By Walt Hickey

Headphones

Sony has made a deal with the NFL to develop a custom headset for coaches that will appear in the 2025 season. The previous headphone sponsor, Bose, ended their relationship with the league in 2022, and the league has lacked a headphone sponsor since. Estimates of the annual value of logos on coaches’ headsets given the amount of screen time they get are in the ballpark of $72 million. Motorola paid $40 million for the rights in 2012, and given the growth of the league since, it stands to reason that estimate is pretty obvious. The headphones are a crucial piece of on-field technology for signaling; for instance, when the coach rips them off and chucks them onto the ground in exasperation, that signals your team screwed up really bad.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

M. Night

Trap, the new movie from M. Night Shyamalan, is tracking to $15 million to $20 million in its opening weekend. Shyamalan’s recent work — after his high-flying early days and less-loved studio gun-for-hire years — has been unique in his strategies for making films, which since The Visit have been generally self-financed and produced on entirely reasonable budgets that have done pretty darn well at recouping their financial inputs. His most recent movie, Knock at the Cabin, was made for the ballpark of $20 million and managed to pull in $54.7 million in cinemas.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Streams

The streaming business has been challenging for lots of the music industry, and songwriters are arguing that they in particular get screwed over by the business. Streaming pays out around $0.004 per song play, but that two-fifths of a penny gets split many different ways. At the top level, the streaming service gets 30 percent, the recording side (label, artist, distributor) gets 56 percent, and the publishing side (publishers, rights org, songwriter) gets 14 percent. It’s divided even further, because of that 14 percent that goes to publishing, the performing rights organization gets 15 percent, the publisher 17 percent, and then the songwriters get 68 percent. That brings the songwriter total to 9.52 percent of the $0.004 stream, or $0.00038, roughly 4 percent of a penny per play. Factor in that most hit songs have between three and 12 writers splitting up that fraction of a cent, and you can see why they’re mad.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Beaches

The Army Corps of Engineers has been rebuilding beaches since 1923, when they first pumped sand to shore up Coney Island. The trend spread quickly as moneyed interests with beachfront properties sought to maintain the integrity of their land, but it’s gotten a bit out of hand and some projects have become permanent. For instance, the longest-running beach rebuilding projects in the U.S. have lasted for decades. The longest, restoring Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, began 59 years ago when it was first rebuilt in 1965, and most recently was worked on this year. The five longest-running projects have been replenished 57 times since the 1960s, with just those five requiring 30 million cubic yards of sand.

Daniel Cusick, E&E News

Clickers

Banana is one of the most popular games in the world, averaging about 400,000 concurrent users playing the game during the month of June on Steam, down from an all-time high of 890,000 players. It’s a clicker game, the descendants of games like Cookie Clicker, and is pretty much mindless. It’s also a product of the market forces dominating gaming right now, not the least of which is the ascent of Steam Wallet, Steam Trading and Steam Community Market, which have essentially built up an entire economy around loot boxes, digital assets, in-game items, currency and more. For a rudimentary clicker game like Banana, the numbers are juiced by armies of bots attempting to rack up skins and rewards that might be tradable on Steam’s many marketplaces.

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas, Sherwood News

Hanford

The Hanford Site is a notoriously contaminated parcel of land as a result of decades of atomic weapon production, which over the course of its lifetime produced 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste as well as millions of cubic feet of solid waste. It’s a radiological boondoggle, land that is essentially useless for housing, farming or much of anything. Except, that is, solar: The U.S. Department of Energy announced a new installation last week of over 8,000 acres that would produce 1 gigawatt of energy capacity, or enough to power 750,000 homes, on the contaminated site. It could possibly become the largest solar project in the country.

Carrie Klein, Canary Media

Trains

Amtrak is on pace for an annual ridership record, with the national passenger railroad seeing 24.1 million riders since the start of its fiscal year in October, up 18 percent compared to the same period a year prior. The Northeast Corridor is responsible for a lot of that — 9.18 million, to be specific — but its regional routes are really seeing success as travelers hop trains rather than drive. The number of riders on the Cascades route in the Pacific Northwest hit 550,000, up 48 percent, and the Pacific Surfliner route in Southern California hit 1.22 million riders, up 34 percent.

Jacob Passy, The Wall Street Journal

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