After an Oasis concert faced technical glitches, the band sent out refunds to every attendee but with a twist – each cheque had their signature on it. They worked on assumption that most fans would prefer their signature to cashing the cheque, and saved up to £1m with a bit of ink.
Music & Literature
In 1934, Sir Allen Lane was waiting at Exeter St Davids for a train back to London, and found himself without a book to read. All that was on offer at the station bookstall were magazines and Victorian reprints. He decided that high quality, engaging, and reasonably priced books should be available to everyone, anywhere. Next year, he created Penguin Books.
The world’s greatest playwright was a serial borrower. All of Shakespeare’s plays were inspired by original source material; Hamlet comes from the Old Norse Saga of King Rolf Kraki, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Spotify pays artists based on the number of streams they receive, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song. As a result, artists are incentivised to pack albums full of short songs, all of which hint at the chorus in the opening few seconds, as opposed to longer experimental songs that take a long time to build.
Only 2% of Spotify artists earn more than $1k a year.
Comparing claimed Spotify usage vs actual usage, one quarter of those who to use it monthly did not use it at all.
After Stranger Things featured Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill,” she saw an immediate spike in listenership. Not only that, three years later listenership still remains elevated following this initial uptick.
How do you add £1 billion to the UK economy? Ask Taylor Swift to perform live. The UK leg of her 2024 Eras tour was attended by 1.2 million people, leading to a huge spike in spending on accommodation, food, transportation and entertainment.
In the bestselling thriller, an assassin uses the birth certificates of dead babies to obtain fake passports. Unfortunately for the authorities, this publicised a genuine loophole in the system – the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) uncovered 1,200 cases involving the use of dead people’s identities, and it was only in 2012 (35 years after the book was released) that the loophole was closed.
The author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers says this about writing: “I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was.” In short, focus on what you want to read, not what you think others will want to read.
Historically, it refers to both the device – the radio set – and the medium itself. But that is changing. According to Ofcom, one quarter of radio listeners say they use Spotify’s ‘radio’ function which automatically creates a custom playlist curated around any song, album, playlist or artist.