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Endless summer. Surf’s up, FutureParty people. We’re giving away a free three-night trip for two to beautiful Rincon, Puerto Rico, and we want you (yes, you!) to win this epic beach adventure. Enter here for your chance to hang ten at one of our favorite getaway spots. And who knows, maybe you’ll be the next Jeff Spicoli. Shaka bruh. 🏄♂️🤙
In other news… Billboard moves its music awards online, A24 goes mainstream, and AI avatars live forever.
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MUSIC
Watch on all the screens // Illustration by Kate Walker
The Billboard Music Awards will now be online-only
The Future. The 2023 Billboard Music Awards is going fully digital for its 2023 awards show… which is set to air in one month. That’s a revolutionary overhaul, but it falls in line with other name-brand (but not top-tier) awards shows shifting to streaming — a move forced by TV networks opting not to pick up shows amid declining ratings. With most people watching awards shows via clips on YouTube, TikTok, and X, Billboard may just be leaning into audience behavior, packaging the show in ready-to-share clips and hoping to reap associated ad revenue.
Social broadcast
The Billboard Music Awards is done with TV (for now).
The awards show will air across Billboard’s social channels and on its website. In recent years, the show bounced around NBC, Fox, and ABC.
The show date is also moving from May to November 19th to align with the end of Billboard’s annual chart-tracking period.
And the publisher is partnering with Spotify on the show, tapping the streamer to “identify fans who have consumed the most hours of music over the past year and helped drive their favorite artists to the top spots on the Billboard charts.”
Those fans will be given a “golden ticket” to attend “a once-in-a-lifetime performance curated by their favorite artists.”
These performances will take place in several locations around the world “in the midst of sold-out tours.” Is this strategy a way to include performances from on-the-road artists who wouldn’t be convinced to fly back to LA or Vegas otherwise?
Potentially… which may only show how much leverage Billboard and Dick Clark Productions have in roping in Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Drake, and Ed Sheeran to sit in the same room at the same time for a show that’s not the Grammys.
In the age of cord-cutting and on-demand TV, awards shows aren’t what they used to be.
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ENTERTAINMENT
Courtesy of A24
A24 plans to go mainstream
The Future. A24 is looking to expand into action fare and more IP-driven projects because, for all the brand loyalty the studio has, many of its films have struggled financially. That pivot would be an accompaniment to its typical arthouse titles, not a replacement, giving the independent studio a wide variety of releases. If successful, smaller distributors like A24 and Neon could recreate a model that, ironically, the major studios used to follow in decades past — just now with a modern mastery of branding.
Remaking itself
A24 is looking for some commercial success.
This summer’s Beau Is Afraid only made $11.5 million on a $35 million budget (the studio’s most expensive film to date) — a disappointing but fair bet after Ari Aster’s last two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, were big moneymakers for the studio.
That led A24 to try franchising some of its horror successes, including Ti West’s Pearl/X/MaXXXine trilogy and a sequel to the breakout Australian hit Talk To Me.
The studio has even been in the bidding mix for iconic IPs like the TV rights to Halloween and is set to produce a Friday the 13th series.
It seems like A24 knows the time to cash in on recent successes (a Best Picture win for Everything Everywhere All at Once and huge viewership for Euphoria) is now, especially as it angles for a buyer at a $2.5 billion valuation. Todd Boehly, the billionaire co-founder of Eldridge Industries and the main backer of A24, would probably like to see his entertainment investment become a bigger player.
But after raising $225 million last year from Stripes founder Ken Fox, A24 may also have capital to scale without finding a buyer. It just might need to beat the major studios at their own game to do it.
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It’s better to gift than receive
And now you can coordinate a group gift (for baby showers, birthdays, etc.) online.
Meet GroupTogether — the platform that makes group gifting easy-peasy.
Here’s how it works:
CREATE. Invite people to join your group gift or card via WhatsApp, email, or SMS.
COLLECT. Share a safe link so your friends can click to pay and sign the card.
GIFT. Make someone’s day with one of their 150 eGift Cards. Or let them pick their own.
It’s free and easy to use, so start gifting!
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Rising from the algorithm // Illustration by Kate Walker
AI is raising people from the dead
The Future. AI is putting the power of resurrection in people’s hands… and that could have some unintended consequences in the matters of mental health, consent, and copyright — for both the living and the dead. With so much at stake, as companies race to provide more and more powerful tools, everyone may need to protect their “likeness” to stay ahead of the curve.
Grave-generation
Moving on is hard. So, there’s an AI for that.
Tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT are being used together to create avatars of deceased relatives to help people cope with grief.
Some funeral companies, like China’s Shanghai Fushouyun, are even offering it as part of their memorial services… making for a very different type of viewing experience.
But it’s also being used by people to bring back celebrities they miss — a move that family members are not cool with.
There’s been a fascination with generating lifelike replicas of the deceased for the past decade, starting with a Tupac hologram that played at Coachella in 2012 to ongoing “live” performances of artists like Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly.
And AI will only supercharge those capabilities. Avengers co-director Joe Russo even believes the tech will eventually let audiences generate a movie “starring [their] photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar.”
That feels like a recipe for a whole new understanding of “consent,” which is exactly what Congress is trying to figure out now.
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Highlights
The best curated daily stories from around the web
Media, Music, & Entertainment
Disney is finally lifting the lid on how much profit ESPN rakes in — $2.9 billion last year alone, which is $800 million more than the Mouse House’s entire filmed entertainment business. Read more → thr
As an offer to break the gridlock in negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP, a group of A-list actors is offering to remove the $1 million cap on membership dues to bring in $50 million more per year to the union — money that would be used to bolster the union’s benefits. Read more → deadline
YouTube is working on (and hoping to get approval for) an AI tool that would let users sing like Drake… so we can all be Ghostwriter. Read more → bloomberg
Fashion & E-Commerce
Goop is dropping a beauty brand priced for all us normies that’ll hit physical shelves at Target and digital shelves on Amazon. Read more → bof
Adidas is getting in the mosh pit with the nu-metal band Korn. Read more → complex
Amazon wants to deliver goods even faster… so it’s developing an AI-powered robot workforce to do it. Read more → theverge
Tech, Web3, & AI
The Five Eyes — the intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — are issuing a rare warning that half of tech-focused Chinese espionage occurs in Silicon Valley. Read more → nyt
Universal Music Group, ABKCO, and Concord Publishing are suing Anthropic for copyright infringement, claiming its Claude chatbot has lifted the lyrics of 500 songs. Read more → hypebeast
NY Attorney General Letitia James has opened a whopping $1 billion fraud case against crypto firms Gemini Trust, Genesis Global Capital, and Digital Currency Group, alleging the companies knowingly misled investors. Read more → nyt
Creator Economy
Discord is transforming into an app store in the US, UK, and the EU, giving developers 70% of the revenue (just like Apple and Google). Read more → techcrunch
Substack is putting headlines right in article images to bypass X’s new headline-removing feature. Read more → theverge
Speaking of X, Elon Musk is floating deleting the platform in the EU after the coalition government opened an investigation into how the company handles misinformation. Read more → insider
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Copy edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.