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With inflation cooling more than expected, and Fed chair Powell hinting at smaller rate hikes in the near future, Wall Street started getting into the joyful festive spirit. This week the S&P 500 rallied again — bringing gains for the flagship index to a little over 5% in November. That move follows on from October, which was also a great month for stock markets as the Dow soared nearly 14%, posting its best month since 1976.
Sweet greens
Even with two green bars in a row on this chart — the first back-to-back monthly gains since August 2021, when Meta was still Facebook and inflation was not an acceptable conversation topic — it’s nevertheless not been enough to undo the damage done from earlier this year. Indeed, the S&P 500 is still down ~14% in 2022, remaining on track for its worst year since 2008.
The show must go on
The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running show in Broadway history, will linger in Manhattan a little longer after its February 2023 curtain call was pushed back by 8 weeks.
The musical has been a major hit with Broadway audiences for nearly 35 years and, after the September announcement that Phantom would fade away in the new year, the production has seen a huge sales boost, reportedly pulling in $2.2m in the last week alone. Data collated by IBDB shows how Phantom, over more than 13,000 individual performances, maintained a remarkable 90% average attendance rate from 1988-2019 — with nearly every show sold-out for the first 8 years of its run.
Stranger than you dreamt it
Indeed, Phantom's attendance figures only really began to drop noticeably in 2022. Broadway theaters, like much of the performing arts industry recently, have struggled — Forbes neatly ascribing 2022’s spate of show closures on the strip to “costs, COVID, and crime”.
Calling time on a Broadway heavyweight like Phantom could be seen as a clear marker of how tough things have got — but it’s also natural for shows to lose momentum after almost 4 decades at the top. If Phantom's been on your Broadway bucket list we wish you luck — searches for tickets have spiked dramatically.
Spotify (un)Wrapped
If you’ve been on social media in the last 48 hrs, you’re now no doubt familiar with the listening habits of your nearest and dearest.
The music tech company’s Wrapped — one of our favorite uses of data storytelling that gets widespread coverage — is a good reminder of Spotify’s dominance in the industry. Despite competing with a trio of tech giants in Apple, Amazon and Google (through YouTube), the Swedish company remains the world’s largest music streaming service, counting more than 450 million users at the end of its latest quarter.
Freemium forever
60% of those users, 273 million in total, remain on Spotify’s free service. Those users get access to Spotify’s enormous music library at the cost of being bombarded with 15-30 second adverts every few songs. But, as frequent as those ads may feel for listeners, they are a tiny part of Spotify’s business. Spotify’s paid users brought in nearly €2.7bn in revenue in the latest quarter, ads brought in roughly one-seventh of that.
It would be hard to call Spotify a startup, given the company is in its 16th year of operations (with 4 as a public company), but on some measures it still looks like one, having not converted progress into steady profits. After payments to artists, labels, publishers and agents, Spotify makes a 25% margin. That margin then goes on overheads, research & development, sales & marketing and admin costs — in fact Spotify has lost ~€1.1bn since 2019, with the company ending up in the red for 10 of the last 15 quarters.
• Salesforce shares have fallen ~10% after a second co-CEO departure in less than 3 years, left founder Marc Benioff alone again.
• Japan beat Spain 2-1 at the World Cup with just 17.7% possession — the lowest figure ever recorded in the competition.
• Tinder’s "year in swipe" reveals a lot about the modern dating scene.
• Americans are spending most of what they earn, as the US savings rate hits its lowest level since 2005.
• Netflix is planning to allow tens of thousands of subscribers to preview exclusive content from early 2023.
• Planning a move? The Economist has released their list of most and least expensive cities for 2022.
• GIPHY’s top GIFs and Clips of 2022.
Off the charts: Which auto manufacturer, that announced it would stop production of their once most-popular car in Europe in favor of EVs this week, were we charting about in May 2021? [Answer below].
