By Walt Hickey
My Own Worst EnemySony Music has settled with the rock band Lit regarding $800,000 in royalties for their 1990s song catalog, largely driven by their hit 1999 single “My Own Worst Enemy.” The lawsuit is related to an incredibly prescient clause in the band’s deal with RCA Records signed in 1998, which the artists believed entitled them to a higher royalty rate on streaming music, something that barely existed in 1998. Sony was paying Lit their basic 14 percent royalty rate for plays on digital streamers. However, a parenthetical on the 1998 Lit deal said they get 50 percent net proceeds from master use licenses that include, as an example, “RCA’s license to another person of the right to embody a master recording on a website in a so-called ‘streaming’ format, which is not subject to the ‘digital download’ of that master recording by a viewer.” Nobody knows who added the clause or why. How in the hell someone thought to include that in a contract from 1998, a mere five years after the invention of the MP3, before the first mainstream streaming platforms Rhapsody and PressPlay emerged in the early 2000s, is frankly astonishing. I’m almost annoyed that the headline for this story isn’t Holy Crap, We Discovered A Time-Traveling Lawyer. Anyway, in light of this, Sony decided to settle. TwinkiesJ.M. Smucker bought Hostess for $5 billion in 2024, which in retrospect certainly seems like the wrong time to buy a snack food company. Sales have declined, thanks to cuts in discretionary spending, trends related to health and fitness and the rapid ascent of GLP-1 drugs. Overall snack sales in the United States are down four percent in the past four years, and sales of sweet snacks are down 17 percent. Jesse Newman, The Wall Street Journal
LaliqueThe Lalique Museum was robbed on July 5 in an 11-minute robbery in which three masked men broke in at 5:30 a.m., smashed six showcases with hammers, and stole 27 crystal pieces worth 4.5 million euros. According to the vice-chairman of the museum, the museum’s security company failed to intervene and did not alert the authorities. The Lalique Museum opened in 2011 to present artifacts of the Lalique company, a jeweler and glassmaker founded by Art Nouveau luminary René Lalique. A parliamentary report that followed the Louvre robbery eight months ago shone a spotlight on security failures across the 2,000 mostly small museums across France; sophisticated thieves raiding these small museums has become a trend across the country. Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper AnimeProduction costs for anime are up substantially, driven by tight supply, big spending from international streamers and high demand. Production costs for a 30-minute episode of anime were 15 million yen to 50 million yen in 2020, but today that range is 40 million yen to 60 million yen per episode, with the median cost up 50 percent over the past six years. The anime streaming market was worth 265 billion yen as of 2024, up 6.2 percent year over year. One trend driving the cost increase is the demand for higher-quality animation, often at a level that would be expected for a theatrical release rather than televised anime, which has generally been granted a bit more leeway when it comes to image quality. Another is time: It once took three to four months to produce a 30-minute episode, but it now generally takes about six months.
TectonicA new study published in Nature describes the real-time measurement of tectonic plates shifting under the ocean, a never-before-seen event. Thanks to a suite of instruments placed along a stretch of mid-ocean ridge, researchers were able to monitor the region when a swarm of earthquakes hit, at which point the sea floor dropped four meters, the plates moved apart by over a meter and up to 160 million cubic meters of lava erupted onto the seabed, roughly 40 years of plate motion in a single event. What’s particularly interesting is that the fault shifted two meters, but earthquakes were responsible for just 10 to 20 centimeters of that shift, which means that the aseismic slip was indeed responsible for a large amount of the movement. Sam MacDonald, Scientific American
Hydration BreaksThe United States may be out of the World Cup, but like good capitalists, they had the decency to do so in the 94th match of the 104-match tournament, which means that Fox and Telemundo have already capitalized on most of the ad sales dollars and retransmission-consent fees. This World Cup is a big hit for the broadcasters, who picked up the rights for a song after the Qatar Cup; Fox paid just $485 million for the rights. Fox has made out like bandits on the hydration breaks, which have meant 260 additional seconds of ad time per match, which came to $200 million in bonus sales during the group stage — on pace for $450 million worth of hydration break sales for the whole tournament, basically enough money in the hydration break to pay for the whole tournament’s rights. Leap SecondEarth’s rotation speed increases and decreases based on a number of factors, meaning that since 1972, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has occasionally announced a leap second for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), adding to a year to keep up in lockstep with the astronomical solar year. This is deeply annoying for the people who operate computer systems, and they would like it to stop. In 2016, Earth’s rotation began to increase, so we have not had to add a leap second in a while; however, the acceleration is getting to a point where we might be due for a negative leap second, or a skipped second, sometime soon. A new proposal would say to hell with all this, just switch to “leap hours” and we won’t have to deal with this for hundreds of years. The 2026 General Conference on Weights and Measures will settle the matter; recent projections put us at a 30 percent risk of a negative leap second by 2035. Emma Gometz, Scientific American Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read: Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow. Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine · Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak ·Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
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