The next Hollywood/Wall Street love affair

Wall Street’s latest adventure in our corner of the world appears to be asset-light content production companies. Announcements of acquisitions and funding rounds are starting to accelerate, reminding us of the early days of the adoption of music…

YouTube to Netflix, a Tale of Two Streamers

Fashionably late to the party, Netflix announced in its Q1 earnings call that it was open to adding a lower cost ad-supported model after years of resisting advertisements on its platform. In 2020 we wrote about our enthusiasm in AVOD after the market…

The Music vs. Podcast Battle

Few of us could avoid reading about the media industry in January-February as the Spotify/Neil Young controversy dominated headlines. Without taking sides or rehashing all that has already been written, we thought it may be helpful to provide a legal and economic framework for…

Everything is cost of capital all at once

The topic of interest rates and their impact is hard to avoid these days, including in the media industry, as participants learn that uncorrelated cash flows do not necessarily mean uncorrelated asset values. However, it was recent reading on a completely…

A Pressing Issue

We’ve written about the vinyl industry once before in 2017 at which point vinyl had exhibited a double digit revenue growth spurt. In the four years that have elapsed since, the vinyl industry hit yet another milestone; in 2021 U.S. vinyl revenues grew 61% year over year, exceeding $1B in revenue…

What’s going on in advertising?

The recent Q2 earnings reporting season for publicly traded media and tech companies was a wealth of datapoints around the impact of macroeconomic uncertainties on advertising spend across the digital and legacy media ecosystem.

Focus on the exporting

To help understand the current film/TV landscape, one can look to an analogy from a much more vital industry: energy.

When a country produces a valuable commodity — whether oil or wheat — it implicitly makes a daily choice of keeping it within the bounds of its…