What you’re missing: The Reset is a newsletter we send out every Sunday to the corporate enterprise subscribers to WrapPRO. If you think your company or organization would be interested in signing up for an enterprise plan, please reach out to our head of enterprise sales, Kimberly Donnan, at kimberly.donnan@thewrap.com.
Happy Sunday,
Thank you for indulging me with a little fright month photography from Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho,” showing Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scream (brilliantly accompanied by violins, if you recall). I give you “Psycho” to help underscore where we are in the zeitgeist these days.
The very first issue of this newsletter back in April focused on managing chaos. Today the chaos is even more chaotic. Donald Trump has brought back his proposal to impose 100% tariffs on films made overseas. His relentless attacks on media and press are escalating. M&A feels like an unwinnable, political chess game. The federal government is now shut down, preventing you from seeing the economic data that will help you model your businesses for the future. It’s enough to make anybody want to, well, scream.
That brings me to a message imparted this past week by our founder and Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman as a welcome to the attendees at our successful business event TheGrill in Los Angeles.
“We don’t live in normal times. That said, define normal.
“I think everyone can agree that, business-wise, we are in the middle of a changing weather pattern. Not just a single storm but a shift in the system. And since we don’t know what that new system looks like, it becomes really hard to predict or plan around it, let alone get ahead of it. Some days you just feel like you’re hanging on.”
The last thing TheWrap would ever do is to preach but Sharon’s chat was a helpful prescriptive for the times we live in. I will leave you with this for your week ahead: “We know by now that change is not only a constant in the world of content, but that its velocity has only increased,” she said. “Those of us who are here for this conversation are the intrepid, the rock-ribbed and the fearless. The community here today is made up of people energized by change, not in retreat from it. We’re here to adapt, learn and grasp the moment.”
Stay rock-ribbed, readers.
Tom Lowry
SVP/Editorial Strategy
tom.lowry@thewrap.com
1. Live Entertainment’s Post-Pandemic Bright Halo Flickers This past week, we released an exclusive WrapPRO research report in partnership with Pollstar that shows the meteoric rise of live entertainment following the pandemic standstill and how things might be settling in, possibly for a correction.
“Taking a Beat on Live Entertainment 2025” is exclusive for WrapPRO subscribers, as will be future research reports we deliver on the entertainment, media and tech industries.
To capture some of the live entertainment leveling off, take a look at this chart showing the rise of the average gross per show of live entertainment from 2019 to now, and check out the trendline.
As part of this data-rich report, WrapPRO conducted its own survey to get a read on our readers’ live entertainment preferences and spending. Don’t miss that in the report, too.
2. The 1 Percent Loving Sports A recap recently by Goldman Sachs of where so-called family offices are placing their bets reveals it’s pretty much all about sports. Family offices are private investment firms that help ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families invest their riches, aiming to preserve and grow wealth across generations.
According to Goldman Sachs, 71% of those family offices it surveyed say they’re investing in men’s major leagues, with tech and venues next. A quarter have already put money into teams, arenas, or ticketing, while another 25% are actively exploring.
“Recent examples: Julia Koch buying into the Giants, Mark Walter’s $10 billion Lakers stake, and Bay Area families backing the 49ers. While interest is strongest in men’s leagues, investors are also buying into new WNBA franchises — seeing sports as a diversified play with inflation-proof revenue streams,” according to a post from Boardroom, a media network for sports, business and entertainment founded in 2019 by Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman.
If you haven’t read it, please check out our recent “Game On” series about the outsized impact of sports on entertainment.
First off, Daniel Ek is worth more than $9 billion, according to Forbes estimates.
He’s been a CEO for 19 years, seven of those running a publicly traded company.
And he’s 42. So stepping away from the chief executive role, without having to speculate about some smoking gun reason for why he’s leaving the job, would be completely understandable. As a co-founder and top executive of Spotify, Ek has overseen incredible growth, taking on a pioneer status in streaming and music — he’s hoping soon for podcasts, too. The NYSE-traded, Swedish company’s shares are up 50% so far this year, with a $141 billion market cap.
Ek’s news came last Tuesday, with Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström named as co-CEOs, and Ek becoming executive chairman. Ek’s reason was that it was simply time for a change and that he would like to spend more time focused on long-term strategy, and to focus on his other investments, such as body-scanning company Neko Health and Helsing, a drone and AI provider for military operations. The Helsing investment prompted some artists to drop off Spotify in protest of Ek supporting AI weapons as “lethal, dystopian technology” while prompting calls for investigations. Some wondered whether this controversy prompted his departure.
Which brings us to the the hard lessons we can take away from Ek as CEO. His relationships with artists has been contentious forever (he once decried that artists really just need to work harder) when the hot button issue surfaced of the royalties Spotify pays out. Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift have left the service temporarily over these issues, and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell boycotted Spotify over its exclusive distribution deal with Joe Rogan.
There’s no denying Ek’s status as an innovator, playing a huge part in how we all listen to music.
But his successors will need to focus on smoothing artist relations, including with a growing class of creators, if it plans to hold its own against gigantic competitors in Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube.
‘Digital brains’ that ‘think’ and ‘feel’: why do we personify AI models, and are these metaphors actually helpful?, The Conversation
Publishers need to go back to basics, The Rebooting Show podcast with Brian Morrissey
Sequoia VP talent Zoe Hewitt on what star talent looks like in 2025, Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
