By Walt Hickey

Chicken Soup

The sentence “Chicken Soup for the Soul lost $636.6 million last year” is certainly a weird one, but I must assure you it did in fact happen. The brand, which expanded beyond the initial short story collections and has become a streaming player in its own right, saw revenues of $294.4 million last year. The company owns Redbox, the kiosk-based DVD distributor with some 40,000 locations, which is doing very well with $112.7 million in revenue, up from $67.7 million in 2022. I’m just saying, if I knew that I could bet against this company when it was mostly known for collections of short stories about how much it sucks when your dog dies, I would be a millionaire today.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Cache

Lars Emil Bruun was a simple man who loved two things: controlling much of the butter trade in Denmark a century ago, and also coins. The man, who lived 1852-1923, racked up a collection of 15,000 coins, 4,600 medals, 330 banknotes and 1,800 book titles, and when he died he insisted that his collection must remain intact and stowed for exactly 100 years, after which it may be sold. The time for the fateful auction of coins and medals has come, and the first tranche of objects will come up for auction this autumn. You’ve got Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and then you’ve got the coins from the various brief colonies of those places like Tranquebar in India. Indeed, the origin is pretty charming; the reason for the century-long wait is that Bruun wanted his collection to be the backup to the Royal Danish Collection of Coins and Medals as a redundancy, and if in a century the state’s collection endured it’d be time to hawk the family numismatic jewels. Anyway, all his heirs seem kind of mad about the whole thing.

James Tarmy, Bloomberg

Music

The year-end report from the RIAA confirmed that the business in Latin music is only going up, with total revenue increasing from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $1.4 billion as of 2023 and the overall share of music that is Latin music rising from 5.5 percent in 2020 to 7.9 percent last year. In general, the growth rate of Latin music is vastly outpacing the overall music business. Most of that is on streaming, which makes up 98 percent of the revenue in Latin music, roughly $1.3 billion last year.

Isabela Raygoza, Billboard

‘Treuse Got Me Loose, Gone On Patron

The Carthusian monks have managed to make headlines, first after the Chartreuse they produce became abstruse when they indicated that the monastery will dial back their liqueur production to focus on other matters such as God, but now again after the actual numbers emerged and it turns out global Chartreuse sales hit 1.6 million bottles last year, doubling in the U.S. since 2020. The monks have gone so far as to open a visitors center in Paris. That’s weird, especially for Americans who have been on quests to find the good green stuff for the past year. The story of Chartreuse will always be fascinating. As recently as 1983, the Carthusians earned just $287,000 selling 1 million bottles of Chartreuse. Now, it’s far, far more.

Aaron Goldfarb, VinePair

Suit

A new proposed class-action lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., federal court has three fans of Madonna suing over the artist’s late starts to her concerts, alleging disrespect for fans and a violation of law. The suit alleges that Madonna appearing onstage at 10:40 p.m. when the date cited 8:30 p.m. as the start time on December 18 and 19 breaks the promise of what the tickets were sold for and is a cognizable injury. The suit follows a similar one filed in New York. That said, if “it’s annoying to have to ride the train late at night” is a tort, then I’m Williams Jennings Bryant.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Pulp

Over the past two decades, paper packaging volumes are up 65 percent. Now, the good news is that more and more of those boxes are made from ex-boxes and ex-ex-boxes, thanks to the versatility of paper pulp. Lock, stock and barrel, about 54 percent of pulp used to make paper packaging was recycled paper, 43 percent is made from new forest fiber, and just 3 percent is made from alternatives like wheat straw and bagasse. The fear is that we’ll pave paradise and make it a cardboard box, but all told, paper packaging is but a fragment of actual deforestation and it’s probably the plastic air sacs we should be worried about.

Kate Lindsay, BBC News

Muskrats

I think I speak for all of us when I say that the consensus opinion is that beavers are great, we dig what they’re doing, and the whole “make a dam and improve the forest as a whole” thing is an awesome angle that we’re all rather proud to support. Well, the zeitgeist is moving onward, and the new thing is muskrats and all they contribute. They build dams, they breed extensively, and they are regrettably struggling: Since the 1970s, populations have fallen by at least half in 34 states, and in many states between 90 and 99 percent.

Brandon Keim, Hakai Magazine

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