Anthony S Casey | News & Ideas
If Steve Cohen’s bid for the New York Mets succeeds, he’ll find himself in familiar company.
Hedge fund managers and private equity titans are an increasingly common sight in the owners’ boxes of Major League Baseball teams, including former trader John Henry at Boston’s Fenway Park, Guggenheim Partners’ Mark Walter at Dodger Stadium and Crescent Capital’s Mark Attanasio at Miller Park in Milwaukee.
Chelsea will be free to splash the cash in January after the club successfully challenged the transfer ban imposed by Fifa for breaches of rules involving signing young players.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that the two-window ban imposed by Fifa should be halved — and as Chelsea served the first half of that ban during the summer Frank Lampard can now strengthen his squad in January.
Lampard has a £150 million transfer fund to tap into and the club are interested in several targets including Ben Chilwell, the Leicester City and England left back, and Wilfried Zaha, the winger who has been unsettled at Crystal Palace.
Fifa banned Chelsea for two windows in March for having breached rules in 150 cases.
Amazon.com Inc. said it signed up new Prime service members in record numbers in the U.K. on Tuesday and Wednesday, when it aired Premier League soccer on its streaming platform for the first time.
“Both days beat any previous Prime Day, Black Friday and the day The Grand Tour launched,” Amazon said in a statement, referring to the car show hosted by Jeremy Clarkson.
Sheeran’s Shape of You is most streamed song, with 2.3bn plays, while Drake is most popular artist with 28bn streams
Drake has been named as the most-streamed artist of the decade on Spotify, with over 28bn streams. Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You was the most streamed song, with 2.3bn streams.
Drake’s track One Dance was runner up to Shape of You, with the top five songs rounded out by Post Malone’s rockstar, the Chainsmokers’ Closer and another Sheeran song, Thinking Out Loud. Sheeran, Post Malone, Ariana Grande and Eminem were the other most streamed artists.
The most streamed song of 2019 was Señorita by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes, which scored more than 1bn streams. Closing in on that figure is Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy with 990m. Eilish’s album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go was the most streamed album of the year. The most streamed artist globally was Post Malone, whose album Hollywood’s Bleeding was the second most streamed after Eilish’s. In the UK, the most streamed song and album were both by Scottish breakout balladeer Lewis Capaldi.
Spotify remains the world’s most popular streaming service. With a user base of 113 million paying subscribers, its popularity continues to grow as the market for downloads and CDs wanes. Its chief rival, Apple Music, has 60 million paying subscribers, and launched a new promotional campaign today: the Apple Music awards, which awarded Eilish artist of the year, album of the year and songwriter of the year, the latter shared with her collaborator and brother, Finneas. Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road was named song of the year, and Lizzo breakthrough artist.
Amazon.com Inc. needs to shake off a patchy record in live sports when it brings the world’s richest soccer competition to millions of fans from Tuesday.
The e-commerce giant’s Prime Video service takes over the English Premier League from regular broadcasters Sky and BT for 20 matches this month, the first time a streaming platform has assumed full responsibility for showing the competition. Six overlapping games on Wednesday, including Liverpool’s clash with local rival Everton and Manchester United’s battle against Tottenham Hotspur, are set to push video-on-demand technology to its limits.
With BT Sport adding access to the over-the-top (OTT) subscription service via its own hardware, the UK pay-TV broadcaster is activating the deal by offering its own subscribers a free six-month trial to Amazon’s streaming product.
The announcement comes as Amazon prepares to stream its first full round of English top-flight soccer matches in early December. Having secured a package of 20 games for the ongoing 2019/20 campaign in June 2018, Amazon announced earlier this year that it would become the first UK broadcaster to provide coverage of a full round of live Premier League matches as part of its offer.
Though the terms of the deal were not fully disclosed, the arrangement gives BT Sport’s subscribers access to 40 live Premier League fixtures throughout December and January.
Pete Oliver, BT’s Managing Director for Consumer Marketing, said: “With six months [of] Amazon Prime Video on us, offering access to even more Premier League matches, all in one place with integrated search and one simple bill, there’s never been a better time to be on BT TV.”
The move also means that BT TV set-top box owners will get access to every Premier League fixture this season, including coverage of matches it distributes as part of its carriage deal with rival pay-TV broadcaster Sky Sports.
The deal with BT represent Amazon’s latest distribution contract in the UK after securing carriage of its streaming platform via Virgin Media V6 set-top boxes earlier this year.
In addition to its Premier League coverage, BT Sport has recently retained exclusive Uefa Champions League as part of a new four year deal worth US$1.5 billion that keeps European soccer’s premier club competition on its channels through to the end of the 2023/24 season.
The new song “7 Rings” has been an hit for pop star Ariana Grande. And while that’s no surprise given her career success, the fact that the $69.5 billion Michigan Retirement Systems, East Lansing, is making money off of it might be.
The pension fund owns roughly 93% of Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Concord Music, which has a catalog featuring a wide array of artists, including the songs of the musical theater legends Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, according to Jon Braeutigam Michigan deputy treasurer.
Among their many hits, the duo wrote “The Sound of Music,” which opened on Broadway in 1959. Sixty years later, 90% of the songwriting royalties from Ms. Grande’s new song, which is a spin on the tune “My Favorite Things,” goes to Concord, Mr. Braeutigam said.
Michigan made its first investment into Concord in 2010 with a $25 million commitment through Wood Creek Capital Management, which is now Barings. Its investment now totals $1.1 billion and is worth $1.8 billion, based on a private valuation, Mr. Braeutigam said.
Though Concord is the pension fund’s lone music-centric investment, Mr. Braeutigam said it was a good opportunity to diversify the portfolio. “We thought music rights were complementary to the overall portfolio,” he said.
The initial $25 million investment was made at a time when CD sales were declining and the future of the music industry was uncertain. But Mr. Braeutigam said the State of Michigan Investment Board, which manages the pension fund, thought the music industry presented a stable investment opportunity. “We think there’s nothing wrong with cyclical businesses, but our thesis was it might prove to be less cyclical because the average purchase price is pretty low for people listening to music as opposed to big-ticket items,” he said.
With the pension fund’s Concord investment, that thesis sounds about right.
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