By Walt Hickey

Television

The television business in the United States has seen a dip, with the number of fictional series produced dropping from 600 series in 2021 to 516 series in 2022; in Europe, however, where the economics of pop culture are treated differently, that bubble has not necessarily popped yet, if at all. According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, there were 873 fictional series produced for broadcast and streaming platforms in Europe, up from 775 in 2021. Spending by global streaming platforms fueled much of that growth, with international streamers spending $5.3 billion on European content, up 70 percent year over year, though their production was a bit top-heavy in just two countries with the U.K. and Spain responsible for 55 percent of global streamer spending. All told, the European market was up to $140 billion. Based on what I have seen of German, English, Dutch and other European television content, I for one am thrilled to learn about new vicars who have been assigned to the countryside to solve crimes in a village, or deacons who are transferred to a parish on the cape and must solve cosy mysteries, or perhaps daring and experimental new programming about monsignors transferred to solve misdemeanors in a municipality.

Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter

Super Mario Maker

With just a few weeks to go, the speedrunners questing to complete the entirety of uploaded games of Super Mario Maker are still stuck on one final map: the “Trimming the Herbs” match that is currently the fixation of a number of contenders vying to be the last person to ever complete a map in Super Mario Maker. The pros estimate that there are fewer than 10 people in the entire venture who have the skills to beat the 17 seconds of terror in this map, which is lousy with spikes, ghosts and piranha plants. A 6-year-old video of the original uploader proving it’s possible has beguiled the players, who have been able to complete 85,000 unplayed levels of the Wii U game and have brought it down to this one remaining impediment. On April 8, Nintendo pulls the plug on the servers.

Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

Spotify

Streaming service Spotify paid $9 billion in royalties to musical artists in 2023. Of that, $4.5 billion went to independent artists, most of whom made a few dollars here and there. The platform said that there were 66,000 artists who made at least $10,000 in royalties in the year (up 16 percent year over year), 11,600 artists who made at least $100,000 in royalties, and a small club of 1,250 artists that made over $1 million on Spotify last year. That’s up 18 percent from the 1,060 artists who made $1 million from Spotify in 2022.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

New Slang

A new survey of parents of children who can be considered to be in the so-called Gen Alpha, which is the generation following Gen Z, has come to report the most common slang words among the youths currently in play. Overall, 33 percent reported hearing their youngest child use the word “bet,” which expresses agreement, as well as 32 percent who reported the use of “GOAT” and 31 percent who heard the word “sus,” which respectively allude to the “greatest of all time” and the word “suspicious.” Other commonly appearing words include “bussin’” (28 percent), “cap” (28 percent), “rizz” (18 percent), “gyat” (12 percent) and “sigma” (12 percent). Naturally, this also means that it’s just the words that parents reported hearing and comprehending, so it’s likely omitting some of the more incomprehensible slang that it’s going to take years for the mainstream press to identify and, yes, completely run into the ground.

Nicki Zink, Morning Consult

Ghost Jobs

A phenomenon now seen on job boards is the “ghost job,” or a job posted by a company that is seemingly never filled, up indefinitely, and used, if anything, to pretend that a company is growing or to cache resumes for when an actual job does, in fact, open up. A survey of hiring managers found that 40 percent list jobs that are not actively being filled, and one analysis of LinkedIn estimated that 1.7 million potential jobs there are in fact likely “ghost openings” that have been posted for long periods of time and are not actually being filled.

AJ Dellinger, BBC

Monopoly Go

One of the most successful video games in America is Monopoly Go, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a mobile version of the board game Monopoly. It’s got 10 million daily players, and has made $1 billion in three months, according to the publisher. Much like in the classic game, that unspeakably large profit was the result of lots and lots of investment, with the senior VP of publishing at the company reporting that the publisher has spent almost $500 million on marketing and user acquisition on top of the seven years of game development. That’s an incredible amount of money on a mobile game; for perspective, The Last of Us Part II, a triple-A game from a major publisher, cost $220 million to develop.

Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku

CFB

ESPN will spend a reported $7.8 billion on a six-year extension to the rights to air the College Football Playoff, which will keep the championship bowl games at ESPN through the 2031-32 season. The investment comes at a compelling time in college football, with the playoffs expanding from four teams to 12 teams this year, and then onto 16 teams as soon as 2026. It comes along with some other seismic shifts in the college game, such as the advent of the rights of athletes to profit from their names, images and licensing, as well as the departure of Nick Saban from the team that always wins the playoffs anyway.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

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