Numlock News: January 13, 2023 • Fireball, Starry, K-Pop

Jan 13

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By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! Numlock is off Monday in observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Fireball

Fireball, the spirit that should barely even be considered liquor, is also somehow now the 22nd-largest beer vendor in multi-outlet and convenience stores with their Fireball Cinnamon, a malt beverage riff on the whiskey-esque liquid. It comes in at 16.5 percent alcohol by volume, which somewhat hilariously is just half the ABV of actual Fireball, which comes in at a tolerable 66 proof. In convenience stores, Fireball is now the 15th-largest beer supplier in dollar terms, moving $70 million worth of Fireball Cinnamon in 2022.

Dave Infante, Vinepair

Taylor

Last year saw yet another banner year for the vinyl revival, and one person can take a uniquely large amount of the responsibility for that. Taylor Swift sold 1.695 million vinyl LPs in 2022, which is literally about 4 percent of all vinyl LPs sold in the United States in 2022. That’s more vinyl than the next two sellers — Harry Styles (719,000 LPs) and The Beatles (553,000 LPs) — combined. Of the top 40-selling vinyl records in 2022, Swift was responsible for six of them.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

I’m Not Crying My Eyes Are Just Misty

Pepsi announced it’s killing Sierra Mist after 24 years of failing to make a dent in sales of rival Sprite. Sierra Mist, which if you’re like me you probably drank most recently as a desperation whiskey mixer after exhausting all the club soda at a holiday party, was unable to compete with Coke’s lemon-lime rival. According to Beverage Digest, Sierra Mist had about 0.1 percent of the soda market, and that figure has been declining for five years. Meanwhile, Sprite is a solid 8 percent of the soda business. Pepsi has decided just to wipe the slate clean and launch a new lemon-lime beverage it’s calling Starry, which is free of caffeine and available in regular and sugar-free formats.

Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business

Tickets

A new analysis looked into how soon to tour kickoff artists tend to announce, and found vast differences between how different genres roll out dates. Your standard pop tour is announced 164 days before the first concert date on average, giving buyers about five and a half months to get ready for the show. Rock, meanwhile, tended to have a bit of a quicker turnaround, with alternative acts announced an average 140 days before the show, rock in general coming in 139 days, and hard rock 135 days. Some genres give their fans much more lead time; classical concerts got announced an average of 202 days before the show, and opera was announced 183 days before the show on average. Others give them next to none: Your standard K-pop tour is announced a mere 89 days before the band hits the road.

Stephen Spiewak, Vivid Seats

Fishy

Delta smelt are tiny fish native to the San Francisco estuary, and while they were once the most abundant fish there, they are now nearly extinct. In an attempt to shore up the population, the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has been releasing hatchery-raised smelt into the wild, but a new study illuminated a small problem in a large percentage of the hatchery-raised smelt that could cause them issues in the wild: Their otoliths, or inner ear bones, tended to be made of the mineral vaterite, while a normal delta smelt ear bone is made out of aragonite. The raised fish are 80 times more likely to have a vateritic otolith, and while one small bone might seem like it might not be a big deal, this could mean the fish are deaf or have problems swimming or avoiding predators.

Annie Roth, Hakai Magazine

Cooking

Wood and charcoal are primary sources of fuel for cooking in sub-Saharan Africa — only 17 percent of the population uses a cleaner cooking method — and the diminished air quality and pollution caused by that kind of in-home combustion takes its toll, with 3.2 million premature deaths annually. Replacing the wood- and charcoal-burning stoves with cleaner alternatives could avert some 463,000 deaths a year, according to a new study out of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Such a transition would require $7.5 billion, according to the paper, but would have a healthcare savings of $66 billion.

Babak Khavari, Camilo Ramirez, Marc Jeuland and Francesco Fuso Nerini, Nature Sustainablilty, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Corn

Corn, which if you trace the supply chain far back enough usually ends up as the primary precursor ingredient for most things in America, had a big USDA report drop yesterday with all sorts of surprises. The USDA cut the estimated size of the domestic corn crop to 13.73 billion bushels, down 190 million bushels compared to analyst expectations. The biggest surprise was a 1.6 million-acre drop in corn acres, which is a rare amount of land to exit the business in a year. Economists are attempting to puzzle out where those acres went, with some arguing that the USDA previously underestimated the impact that drought had on the acreage, which made farmers who wanted to grow corn instead pivot to selling the drought-struck corn as animal feed silage. Anyway, that’s the latest from the people who grow the precursor to functionally all American life.

Tyne Morgan, Ag Web

This past week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, who wrote "January 1, 2023, is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all!” Every year I link out to Jenkins’ post about the new works entering the public domain, as it’s a fascinating and nuanced topic. We spoke about Mickey Mouse, Canada, my own eventual death, and Winnie the Pooh. Jenkins can be found at Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

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