1st July, 2022

Happy Friday, and for friends and followers in the United States, Happy 4th July weekend.

With many of you taking a couple of extra days off, I've included a couple of extra articles that caught my eye this week. Also to make up for this Dispatch being sent a little later than usual - in part because I've been playing catch-up since a 5am start this morning to make it to the taping of the Today Show, which today celebrated its fortieth anniversary. You'll have to excuse the grainy photo, but the third from the left is my father Steve who hosted the show for twenty years from its launch in 1982. He's a large part of the reason why I've made my career in media and entertainment, so only fitting to acknowledge him - and the show's other hosts including Sue Kellaway, Tracy Grimshaw, Liz Hayes, and Karl Stefanovic - on the show's special day. No, you won't see any resemblance - I got the face and hairline for radio.

On to the Dispatch.

What I've Been Reading

Conscious of not appearing too much like “tech bros imposing ourselves on an industry”, Serenade founder Max Shand is working hard to "normalise a new format of music collecting and ownership in a traditional industry". This is a great profile from Dominic Powell on an Australian start-up fast on its way to change the music industry.

"The ByteDance model goes beyond advertising. TikTok is diversifying into music distribution, game publishing and Twitch-style subscriptions. It’s also edging into e-commerce, blurring the line between social media and online shopping in ways that could challenge Amazon.com Inc. The video-sharing platform now lets merchants set up digital stores in countries like Britain, Indonesia and Thailand, where millions of users purchase products directly inside the app without any involvement from traditional e-commerce."

TikTok is definitely a threat to Google and Facebook, and if you believe the FCC who today called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stories, a threat to privacy and democracy, but that's another story.

“Graphic designers are blue-collar art workers. We do the work that artists used to do. During the Renaissance, mass communication for the Vatican was created by artists. Today, mass communication for Venmo is created by designers. We need to be anonymous because we're speaking on someone else's behalf.” A fantastic Creative Boom profile on Dylan Mulvaney, head of design, and the culture and creative process of Gretel. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dylan on four projects over the years, and each time the process - Discovery, Strategy, Lab, Application, and Support - was just as amazing as the result.

And as an added bonus, here's the Fast Company profile from 2017 that first put Gretel on my radar and led me to cold call them and ask if they would work on a restaurant project in Tokyo that we were developing. They said yes, and the rest is history. Can’t wait to work with Dylan, Ryan Moore, Greg Hahn, Larissa Marquez, Haley Klatzkin, and team again.

“Amazon was built in 2000, Google didn't even exist till 2001 — these are companies that define the Internet. These are companies born out of that recession or a tech bear market. When you look at the underlying tech, the tech is incredible. And to me, that's the real story here. So people saying, ‘Oh, the hype died down,’ you would have been shorting the Internet in 2001, and that would have played out very terribly. And I think this is very much like the same type of scenario.” Gmoney from a great read via Savannah Fortis on how fashion and luxury brands are responding to crypto's recent downturn.

In 2020, the Elvis Presley estate’s value was $400 to 600 million. Now — thanks to the artist's prevailing cultural relevance, a Baz Luhrmann biopic out this week, and publishing valuations soaring on potential future earnings — a new source suggests the Presley estate is worth more like $1 billion. Not without its controversy, the Elvis business is booming.

A life in corporate America can only go so far when you have a passion for creativity and an undying love for your people secretly burning inside. A great interview and profile on Luke Bailey and Jackie Liao, founders of neon money club, which aims to teach pop culture’s digital generation how to invest and grow their finances while buying into the things that speak to them. Their philosophy is simple: “Ownership is the new drip.” That means the latest sneaker drop is cool, but owning stock in the sneaker brand that makes them is cooler.

As Tom Maynard has often told me, if you want to see the future of digital media and where TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube, are taking their platforms and communities, we should look a little further than just the United States and Europe. There are some great insights in this piece on the explosive growth of South East Asia's creator economy. If you're interested in the future of media, take the time to dig into this piece from Sam Gutelle.

What I'm Listening To

"It is cheaper to save the planet than destroy it."

What if Silicon Valley’s next big frontier was not web3 but climate change? That’s the bet the venture capitalist John Doerr is making. In this conversation, Kara Swisher asks Doerr whether Silicon Valley can save the planet, and what governments must do to meet international emissions targets - spoiler alert, big tech (and the market more broadly) can't solve this alone. Policy and regulation are needed to accelerate change. Am a few weeks late to this episode, but it is well worth your time.

What I'm Wondering

Netflix remains the most indispensable service among major streaming platforms, with 31% of U.S. members saying they would keep the service if they could only have one video subscription.

How does this track for people here? If you could keep one, which would it be?

Feel free to drop your answers in the comments, or for those feeling too shy to do so publicly, keep sending me your thoughts via text or WhatsApp.

That's it for this week. 

Keep me posted and enjoy your weekend wherever in the world this dispatch finds you.

Ben