Welcome to SWOT by Sound Story, your inside track on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats looming for the creative industries.
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⚡ Trending: Lisa Wilkinson praised as ‘warrior’ as her rumoured $1.7 million-a-year contract with Channel Ten ends. Words by Samantha Maiden. Source: News.com.au.
🎵 Music: BBC Radio 1's Chris Price on the new normal of simultaneous Top 10 hits for artists. Words by Andre Paine. Source: Music Week.
📰 Media: On the basis of delivering positive shareholder returns, there are only a couple of contenders for Unmade’s CEO of the year: Vinyl Group’s Josh Simons and Pureprofile’s Martin Filz. Words by Tim Burrowes. Source: Unmade.
💰 Advertising: Coca‑Cola marks 50(ish) years of its neon Kings Cross sign with nostalgic campaign. Words by Nathan Jolly. Source: Mumbrella.
📲 Tech: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Friday morning over whether TikTok should be banned in the U.S. if it doesn’t separate from parent company ByteDance, a major case that will have far-reaching implications for the First Amendment and TikTok’s millions of users—though it’s still unclear how the court will rule. Words by Alison Durkee. Source: Forbes.
📜 Government: Peter Dutton the latest politician to seek popularity boost by podcast. Words by Dan Jervis-Bardy. Source: The Guardian.
🌶️ Spicy: Shocking moment rapper fires gun in his pocket during live interview and then carries on filming. Words by Olivia Burke. Source: LADbible.
Strength: Australian Promoters on the World Stage
Pollstar has spotlighted the Top 100 Promoters worldwide, with a number of Aussie companies making the cut.
👉 Pollstar rounded out the year with a series of lists, including highlighting the top 100 promoters from around the world, based on the number of tickets they moved in 2024.
👉 A number of Australian promoters and ticketing companies made the list, including Sound Story client Untitled Group at #65 with 466,951 tickets valued at US$48,010,931.
👉 Other Aussies on the list include Frontier Touring at #24 (1,706,725 tickets and $215,320311), Destroy All Lines at #48 (659,174 tickets and $55,337,130), Bohm Presents at #67 (443,578 tickets and $23,372,622), Handsome Group (part of TEG) at #74 (398,888 tickets and $26,219,158), and Sydney-headquartered Global outfit TEG (including its subsidiaries) at #17 (2,142,238 and $182,323,363).
👉 One of Untitled Group’s pillar events is the Beyond The Valley festival, which took place over the break. You can read about how its marketing team have navigated a cost-of-living and live music festival crisis here.
Weakness: More Contraction and Consolidation on the Horizon
We’re only a few days into 2025, but already some big companies are making dramatic moves to weather the looming storms.
👉 As 2025 has kicked off, speculation is already rife about which Australian creative and media companies will need to consolidate this year in order to survive. Globally, however, this is already a reality, despite only being 2.7% of the way through the year.
👉 Getty Images and Shutterstock, the two largest licensed visual content companies in the world, have announced plans to merge, in a US$3.7 billion deal.
👉 A number of articles are already citing the increasing use of generative AI tools as a key reason these mega companies need to cut costs and find new revenue streams.
👉 Closer to home, just before 2024 wrapped up, Foxtel announced it had been sold to international giant DAZN, which current majority owner News Corp claimed was a victory for shareholders.
Opportunity: Media Companies to Reset in 2025?
Okay, this might seem a bit optimistic, but hear us out – is 2025 presenting an opportunity for media companies to clean up their acts?
👉 2024 was characterised by multiple media companies, including one of our largest – Nine Entertainment – being called out for their culture and the structural issues they’re facing which are being exacerbated by a weak advertising market.
👉 So, could 2025 be the year that these companies take the opportunity to reset? Sure, this might be wildly optimistic, because why would things change now?
👉 Well (Nine-owned) The Sydney Morning Herald has run a piece about “Why Nine is primed for change this year”.
👉 The article covers a potential overhaul of the Board, speculation about the new CEO, what assets (if any) they would offload as part of a strategic review, concluding: “There are plenty of punts on what might happen at Nine, but it’s a good bet that something will.”
Threat: Mark Zuckerberg Kills Facts
You know those days, where you wake up, put on your US$900,000 watch, and decide to make an announcement that changes the course of internet history?
👉 No? Well Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg does. This week, the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Meta, who originally founded Facebook in 2004, announced “More speech and fewer mistakes”.
👉 In the 5 minute and 17 second video Zuckerberg – sporting a US$900,000 watch, by the way – announced the internet giant is ending its third-party fact-checking program and “moving to a Community Notes model”.
👉 Articles such as this one explain how the announcement is part of a mission to pursue incoming US President Donald Trump’s approval, and this one explores the local reaction.
👉 There’s some heavy reading out there about the dire implications of this announcement, but there’s also the “Top 10 real Mark Zuckerberg quotes” to enjoy as well as other takedowns.
The Fun Stuff
Quote of the Week: “It’s got to be feral cat, right? It was strange, because I’d eaten everything else before, and probably culturally strange too because I don’t think it’s something Australians consider a food. It was also the yummiest. We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil. It tasted like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had,” TV host Tony Armstrong on the strangest (but seemingly tastiest) thing he ate on ABC’s “Eat the Invaders” which kicked off this week.
📋 Task of the Week: Voting in this year’s triple j Hottest 100 closes at 5:00pm (AEDT) on Monday, 20 January, ahead of the Countdown itself kicking off at 12:00pm on Saturday, 25 January. You can get your final votes in HERE.
