Recorded Music Revenues Up For Fourth Year In A Row, Soar To Global Record

Streaming revenue grew by 34.0% and accounted for almost half (47%) of global revenue, powered by a 32.9% increase in paid subscription streaming, according to the report. There were 255 million users of paid streaming services at the end of 2018, with paid streaming accounting for 37% of total recorded music revenue. Growth in streaming more than offset a 10.1% decline in physical revenue and a 21.2% decline in download revenue. – Variety

Mark Twain, Charles Ives, and Race

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 2 are twin American cultural landmarks, comparable in method and achievement. They both transform a hallowed Old World genre — the novel, the symphony — through recourse to New World vernacular speech. – Joe Horowitz

How George Harrison (Yes, The Beatle) Saved Monty Python’s ‘Life Of Brian’ — And Indie Filmmaking In Britain

Just as Life of Brian was about to start shooting, the chairman of EMI read the script and killed the project. So Eric Idle called Harrison, the richest person he knew — and thus was born HandMade Films, the independent studio that made such now-classics as The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits, Mona Lisa, and Withnail and I. Then an American mucked it all up. – The Guardian

English National Opera Sees Some Box Office Success, With One Show Last Year Its Best Seller Ever

“[The company’s] figures showed it had brought thousands of new people to the art form during recent months. It has achieved 75 per cent capacity in its 2000-plus seater Coliseum with 47 per cent of its bookers by first-timers. The 2018 production of Porgy and Bess was its highest grossing show ever.” – The Times (UK)