed in the spread of television, the invention of the VCR, the rise of cable TV and Hollywood’s constant “It’s the pictures that got small” mythologization of its own disappearing past.

But for decades these flights of nostalgia coexisted with continued power, and the influence of the smaller screen grew without dislodging the big screen from its commanding cultural position. TV in the 1960s and ’70s was incredibly successful but also incredibly disposable, its endless episodes standing in relation to the movies as newspaper opinion pieces stand to best-selling books. The VHS tape created a different way to bond with a successful movie, a new life for films neglected in their initial run, a new source of revenue — but the main point of all that revenue was to fund the next Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts vehicle, with direct-to-video entertainment as the minor leagues rather than The Show.

There have been television stars since Milton Berle, and the ’80s and ’90s saw the slow emergence of what we now think of as prestige TV. But if you wanted true glory, real celebrity or everlasting artistic acclaim, you still had to put your work up in movie theaters, creating self-contained works of art on a larger-than-life scale and see how critics and audiences reacted.

If you succeeded, you were Robert Altman (who directed small-screen episodes of shows like “Bonanza” and “U.S. Marshal” for years before his big-screen breakthrough) or Bruce Willis (who went from “Moonlighting” to “Die Hard”). If you tried to make the leap and failed — like Shelley Long after “Cheers” or David Caruso leaving “NYPD Blue” — you were forever a cautionary tale and proof that the movies still stood alone, a mountain not just anyone could climb.

The late 1990s were this cultural order’s years of twilight glow. Computer-generated effects were just maturing, creating intimations of a new age of cinematic wonder. Indie cinema nurtured a new generation of auteurs. Nineteen ninety-nine is a candidate for the best year in movies ever — the year of “Fight Club,” “The Sixth Sense,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Election,” “Three Kings” and “The Insider,” so on down a roster that justifies not just a Top 10 but a Top 50 list in hindsight.

Tellingly, Oscar viewership actually rose from the late 1980s onward, peaking in 1998, when “Titanic” won best picture, which (despite its snobbish detractors) was also a victory for The Movies as a whole — classic Hollywood meeting the special-effects era, bringing the whole country to the multiplex for an experience that simply wouldn’t have been the same in a living room.

To be a teenager in that era was to experience the movies, still, as a key place of initiation. I remember my impotent teenage fury at being turned away from an R-rated action movie (I can’t recall if it was “Con Air” or “Executive Decision”) and the frisson of being “adult” enough to see “Eyes Wide Shut” (another one of those 1999 greats — overhyped then, underrated now) on its opening weekend. And the initiation wasn’t just into a general adulthood but into a specific lingua franca: There were certain movies you simply had to watch, from “Austin Powers” to “The Matrix” (1999 again!), to function socially as a college student, to understand the jokes and references that stitched together an entire social world.

Just another form of content?

What happened next was complicated in that many different forces were at work but simple in that they all had the same effect — which was to finally knock the movies off their pedestal, transform them into just another form of content.

The happiest of these changes was a creative breakthrough on television, beginning in earnest with “Sopranos”-era HBO, which enabled small-screen entertainment to vie with the movies as a stage for high-level acting, writing and directing.

The other changes were — well, let’s call them ambiguous at best. Globalization widened the market for Hollywood productions, but the global audience pushed the business toward a simpler style of storytelling that translated more easily across languages and cultures, with less complexity and idiosyncrasy and fewer cultural specifics.

The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood’s potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema’s communalism.

Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today.

Over time, this combination of forces pushed Hollywood in two directions. On the one hand, toward a reliance on superhero movies and other “presold” properties, largely pitched to teenage tastes and sensibilities, to sustain the theatrical side of the business. (The landscape of the past year, in which the new “Spider-Man” and “Batman” movies between them have made over a billion dollars domestically while Oscar hopefuls have made a pittance, is just an exaggerated version of the pre-Covid dominance of effects-driven sequels and reboots over original storytelling.) On the other hand, toward a churn of content generation to feed home entertainment and streaming platforms, in which there’s little to distinguish the typical movie — in terms of casting, direction or promotion — from the TV serials with which it competes for space across a range of personal devices.

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences.

The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined.

The televised serial can establish a bond between the audience and a specific character, but the bond doesn’t translate into that actor’s other stories as easily as the larger-than-life aspect of movie stardom did. The great male actors of TV’s antihero epoch are forever their characters — always Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Al Swearengen — and recent female star turns in serial entertainment, like Jodie Comer in “Killing Eve” or Anya Taylor-Joy in “The Queen’s Gambit,” haven’t carried their audiences with them into their motion-picture follow-ups.

It is important not to be ungrateful for what this era has given us instead — Comer and Taylor-Joy’s TV work included. The surfeit of content is extraordinary, and the serial television drama has narrative capacities that even the most sprawling movies lack. In our most recent week of TV viewing, my wife and I have toggled between the ripely entertaining basketball drama “Winning Time” and a terrific Amanda Seyfried turn as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout”; next week we’ll turn to the long-delayed third season of Donald Glover’s magical-realist serial “Atlanta.” Not every stretch of new content is like this, but the caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago.

But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.

First, they cede the expansive powers inherent in the scale of the moviegoing experience. Not just larger-than-life acting but also the immersive elements of the cinematic arts, from cinematography to music and sound editing, which inherently matter less when experienced on smaller screens and may get less attention when those smaller screens are understood to be their primary destination.

Just to choose examples among this year’s best picture nominees: Movies like “Dune,” “West Side Story” and “Nightmare Alley” are all profoundly different experiences in a theater than they are at home. In this sense, it’s fitting that the awards marginalized in this year’s rejiggered Oscars include those for score, sound and film editing — because a world where more and more movies are made primarily for streaming platforms will be a world that cares less about audiovisual immersion.

Second, the serial television that dominates our era also cedes the power achieved in condensation. This is the alchemy that you get when you’re forced to tell an entire story in one go, when the artistic exertions of an entire team are distilled into under three hours of cinema, when there’s no promise of a second season or multiepisode arc to develop your ideas and you have to say whatever you want to say right here and now.

This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television. Even the best serial will tend to have an unnecessary season, a mediocre run of episodes or a limp guest-star run, and many potentially great shows, from “Lost” to “Game of Thrones,” have been utterly wrecked by not having some sense of their destination in advance. Whereas a great movie is more likely to be a world unto itself, a self-enclosed experience to which the viewers can give themselves completely.

This takes nothing away from the potential artistic advantages of length. There are things “The Sopranos” did across its running time, with character development and psychology, that no movie could achieve.

But “The Godfather” is still the more perfect work of art.

Restoration and preservation

So what should fans of that perfection be looking for in a world where multiplatform content is king, the small screen is more powerful than the big one and the superhero blockbuster and the TV serial together rule the culture?

Two things: restoration and preservation.

Restoration doesn’t mean bringing back the lost landscape of 1998. But it means hoping for a world where big-screen entertainment in the older style — mass-market movies that aren’t just comic-book blockbusters — becomes somewhat more viable, more lucrative and more attractive to audiences than it seems to be today.

One hope lies in the changing landscape of geopolitics, the current age of partial deglobalization. With China becoming less hospitable to Western releases in the past few years and Russia headed for cultural autarky, it’s possible to imagine a modest renaissance for movies that trade some potential global reach for a more specifically American appeal — movies that aspire to earn $100 million on a $50 million budget or $50 million on a $15 million budget, instead of spending hundreds of millions on production and promotion in the hopes of earning a billion worldwide.

The more important potential shift, though, might be in the theatrical experience, which is currently designed to cram as many trailers and ads as possible in front of those billion-dollar movies and squeeze out as many ticket and popcorn dollars — all of which makes moviegoing much less attractive to grown-ups looking for a manageable night out.

One response to this problem is the differential pricing that some theater chains have experimented with, which could be part of a broader differentiation in the experience that different kinds of movies promise. If the latest Marvel spectacle is packing theaters while the potential “West Side Story” audience waits to see it on TV at home, why not make the “West Side Story” experience more accessible — with a low-cost ticket, fewer previews, a simpler in-and-out trip that’s more compatible with, say, going out to dinner? Today’s struggling multiplexes are full of unsold seats. Why not see if a streamlined experience for non-Marvel movies could sell more of them?

But because these hopes have their limits, because “West Side Story” making $80 million domestically instead of $40 million won’t fundamentally change the business of Hollywood, lovers of The Movies have to think about preservation as well.

That means understanding their position as somewhat akin to lovers of theater or opera or ballet, who have understood for generations that certain forms of aesthetic experience won’t be sustained and handed down automatically. They need encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted — and in our current cultural climate, to inculcate adult tastes over and above adolescent ones.

In the case of movies, that support should take two overlapping forms. First, an emphasis on making it easier for theaters to play older movies, which are likely to be invisible to casual viewers amid the ruthless presentism of the streaming industry, even as corporate overlords are tempted to guard classic titles in their vaults.

Second, an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. Since the liberal arts are themselves in crisis, this may sound a bit like suggesting that we add a wing to a burning house. But at this point, 20th-century cinema is a potential bridge backward for 21st-century young people, a connection point to the older art forms that shaped The Movies as they were. And for institutions, old or new, that care about excellence and greatness, emphasizing the best of cinema is an alternative to a frantic rush for relevance that characterizes a lot of academic pop-cultural engagement at the moment.

One of my formative experiences as a moviegoer came in college, sitting in a darkened lecture hall, watching “Blade Runner” and “When We Were Kings” as a cinematic supplement to a course on heroism in ancient Greece. At that moment, in 1998, I was still encountering American culture’s dominant popular art form; today a student having the same experience would be encountering an art form whose dominance belongs somewhat to the past.

But that’s true as well of so much else we would want that student to encounter, from the “Iliad” and Aeschylus to Shakespeare and the 19th-century novel and beyond. Even if the End of the Movies cannot be commercially or technologically reversed, there is cultural life after this kind of death. It’s just up to us, now, to decide how abundant it will be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/o...ovies-end.html





Elon Musk’s Starlink is Keeping Ukrainians Online when Traditional Internet Fails
Rachel Lerman, Cat Zakrzewski

Elon Musk recently challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to a one-handed fistfight for the future of Ukraine. But the entrepreneur’s real defense of the besieged country is his effort to keep Ukrainians online with shipments of Starlink satellite Internet service.

Starlink is a unit of Musk’s space company, SpaceX. The service uses terminals that resemble TV dishes equipped with antennas and are usually mounted on roofs to access the Internet via satellite in rural or disconnected areas.

When war broke out in Ukraine, the country faced threats of Russian cyberattacks and shelling that had the potential to take down the Internet, making it necessary to develop a backup plan. So the country’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a direct plea to Musk urging him to send help. Musk replied just hours later: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”

The latest space race is all about improving Internet access. Here’s what you should know.

Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk’s companies and European allies, which has proved “very effective,” Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday.

“The quality of the link is excellent,” Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. “We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day.”

The use of Starlink as a stopgap measure for citizens and the government to stay connected during an invasion is a major test of the relatively new technology, experts say, and could have widespread implications for the future of war. Internet has become an essential tool for communication, staying informed and even powering weapons.

It’s also a test for Musk. The world’s richest man, valued at $232 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire‘s Index, makes a habit of turning to Twitter for brash promises and proclamations in the midst of world crises. Already this week, the Tesla CEO has challenged Putin to a fight and followed up by pledging he would use just one hand if Putin was scared. And he told Putin he could bring a bear.

He has fallen short on some past pledges, including making ventilators for coronavirus patients and efforts to help rescue Thai children stuck in a cave.

But this time, Fedorov and some experts say he’s come through. Tesla employees in Europe reportedly assembled systems to help power Starlink in Ukraine, and Fedorov said other European countries have sent Starlink equipment from their own supplies.

Musk responded to a request for comment on his efforts with Starlink and past efforts, telling The Post to give his regards “to your puppet master Besos.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Musk did not respond to a follow-up request specifically on his work with Starlink in Ukraine.

Internet disruptions can be caused by power outages or by fiber optic cables being cut as a result of shelling, experts said. The Starlink technology is being used by civilians in areas under attack that have lost Internet service, and by government officials. Starlink terminals have also been provided to help the country’s tech companies stay online when the war has forced them to relocate. The Times of London reports that a Ukrainian unit is using Starlink to connect its drones attacking Russian forces.

Starlink has grown quickly in recent years, surpassing some satellite Internet competitors by launching more than 1,000 satellites into space. People can buy the service online for $99 a month, plus $499 for the equipment, but Starlink cautions it can take six or more months to ship in some cases.

A person familiar with Starlink’s effort in Ukraine, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there are more than 5,000 terminals in the country.

Still, experts said that even a big Starlink network probably wouldn’t be enough power to keep an entire country online and operating at full-speed. But the terminals can serve as a reliable backup as Internet services falter. Fedorov said he and his staff are having discussions with other European leaders and companies about additional satellite and cellular technologies that could help keep Ukrainians online in the event of greater Internet outages.

Internet flows deteriorated on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and have not fully recovered, according to data-monitoring services. But since that initial dip, connectivity has remained fairly stable, with mainly temporary, isolated outages even during heavy Russian shelling.

“Every day there are outages, but generally service comes back,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which monitors global data flows.

Even before Fedorov tweeted at Musk for help, SpaceX was working on a way to get Starlink to Ukraine. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a talk at California Institute of Technology this month that the company had been working for several weeks to get regulatory approval to allow the satellites to communicate in Ukraine.

“But then they tweeted,” she said, according to SpaceNews. “There’s our permission.”

Fedorov’s agency is working to get Starlink terminals to regions where Internet access has been cut off, he said. The systems have in some instances been used to connect people when cellular networks in the country have been overloaded.

Fedorov said that he’s briefly texted with Musk and that the tech billionaire has also had a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

There are some concerns that accompany the use of the terminals. Like all satellite communications during war, Starlink signals could be used to detect the location of the antennas, experts say.

While it’s unclear if Russia can use the signals to target attacks, Musk instructed caution on Twitter.

“Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high,” he tweeted. He added that users should turn on the terminal only when needed and keep it far away from people.

Experts have warned that the devices could give away Ukrainians’ locations to Russian attackers, but that hasn’t been an issue so far, Fedorov said. The devices have usually been used in “densely populated areas where there would be a lot of civilians anyway.”

He said Russian cyberattacks have not ramped up on the systems — yet.

“They currently appear to be very busy attacking the websites of our small towns and villages,” Fedorov said. “I think they’re just not at that point yet.”

Because Starlink is still relatively new, there’s a lot to figure out about how and if it’s feasible to use in conflict zones, defense and space industry experts say.

“The answer is it’s potentially useful, but there’s a lot we don’t know,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for space sustainability nonprofit Secure World Foundation, pointing to the risk of cyberattacks and what exactly the needs are.

Russians, as well as many others, have technology capable of finding, jamming and sometimes intercepting many kinds of transmissions. Starlink’s technology could be a target for these efforts, said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

“But I think it’s really important that people in Ukraine and areas without connectivity get connected, so it’s a question of understanding and balancing risk,” he said.

In Kyiv, one Ukrainian engineer saw the Twitter exchanges between Fedorov and Musk and hurried to piece back together a Starlink terminal he had bought months earlier. Oleg Kutkov said he bought a terminal just to disassemble it and put it back together — as an engineer, he was curious to see how it worked.

But now that Starlink services are enabled in the country, it could actually prove useful, he said. His regular Internet service is still working, but he put the Starlink antenna out his window and turned it on to test, he said. The speed was really fast.
“Internet connection is really important here in Ukraine,” Kutkov said. “We are getting a lot of info from social media channels, from the government and from each other.” Kutkov got so many questions from fellow Ukrainians about Starlink that he set up a Facebook group to address them. It now has 370 members.

Christian Davenport, Craig Timberg and Joseph Menn contributed to this report.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...ils/ar-AAVfILK





A Mysterious Satellite Hack Has Victims Far Beyond Ukraine

The biggest hack since Russia’s war began knocked thousands of people offline. The spillover extends deep into Europe.
Matt Burgess

More than 22,000 miles above Earth, the KA-SAT is locked in orbit. Traveling at 7,000 miles per hour, in sync with the planet’s rotation, the satellite beams high-speed internet down to people across Europe. Since 2011, it has helped homeowners, businesses, and militaries get online. However, as Russian troops moved into Ukraine during the early hours of February 24, satellite internet connections were disrupted. A mysterious cyberattack against the satellite’s ground infrastructure—not the satellite itself—plunged tens of thousands of people into internet darkness.

Among them were parts of Ukraine’s defenses. “It was a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war,” Viktor Zhora, a senior official at Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, the State Services for Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP), reportedly said two weeks later. He did not provide any more details, and SSSCIP did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But the attack against the satellite internet system, owned by US company Viasat since last year, had even wider ramifications. People using satellite internet connections were knocked offline all across Europe, from Poland to France.

Almost a month after the attack, the disruptions continue. Thousands still remain offline across Europe—around 2,000 wind turbines are still disconnected in Germany—and companies are racing to replace broken modems or fix connections with updates. Multiple intelligence agencies, including those in the US and Europe, are also investigating the attack. The Viasat hack is arguably the largest publicly known cyberattack to take place since Russia invaded Ukraine, and it stands out for its impact beyond Ukraine’s borders. But questions about the details of the attack, its purpose, and who carried it out remain—although experts have their suspicions.

Satellite internet connections are often used in areas with low cable coverage and are used by everyday citizens, as well as official organizations. The setup is different from your typical home or office Wi-Fi network, which mostly rely on wired broadband connections. “Satellite communications are composed of three main components,” says Laetitia Cesari Zarkan, a consultant at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and a doctoral student at the University of Luxembourg. First, there is the spacecraft that’s in orbit, which is used to send “spot beams” back to Earth; these beams provide internet coverage to specific areas on the ground. These beams are then picked up by a satellite dish on the ground. They can be attached to the sides of buildings but also are on planes and power inflight Wi-Fi. And finally there are ground networks, which communicate with and can configure people’s systems. “The ground network is a collection of earth stations connected to the internet by fiber-optic cables,” Zarkan says.

Aside from Zhora’s comment, the Ukrainian government has remained tight-lipped about the attack. However, satellite communications, also known as SATCOM, appear to be frequently used in the country. Ukraine has the world’s most transparent system for tracking government spending, and multiple government contracts show that the SSSCIP and police have purchased the technology. For instance, during Ukraine’s 2012 elections, more than 12,000 satellite internet connection points were used to monitor voting, official documents spotted by European cybersecurity firm SEKOIA.IO show.

“To disrupt satellite communications, most people—myself included—would look at the signal in space, because it's exposed,” says Peter Lemme, an aviation specialist who also writes about satellite communications. “You can transmit signals toward the satellite that would effectively jam its ability to receive signals from legitimate modems.” Elon Musk has claimed that Starlink satellite systems he sent to Ukraine have faced jamming attacks.

However, the attack against Viasat may not have involved jamming. The attack against the network was a “deliberate, isolated, and external cyber event,” according to Viasat spokesperson Chris Phillips. The attack only impacted fixed broadband customers and didn’t cause disruption to airlines or Viasat’s US government clients, the company says, and no customer data was impacted. However, people’s modems have not been able to connect to the network, and they have been “rendered unusable.”

On Tuesday, Viasat chair Mark Dankberg told a satellite conference that the company purchased the KA-SAT in Europe last year, and its customer base is still being operated by a third party as part of the transition. “We believe for this particular event it was preventable, but we didn't have that capability in that case,” Dankberg said, confirming that thousands of modems were taken offline. “In most of the cases of the modems that went offline, they need to be replaced. They can be refurbished, so we're recycling modems through,” Dankberg said.

“There is no evidence to date of any impairment to the KA-SAT satellite, core network infrastructure, or gateways due to this incident,” Phillips says in a statement. Instead Viasat says the cyberattack was the result of a misconfiguration in a “management section” of its network, as first reported by Reuters. The company declined to provide any more details on the technical nature of the incident, citing ongoing investigations. Viasat says it is now focusing on recovering from the partial outage.

No government has officially attributed the attack to Russia, despite speculation it may have caused the attack to disrupt communications in Ukraine. Dankberg told CNBC on Monday that he couldn’t confirm whether Russia was behind the attack, and that governments would be the source of such attribution. It is rare for governments to quickly attribute cyberattacks to a country or actor, as investigations are complex and take time to complete.

However, Western officials say the attack would be in keeping with Russia’s playbook. “Were it to be attributed ultimately to Russia, it would very much fit within what we would expect them to do, which is to use their cyber capabilities to ultimately support their military campaign,” Western officials told reporters during an on-background briefing last week. The US National Security Agency (NSA), and ANSSI, France’s cybersecurity agency, are investigating the hack. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued an advisory with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that warns of SATCOM hacks. “CISA remains concerned about the threat to US and allies’ satellite communications networks,” Eric Goldstein, CISA's executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement.

Hacking threats to SATCOM aren’t new. In 2014 security researcher Ruben Santamarta published research showing the many ways satellite communications could potentially be hacked. In 2018, Santamarta’s follow-up research demonstrated how this could be done, including a focus on satellite systems in military situations. Santamarta says it is possible the attackers in the Viasat case—although their identity and motive is unknown—may have been able to deploy a malicious firmware update that sabotaged customer modems.

“We have the option that the intended goal of the attackers was to actually break the terminals in order to disable the communications,” Santamarta says. “Or maybe they were expecting to deploy a specific payload to maybe eavesdrop on communications and something went wrong and the terminals were bricked. At this point, we don't know what really happened.”

While many of the details of the Viasat hack are still unraveling—independent security researchers are examining the code on bricked modems—its impacts have been widely felt. The cyberattack appears to be a prominent example of spillover, where an attack spreads, either intentionally or accidentally, beyond its original target. In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cybersecurity experts and governments warned that spillover damage is a huge international threat. In June 2017, for example, Russia’s NotPetya worm spread beyond its original targets in Ukraine and caused more than $10 billion of damage around the world.

“It looks like the clearest example of spillover, whether it was or was not the most disruptive activity that was undertaken at the time,” Western officials say of the Viasat incident. The fallout seems to have spread far and wide. Satellite internet providers in Germany, the UK, France, the Czech Republic, and more saw their services impacted by the outage. Users on a satellite internet forum reported problems as far away as Morocco. “It's hard to go for a week without the internet, but if there is no other alternative access, you just have to wait,” one user in Poland complained. The EU Agency for Cybersecurity, which is also investigating the incident, says it is aware of 27,000 users impacted by the outage, a figure first reported by WIRED Italy.

In one of the first signs the hack was taking place, more than 5,800 wind turbines belonging to the German energy company Enercon were knocked offline. The disruption did not stop the turbines from spinning, but it means they can’t be reset remotely if there is a fault, says Enercon spokesperson Felix Rehwald. So far Enercon has managed to get 40 percent of the affected turbines back online, and its teams are replacing their satellite modems. “We do not believe that it was aiming at us or our customers. It seems that we are sort of ‘collateral damage,’” Rehwald says.

The recovery from the incident is likely to take more time. Viasat says it is getting hundreds of customers online every day and providing people with new modems or issuing software updates that can fix their systems remotely. Jaroslav Stritecky, the CEO of Czech internet provider INTV, says the company has been contacting all of its SATCOM customers to see if they need new modems, and it will likely need to replace the majority of those that were affected. Stritecky says the work may be completed by the end of March. “The question is if there are enough new modems to provide or to support everyone,” he adds.

So far, satellites have played an important role during the war in Ukraine. They’ve been used to capture intelligence on Russian troop movements and provided an essential way for people to communicate. But there may be legal issues that unfold around the hack. Almudena Azcárate Ortega, an associate researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, points out that as satellite systems are used for both civilian and military purposes by multiple countries, they can sit in a complex area when it comes to international law.

“If you target a satellite that is providing certain services to a specific country involved in a conflict, you might also be depriving a neutral country of the services that same satellite provides, therefore breaching that rule of neutrality,” Ortega says. “The reverberating effects of attacking these infrastructures can have effects that would be very deeply felt by civilians.”
https://www.wired.com/story/viasat-i...kraine-russia/





Music’s Messy Digital Revolution

Streaming services bring in steady cash for the music industry, but sales are down and many artists feel left out.
Shira Ovide

Streaming saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet. But the complicated picture from the past 20 years shows that surviving an online revolution isn’t the only hard part. What comes next might be even more difficult.

Music was one of the first industries that felt the sonic boom of the internet, starting with song-sharing websites like Napster in the late 1990s and iTunes digital downloads later. This was thrilling for music lovers, but new ways to listen to and purchase (or not purchase) music pushed industry sales into a crater.

Now, thanks mostly to people paying for all-you-can-listen music streaming services like Spotify, music is financially healthy and reaches more people than ever. But all is not entirely well.

Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There’s a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they’re not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation.

I wanted this newsletter to answer a direct question: Is the music industry an internet success story or not? There is no simple answer, which shows how messy it can be when technology jolts an industry, and it might take decades for all participants to feel like winners of the digital revolution — if that’s even possible.

First, I’ll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month.

The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs. Maybe more than for books, movies or other conventional entertainment sources, there has been a powerful symbiosis of social media and music that has lifted the popularity of both.

That would have been difficult to predict when it seemed the internet was on a path to pulverize the industry. “It’s crazy that music is viewed as a success now,” Ben Sisario, my colleague who covers the music industry for The New York Times, told me. “The question now is, Can the growth continue?”

Ah, yes. The dark cloud. Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999.

Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.)

There aren’t an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That’s what worries people who believe the music industry’s digital success has peaked.

Ben also told me that there’s anxiety in the industry that even the biggest songs or albums aren’t as popular as hits once were. There may be so much music and other entertainment at our fingertips that each fresh song simply is not as attention-getting or valuable as music was even a decade ago.

Ben has also written that 99 percent of artists — the ones who aren’t as famous as Beyoncé — tend to say that millions of streams of their songs might translate into pennies for them. If the music industry is a success, but so many musicians feel like they’re missing out … is that really success?

The pessimists could be wrong. People have also been saying for years that Netflix couldn’t keep adding paying customers, but it has, and now the entire entertainment industry is copying its strategy. Many musicians are excited about newer ways to reach fans on their own terms, including through the website Bandcamp and nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which are essentially a way to transform a digital good into something one of a kind.

But the combination of glory and anxiety in music reflects a running theme in this newsletter. The preinternet days weren’t so great, but the frustrations with the digital revolution are real, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/t...evolution.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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