3 charts for you today:
It's one thing to get your first song release to break into the top 100, it's another to have it go straight to number one and it's even more ridiculous to break the record on Spotify for most streams of any song in a week — but that is what 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo has achieved in the last 10 days.
Her song, drivers license, was being listened to more than 13 million times per day in the middle of last week — making it roughly 3x more popular than the second most popular song on Spotify anywhere in the world, which was Dakiti by Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez.
The magnitude of Rodrigo's initial success may be surprising, but her career as a Disney star cemented her with a legion of fans before she sung a single note. Like so many modern songs, social media platform TikTok then sent the song global. Since releasing the song on January 8th, more than 900,000 individual videos have been uploaded to TikTok, using drivers license as the audio. Among those 900,000 uploads were videos from famous TikTokers including Charli D'Amelio (with her 107 million followers).
Modern music distribution = TikTok.
Good luck for your next single Olivia — it's going to be hard to top that.
Joe Biden is officially in the Oval Office. In his first few days as President, Biden focused his attention on repealing a number of Executive Orders put in place by his predecessor, before turning his efforts towards the country's coronavirus response.
A fragile, but recovering economy
Once COVID-19 is under control Biden's primary focus will likely turn to the US economy, which is in a fragile, but not critical, state.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the latest US unemployment rate at 6.7%. Incredibly, that's actually down from the 14.8% that it peaked at back in April of last year — a testament to how far the economy has come in just 8 months.
Relative to history, an economy with an unemployment rate of 6.7% is actually fairly unremarkable — the average for the last 50 years is 6.2% and many past presidents have taken the reins of an economy in much worse shape. Reagan entered the office with unemployment at 7.4%, Clinton at 7.1% and Obama took over as unemployment was climbing towards 10% during the depths of the global financial crisis at the start of '09.
Okay — so not too bad then?
The issue is whether the sharp rebound continues. If you look at the data on total number of people employed, the economic recovery looks like it has flatlined. Similarly, more recently available data (such as unemployment claims) remain painfully high.
The glass-half-empty view is that once the huge stimulus packages injected into the economy subside, with some provisions expiring in mid-March, the economy could collapse again.
The glass-half-full argument is even simpler: people are going to go mad for all of the things they have missed (holidays, dining out etc.) — and many have been saving over the last 10 months.
Bumble, the dating app which has focused on the experience of women on its platform, has filed with the SEC for an IPO which could value the company at more than $6bn. Bumble is just the latest dating app to have grown and matured into a substantial business, with revenues of $417m for the first nine months of last year.
As the chart above shows, it is no surprise that dating apps and platforms are becoming significant businesses when the majority of new couples are meeting online — according to data from the studies "How Couples Meet and Stay Together" from Stanford University.
Of heterosexual couples who met in 1995, roughly one-third met through friends, but by 2017 that number had fallen to just 20%, while almost 40% of couples met online. In same-sex couples, the number that met online is even higher at 65%.
Interestingly, meeting in a bar or restaurant was the only other medium that became a better matchmaker over the study period, with 27% of heterosexual couples meeting that way in 2017, up from 19% in 1995. Looking for love? Go to a bar and then go on a dating app while you're there.
1) Chinese authorities have made contact with 11 miners that are trapped hundreds of metres underground after an explosion closed the entrance to a tunnel in the Shandong province.
2) Google is threatening to pull its search engine from Australia if a new law comes into force which would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. 80% of digital advertising spend in Australia currently goes to Google or Facebook.
3) United Airlines full year results reveal that the company lost $7.1bn in 2020, or just shy of $20m a day.
4) Every week Noah Kagan runs through the business models, and opportunities, of digital and tech-enabled businesses on his YouTube channel.**
5) The Economist tallied up every time Biden used the word "unity" — or a synonym for it — during his 2,411 word inaugural speech. With 19 mentions, Biden's speech referred to "unity" more than any inaugural address in history.
**This is a sponsored snack.
