Numlock News: August 3, 2023 • Wrestling, Cold Brew, Cyberspace

Aug 3

By Walt Hickey

“This is a blast”: My book, You Are What You Watch, just got a really glowing review in Publishers Weekly. It’s out October 24 and if you haven’t already, today’s a great day to preorder it to help keep the momentum up!

Chilled

Starbucks has reached the point in the year where it is pretty much a cold beverage company, with the third quarter of this year seeing the company hit 75 percent of all beverage sales being of the cold variety. The company, which perfected the art of convincing grown adults that it’s acceptable to drink a milkshake in the middle of the afternoon by simply referring to it as a Frappuccino, has seen serious growth in cold espresso beverages (up 13 percent year over year) and cold foam (which contributed to $1 billion in revenue). The company is also working on expediting the process of making cold brew, which has historically been a 20-step, 20-hour process that costs $50 million a year in labor to produce; a new process that uses low-pressure immersion technology takes just four steps and several seconds, and is made on-demand.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Cruises

Over the past several years, China has enacted a number of policies to get its population onto domestic cruise ships. This includes building 13 new cruise ports between 2010 and 2019, supporting the local industry rather than sending its cruise lovers abroad, and getting international operators to add 34 cruise ships to the region from 2006 to 2021. It’s worked: In five years, China’s chunk of the global cruise market is up 148 percent, accounting for 8.5 percent of the global total and leaping over all of Europe to be the second-largest market. It’s still well behind the U.S., which dominates with almost half the global business.

Devon Bidal, Hakai Magazine

Titles

Title insurance is a necessary purchase when buying a home with a mortgage from a bank in the United States, and it’s seriously overpriced. For perspective, a health insurance company will pay out 80 percent to 85 percent of money collected through premiums to pay for claims made for medical care, keeping the rest for administrative costs and the profit. When it comes to title insurance, only 3 percent to 4 percent of the collected money actually pays out to claims, the rest of it going to fat profits or kickbacks. There are five title insurance companies that own 80 percent of the market, and as a whole $20 billion a year is sucked out of homebuyers’ budgets to pay for the obscure insurance product. It’s easy to imagine a world without mandatory title insurance though, and incidentally that world is called “Iowa,” which banned it in the 1940s and opened up a public finance agency in the 1970s to orchestrate it. In the rest of America, title insurance costs $1,400 to $2,700 for the median home; in Iowa, it costs $175 for home purchases up to $750,000.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

AAA

A new study from the AAA Foundation sought to figure out how changing a speed limit actually affected driver safety. One encouraging stat was that raising or lowering speed limits by 5 mph actually had little to no impact on travel times, a strong argument for changing speed limits to best accommodate safety given that the actual travel time won’t really be affected. That said, otherwise the data was ambiguous: Looking at 12 sites, six which saw a speed limit increase and six which saw a decrease, the data was fairly limited when it came to crash data, and the researchers were unable to come away with any major takeaways about whether and by how much tweaking the speed limit directly affected safety.

Daniel C. Vock, Route Fifty

Demos

When a songwriter or producer is trying to pitch an artist on one of their songs, often they’ll make a demonstration track and try to find a way to approximate the vocals of the artist they’re actually trying to sell the track to. Sometimes, the producer or songwriter will just belt out the track themselves and hope for the best, but other times in order to polish the pitch they’ll instead pay a demo singer $250 to $500 to record a soundalike demo. Most of those singers have other jobs in the industry as background singers or some other field, but it’s solid money for some who can really nail it for top acts. That said, the demo creation part of the production pipeline has long been rife for tech innovation, and the rise of AI-generated vocals to sound similar to artists from places like CoversAI or KitsAI has a legit business use here, essentially to sell an artist on their own hypothetical music.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Wrestling

The WWE reported quarterly earnings, and the latest two-night WrestleMania 39 in early April posted gate revenue of $21.6 million, with viewership up 29 percent year over year. The company’s live event business is absolutely booming, with revenue up 51 percent in that part of the business. Overall, wrestling remains a massive business, with the WWE posting revenues of $410.3 million, up 25 percent compared to the same quarter of 2022.

Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter

Limits

The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced that children under 18 will be limited to up to two hours of smartphone use per day, as well as forcing providers of smart devices to introduce a mode that bans users under the age of 18 from accessing the internet from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Under the plan, users 16 to 18 would be capped at two hours per day, users aged 8 to 16 would get one hour, and children under 8 are capped at eight minutes, though parents can opt out of the time limits. This led to a bloodbath among China’s internet titans, with Bilibili stocks falling 6.98 percent, Tencent declining 2.99 percent, and Kuaishou dropping 3.53 percent on the news. Douyin, the local TikTok app, already caps teens at 40 minutes of usage.

Reuters

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