Most popular music scenes in America

Gary LeVox of Rascal Flatts performs.

Over the past twenty years the geography of popular music has changed considerably. The internet and social media have obviously played a large role. While industries like automobiles or steel still cluster around resources, cheap labor and transportation routes, or high-tech companies cluster around skilled labor and universities, the forever altered music industry now has fewer physical reasons to cluster — musicians no longer need to be near any particular resource to record and distribute their work anymore. And yet, they clearly still do cluster, just perhaps for slightly different reasons.

 

 

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HBO brings streaming-only service to Europe

Some Europeans will get access to the full complement of HBO content for a small fee.

According to Variety, in mid-October an HBO streaming service that does not require an associated cable subscription will be rolled out in Europe. It is confined to only a few European countries, but it’s an embrace from Time Warner to cord-cutters that non-HBO customers have long sought.

 

 

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Is Kickstarter a crowdfunding platform or just another form of entertainment?

crowdfunding

The fact that OUYA raised so much money so fast speaks more to our fantasies than the market reality.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter darling. It is “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their campaign. Proponents of Kickstarter’s populist commercialism see OUYA as an unmitigated success.

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Mobile ticket sales set another record for ‘The Hunger Games’

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Fandango

“The Hunger Games” set the highest opening weekend for a non-sequel over this past weekend, raking in an estimated $155 million at the box office. That’s a ton of tickets and a chunk of them were sold online and on smartphones. Fandango, one of the first movie ticket sales sites, shared data from the weekend as “The Hunger Games” pushed its platform to new heights.

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China axes two-thirds of popular television shows

supergirl

Chinese reality TV show, Super Girl is an annual national singing contest produced by Hunan Satellite Television.

On January 1st, an order to curb “excessive entertainment” on television came into force in China. In response, the number of scheduled entertainment programs has dipped sharply from 126 a week to just 38, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

Spoilers actually enhance enjoyment of films or books

spoilers

Movies with surprise endings, like The Sixth Sense (starring Bruce Willis and Hayley Joel Osment) are not, it turns out, ruined by spoilers.

We’ve all dodged conversations about who shot JR to covering our eyes when the football results flash up and we go to enormous lengths to not have surprise endings spoiled.

 

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Fewer American Households Own TVs

television

114.7 million households will own a television in 2012, down from 115.9 million this year.

These days fewer Americans own TV sets, research firm Nielsen has found. For the first time in 20 years Nielsen says it expects a drop in the number of U.S. households with a television set. According to Nielsen the decrease likely has to do with two factors: poverty and the rise of high-tech alternatives.

 

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Eight Great Explosions in Video

TV-Futures-354

What will it be like to watch television in 2030?

Futurist Thomas Frey:  Having just returned from four days at the famous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I am spending the next couple weeks sorting through the vast array of products I came across, looking for overarching trends and patterns that may signal lifestyle shifts in the future.

 

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