Blog: Entertainment and Fandom - Page 5

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

Sony's $700 PS5 Pro is for superfans – it won’t really grow PlayStation’s playerbase

Cover image for Sony's $700 PS5 Pro is for superfans – it won’t really grow PlayStation’s playerbase
Rhys Elliott
Sony just announced its worst-kept secret, the PS5 Pro. It's launching for $700 in November 2024, four years after the debut of the original PS5. Compared to the original, PS5 Pro will offer better visuals and performance: Larger GPU with more speed : Sony says the PS5 Pro’s GPU will render 45% faster than the current model, with substantial improvements to ray tracing (three times better in some cases), a favourite of graphics aficionados CPU improvements : An “enhanced mode” will allow for more CPU power.
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Advertising remains podcasting’s best monetisation opportunity

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Rutger Rosenborg
Despite the layoffs and budget cuts across the industry in 2023, MIDiA remained optimistic about podcasts . As our 2024-2030 podcast forecasts states, the growth rate will slow, but over the course of seven years, revenue will continue to climb from $4 billion to $10 billion and listeners will grow from almost 700 million to more than 1 billion worldwide.
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‘Brat’ summer and the dilemmas of going mainstream

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Tatiana Cirisano
It has become a rule of thumb that the moment corporate America begins capitalising on a trend, that trend begins to die. Cultural fragmentation has helped niches and scenes flourish, but it has also left large corporations that depend on mainstream products hungry for relevance — and willing to do anything to tap into the zeitgeist, including wringing cultural moments dry.
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HYBE 2.0 diverges from the major-label blueprint in 4 key ways — will it work?

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Tatiana Cirisano
HYBE kicked off the month with new leadership and a new plan to bring the Korean entertainment company into its next era of growth. In a letter to shareholders , outgoing CEO Jiwon Park and new chief Jason Jaesang Lee were refreshingly open about HYBE’s past weaknesses as they laid out a plan to prepare for market shifts and bring the “K-pop system” to new genres and regions.
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The future of AI-generated audiobooks is here

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Rutger Rosenborg
In March, on the heels of a Danish man becoming the first person convicted of streaming fraud, MIDiA explained how AI could soon enable a golden age of audio piracy . Coupled with the fact that book publishers have been reporting that AI-generated books are being published under their names or oddly similar ones on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, there are big implications for audiobooks.
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What Audible’s new royalty model means for its audiobook battle with Spotify

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Rutger Rosenborg
In early July, Audible’s blog broke the news that the company was introducing a new royalty model for audiobooks. Previously, according to Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman , Audible would do a “buyout”, paying a publisher an upfront fee to have their book on the service rather than distributing royalties according to titles or hours listened.
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Marketers, don't miss out on GTA 6

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Rhys Elliott
Grand Theft Auto VI ( GTA 6 ) is due to launch in autumn 2026. It will be one of the century's biggest entertainment launches, and its impact will ripple through culture for years to come. Remember how every brand jumped on the Barbie movie hype train with an everything-pink activation? GTA 6 is about to usher in a similar opportunity –– a bigger one that will last far beyond a single summer.
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