Hollywood Torrent: All records are meaningless now, except that Disney one

Hollywood Torrent From FOLLOW US SUBSCRIBE     Good afternoon from New York, wherever you may be, and a happy trade deadline to all the baseball fans. Let's start with a confession: I love records. When I was a kid, I spent most Saturdays reading the baseball encyclopedia, memorizing different arcana. The highest batting average of all-time? Ty Cobb, 366. The highest batting average in a single season? Hugh Duffy, .439. (The sad part is I still know these.) My passion for statistics extended beyond sports. Every trip to the orthodontist's office started with a quick glance at the weekly box office tallies in Entertainment Weekly. But a sad thing has happened in the past few years: records have lost all meaning. The explanation in baseball is simple. Steroids tainted many of the game's most cherished records, and then a statistical revolution introduced a dizzying array of numbers inaccessible to the common fan. But in pop culture the reasons are less clear. In movies, studios have aimed for bigger opening weekends and bigger movies in general, meaning that new records fall every few months. Old box-office records endure if you account for inflation, but most people aren't going to do that. In music, piracy, iTunes and streaming have slowly eroded the traditional album release. Nobody buys albums anymore so opening-week sales matter a heck of a lot less than they used to. Lil Nas X just dominated the record industry for an entire summer, and I couldn't tell you if he released an album. And in TV, we don't even have numbers anymore. Say what you will about Nielsen ratings, but at least they are consistent in their flaws. Netflix doesn't release viewership numbers save for a handful of cherry-picked data points that make it look good. Amazon and Hulu don't release viewership numbers at all, and new streaming services from Disney, Apple and AT&T are unlikely to be any more transparent. TV networks have started to issue all kinds of crazy data points to make their numbers look better in the face of this new competition. It doesn't help that companies insist on declaring all sorts of meaningless records, and news outlets desperate for clickable headlines play along. Some of these are excusable -- a new record for a Quentin Tarantino movie! -- and some are downright laughable -- a new record for a nonsequel Marvel movie with a blue protagonist! The one company that seems to be the most transparent when it comes to viewership data is YouTube, and yet, we don't know what a view is. Allowing a large technology company to tell us what does and doesn't count as a view on its own platform with little accountability to third parties is a recipe for trouble. Case in point: my favorite weird story of the month. A couple weeks ago, a video from Indian rapper Badshah amassed 75 million views in 24 hours -- the biggest debut of any music video in YouTube history. I didn't even notice at first, which is weird since YouTube LOVES to talk about records. Since introducing a new way to premiere videos last year, the Google-owned site has trumpeted the setting of every new record, from Ariana Grande's "thank u next" to Blackpink's "Kill This Love," culminating in BTS's "Boy With Luv." It even said Swift's "ME!" set a record for "most-viewed female solo debut." But Badshah's feat elicited no response from the world's most popular online video hub. Well, it turns out Badshah and his representatives had purchased advertisements from Google and YouTube that boosted the viewership of the video. This is not illegal, or even immoral. Many in the music industry say buying tens of millions of views is a common practice when releasing a new single; it's all part of the marketing campaign. Blackpink and Swift, among others, have done it. Badshah just took it a step further. But why is YouTube counting an advertisement as a legitimate view of the video, especially when the channel isn't getting paid for the view -- it's actually paying for it! The practice creates doubts about the real popularity of these clips. Badshah suggested a double standard. YouTube was happy to trumpet records from global superstars like Swift and Ariana Grande but paused when an Indian rapper unknown in the West employed a similar strategy. Now, some of the blame here lies with the tactics in India. Buying clicks is now so widespread that many artists in India demand a certain number of YouTube views in their contracts. But it seems like the simplest answer would be to be transparent about what views are "organic," to use an industry buzzword, and which ones are paid. Clearing up what is an ad and what is a view might reveal something else: the real record holder. -- Lucas Shaw   Disney's unprecedented dominance This tweet from Emily Yoshida sums up the current state of the movie business: "The year is 2022. The year's movie slate is 62% Marvel Phase 7, 37% Disney remakes, 1% achingly melancholy paeans to "the movies" (That's it. No other kinds of movies)." Disney has released four of the year's five highest-grossing movies, and commands 38% market share at the domestic box office, according to BoxOfficeMojo. If you consider Fox, which it now owns, Disney tops 40%. No movie studio has dominated the box office like that in modern times. Disney is about three times as big as the next closest player, Warner Bros. Globally, the company has already set the record for the highest annual gross, and it's got five months left. What's coming up? Sequels to "Maleficent" ($758 global box in 2014), "Frozen" ($1.3 billion in 2013) and a new "Star Wars." Bow before your overlords. Quentin Tarantino does it again "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" grossed $40 million in North America this past weekend, the biggest opening of Quentin Tarantino's career. While that wasn't enough to dethrone "The Lion King," it may be enough to reassure Sony after the studio's big investment in the movie. Whether "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" can live up to Tarantino's biggest hits will depend on the movie's overseas performance. "Django Unchained" and "Inglorious Basterds" both grossed upwards of $200 million outside North America. Tarantino makes the kind of movies that you rarely see at the box office anymore, but in this comic-book era of Hollywood, he has become his own brand.  Also at the box office: "Aladdin" and "Spider-Man: Far From Home" crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide, while "Yesterday" has turned into the sleeper hit of summer. "Ne Zha" is the highest-grossing Chinese animated movie ever. 'Old Town Road' sets a Billboard record "Old Town Road" topped the Billboard charts for the 17th week in a row, the longest run of any song in recorded history. The previous record holders were Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men's "One Sweet Day" and Luis Fonsi's "Despacito," featuring Justin Bieber. Months into the phenomenon, it is still remarkable that a kid who had never made a song two years ago found a beat on the internet and then dropped the biggest song in years. The week that was "The early read on traditional cord-cutting is ugly." So says Michael Nathanson, one of the sharpest analysts on Wall Street. Last quarter was the worst on record for U.S. pay-TV operators (see above chart). Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman" will open the New York Film Festival this fall, a coup for Netflix, its distributor. (Netflix released the trailer this morning.) Pro-choice states are lining up to steal production from Georgia. Hollywood studios have threatened to leave the state because of a law passed earlier this year. Vice has held talks about buying Refinery29, another digital-media supernova that suddenly looks less formidable. The Athletic, a sports-news subscription service launched in 2016, has reached more than 500,000 subscribers and expects to nearly double that total by year-end, per Ira Boudway. The Athletic, based in San Francisco, is an ad-free, online-only network for local sports coverage. Subscriptions cost $10 a month or $60 a year. Spotify shares fell the most in almost five months Wednesday after the music-streaming company reported slightly slower subscriber growth than investors had hoped. The company ended the most recent quarter with 108 million subscribers to its premium service, a shade below the 108.5 million forecast by analysts. Amazon tried to clarify its Hollywood strategy at the semiannual Television Critics Association Tour a few days after a story questioned whether the company has one. So far, Amazon has had more success making good shows than getting people to watch them. A small studio, Pocket Aces, has raised $14.7 million to make TV shows and movies for the booming India market. Can Woodstock 50 be saved? The organizers of the Woodstock 50th anniversary festival are relocating the concert to Maryland from upstate New York, a change they say will salvage the troubled event. But many of the acts scheduled to perform, including John Fogerty, Jay-Z and Dead & Company, have said they will not show up. Organizers of Woodstock 50 have been scrambling to save the festival after their main financier backed out and local officials in upstate New York refused to approve a permit. Attempts to move it to different spots in the state -- home of the original 1969 concert -- failed. The new venue is more than 250 miles from the original location, and much smaller. That means artists can collect their money and not play. Pop stars march on Washington Music stars Dave Matthews, Anderson .Paak and Maren Morris have teamed with some of the industry's top power brokers to form a new lobbying group that will represent artists in Washington and state capitals across the U.S. Musicians depend on federal courts and Congress to determine much of their pay. Federal consent decrees govern how much bars, radio stations and restaurants must shell out for songs. And copyright judges determine the rates big streaming services must pay songwriters for a separate license. Legislation also shields technology companies from liability for the proliferation of pirated music. The music industry has no shortage of lobbyists in the U.S. capital, but none of the largest groups are focused on artists. The Recording Industry Association of America represents record labels, the National Music Publishers' Association stands up for music publishers and the National Association of Broadcasters reps radio stations. "Artist decide their musical fate every time they write a song or step on a stage. Their true fate -- the ability to protect their music -- is being decided by others… bureaucrats, government legislators and the powerful digital gatekeepers," Don Henley said. (For those who want to know more about this, John Horn and I discussed the piece on "The Frame.") The Writers' Guild cracks Both Hollywood screenwriters and talent agencies are starting to crack in their fight against one another. Some of the biggest writer-producers in the TV business have questioned their leadership's approach to the dispute, which resulted in thousands of writers firing their agents. Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti all threw their support behind opposition candidates in the upcoming Writers Guild of America election. At the same time, smaller agencies are acceding to the WGA's new code of conduct, which bans agencies from operating their own production companies and from collecting a share of profits for packaging multiple clients into one project. Both sides have prepared for a protracted fight, hoping the other will crack first. It's not clear who has the edge, though the first domino may be the WGA elections in the fall. It's hard to see any of the big four agencies caving, especially since many of their clients are already working with them again (at least unofficially). But perhaps the WGA dispute becomes a real hindrance to Endeavor's plans for an IPO. Weekly playlist I fell in love with Spanish singer Rosalia thanks to her debut album, but I might love "Con Altura," her take on Reggaeton, even more. Get used to hearing that name. I'm late to Tyler, the Creator's new album, and happy I found Rayland Baxter's cover of Mac Miller's "2009." That, and more, here.    You received this message because you are subscribed to the Bloomberg newsletter Hollywood Torrent. You can tell your friends to sign up here.   Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022