Author: azeeadmin

Google has won U.S. regulatory approval to go ahead with a radar-based motion sensor that could make touchscreens look obsolete in the coming years. Known as the Soli Project, the initiative began in 2015 inside Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects unit, a group responsible for turning the giant’s cutting-edge ideas into products.

We’ve seen a number of Soli’s technological breakthroughs since then, from being able to identify objects to reducing the radar sensor’s power consumption. Most recently, a regulatory order is set to move it into a more actionable phase. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said earlier this week that it would grant Project Soli a waiver to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The government agency also said users can operate the sensor aboard a plane because the device poses “minimal potential of causing harmful interference to other spectrum users.”

Soli fits radar sensors into a tiny chip the size of an American quarter to track slight hand or finger motions at high speed and accuracy. That means instead of twisting a knob to adjust the volume of your stereo, you can rub your fingers over a speaker that contains a Soli chip as if sliding across a virtual dial. Under the regulatory order, you also would be allowed to air press a button on your Soli-powered smartwatch in the future.

Aside from clearing safety concerns, the FCC also found that the sensing tech serves the public interest: “The ability to recognize users’ touchless hand gestures to control a device, such as a smartphone, could help people with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments, which in turn could lead to higher productivity and quality of life for many members of the American public.”

We contacted Google to ask for more detail and will update the story when and if we get a response.

The regulatory consent arrived months after Facebook raised issues with the FCC that the Soli sensors operating at higher power levels might interfere with other device systems. The two firms came to a consensus in September and told the FCC that Soli could operate at power levels higher than what the government allowed but lower than what Google had requested.

It’s a rational move for Facebook trying to shape the rules for the new field, given its own Oculus deploys motion technologies. The company also has invested in researching the area, for instance, by looking at a device that creates motion on the arm to simulate social gestures like hugging.

The update on Google’s technological development is a temporary distraction from the giant’s more questionable, revenue-driven moves in recent months, including a massive data leak on Google+ followed by the closure of the online ghost town, its failure to crack down on child porn and its controversial plan to re-enter China reportedly with a censored search engine.

If you’ve conquered China, then India — the world’s second-largest country based on population — is the obvious next port of call, and that’s exactly what has happened in the world of consumer apps.

Following the lead of Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, which have dominated mobile sales in India for some time, the content behind the touchscreen glass in India is increasingly now from China, too. That’s according to a report from FactorDaily, which found that 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese companies, up from just 18 one year prior. (The focus is on Android because it is the overwhelming choice of operating system among India’s estimated 500 million internet users.)

The list of top Chinese apps includes major names like ByteDance, the world’s highest-valued startup, which offers TikTok and local language news app Helo in India, and Alibaba’s UCbrowser, as well as lesser-known quantities like Tencent-backed NewsDog and quiet-yet-prolific streaming app maker Bigo.

Citing data from Sensor Tower, the report found that five of the top 10 Android apps in India are from China, up from just two at the end of 2017.

For anyone who has been watching the Indian technology scene in recent years, this “Chinese app store invasion” will be of little surprise, although the speed of change has been unexpected.

China’s two biggest companies, Alibaba and Tencent, have poured significant amounts into promising Indian startups in recent years, setting the stage for others to follow suit and move into India in search of growth.

Alibaba bought into Snapdeal and Paytm via multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in 2015, and the pace has only quickened since then. In 2017, Tencent invested in Gaana (music streaming) and Swiggy (food delivery) in major deals, having backed Byju’s (education) and Ola (ride-hailing) the year prior. The pair also launched local cloud computing services inside India last year.

Beyond those two, Xiaomi has gone beyond selling phones to back local companies and develop local services for its customers.

That local approach appears to have been the key for those app makers which have found success in India. Rather than taking a very rigid approach like Chinese messaging app WeChat — owned by Tencent, which failed in India — the likes of ByteDance have developed local teams and, in some cases, entirely local apps dedicated to India. With the next hundreds of millions of internet users in India tipped to come from more rural parts of the country, vernacular languages, local content and voice-enabled tech are some of the key strategies that, like their phone-making cousins, Chinese app developers will need to focus on to ensure that they aren’t just a flash in the pan in India.

You can read more at FactorDaily.

Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant ride-hailing firm, is rolling out a range of financial and insurance services as it looks to fortify its service against a range of challenges in 2019.

The company announced today that it is adding “protection” insurance and credit services for both passengers and drivers who use its platform. The former is aimed particularly at Didi drivers by offering health and car insurance that it claims will “lower the entry barrier for gig economy workers and broaden the scope of protection for more families.”

These new options will appear inside the Didi app. The company isn’t saying too much about them in detail, but they were trialed in 10 cities last year. Similar services have surfaced in Southeast Asia, where Didi ally Grab and its local rival Go-Jek have built out a range of fintech services, including payments and insurance.

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that this new Didi rollout comes amid changes that could inhibit its ability to attract and retain drivers. That’s because, as we explained this week, regulations that come into effect on January 1 require drivers to hold two licenses, a local residency permit that clears them for work and a permit to operate a vehicle for commercial purposes. That’s tricky, because the residential permit is difficult to obtain, while the commercial driving license adds a cost that may see some part-time drivers decide that driving with Didi doesn’t make sense financially.

While Didi has fought back to lower the barriers by allowing divers to rent licensed cars that it sources itself — “you supply the manpower, we provide the car,” its slogan reads — these changes could spell the end of China’s gig economy, at least in terms of ride-hailing as we know it.

It’s hard to criticize the introduction of tighter driver regulation given that two Didi passengers were murdered by their drivers last year. The company claims to have instituted a major restructuring that puts the focus on passenger safety, but government intervention was inevitable and it could mean a diminished pool of drivers from which to pick. A Didi representative told TechCrunch that the company has 31 million registered drivers on the platform, but the company didn’t provide an indicator of how many are active.

Nonetheless, for those who will continue with Didi or join its fleet in 2019, this new rollout is aimed at providing some of the financial services that they miss out on by not working a “regular” full-time job. Beyond insurance and lending, it will also see Didi offer deals on “new energy vehicles” through its partners. That will cover both buying cars outright, as well as leasing, trading and acquiring on finance, the company explained.

For Didi, these introductions will likely provide a welcome revenue boost. Little is known about the company’s finances, but it is reported to have lost more than half a billion dollars in the first half of 2018, mainly on subsidies. Using its extensive reach to help finance and retail partners tap into its registered user base will create a new source of income whilst also providing benefits to those users.

Government regulation isn’t Didi’s only challenge this year, as a number of rivals have sprouted up even as Meituan — the deep-pocketed “super app” company that went public in 2018 — decided to pull away from ride-hailing due to financial concerns.

Traditional auto giants BMW and SAIC Motor — Volkswagen’s partner in China — are driving into the ride-hailing scene, while HelloBike, which just bagged significant funding from Alibaba’s Ant Financial and others, is entering, too.

These factors make 2019 an interesting year for Didi. Talk of the company going public was rife in previous years, but there seems to have been little progress made. Last year’s spin-out of its driver services business — a relatively asset-heavy unit — was tipped to be a precursor to a listing, but already Lyft and Uber have taken their first steps and Didi is reported to have stalled its efforts.

Netflix pulled an episode of “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” from its streaming service in Saudi Arabia after receiving a complaint from the kingdom. The removal was first reported by the Financial Times.

The episode, titled “Saudi Arabia,” centers around the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and criticizes Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The Crown Prince has been implicated by the Central Intelligence Agency and Turkish officials in the planning of Khashoggi’s murder.

At the beginning of the episode, Minhaj, a Muslim-American whose show mixes political and cultural commentary with comedy, says “just a few months ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, AKA ‘MBS,’ was hailed as the reformer the Arab world needs, but the revelation of Khashoggi’s killing has shattered that image. It blows my mind it took the killing of a Washington Post journalist for everyone to go ‘oh, I guess he’s really not a reformer’ and meanwhile, every Muslim person you know was like ‘no shit, he’s the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. So now would be a good time for us to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

He also called on tech companies to stop taking money from the kingdom, an investor in Uber and the SoftBank Vision Fund (among others).

Netflix told the Financial Times that it removed the episode from Saudi Arabia last week after receiving a request from the country’s Communications and Information Technology Commission that said it allegedly violated Saudi Arabia’s anti-cyber crime law.

Netflix said the commission cited Article 6 of the law, which states that “production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy, through the information network or computers” is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine not exceeding SR3m ($800,000).” While ostensibly designed to protect internet users from cybercrimes, the Freedom House said in a 2016 report that the law contains clauses limiting freedom of expression.

“We strongly support artistic freedom worldwide and only removed this episode in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request – and to comply with local law,” Netflix told the Financial Times.

The newspaper noted that “Saudi Arabia” is available on the “Patriot Act’s” YouTube channel, where it is viewable by users in Saudi Arabia.

TechCrunch has reached out to Netflix for comment.

Three point eight.

From the first day of trading in 2018 to the last, that was the final percentage difference in Tesla’s share price. Taken on its own, the number is a modest and positive gain — and far more fruitful than automakers Ford, GM and Fiat Chrysler. It’s a number that suggests a consistent year of upwards momentum for Tesla, steady and diligent like a tugboat, even-keeled and untouched from stormy market seas.

Those two bookends of the stock market calendar — January 2 and December 31 — and the 3.8 percent gain they produced obfuscates what really happened to Tesla and CEO Elon Musk in 2018.

It wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t calm. It wasn’t constant or consistent. Tesla wasn’t a tugboat in 2018; it was a whipsaw.

The year was a dizzying ride that took Tesla shareholders and fans, critics, car owners, employees, the media and Musk himself to extreme highs and troubling lows — sometimes flip-flopping twice or more in a few days’ time.

And it was exhausting, because so much of it seemed self-inflicted and avoidable.

The chart illustrates the ups and downs of Tesla’s share price, along with specific highlights. But there were so many more.

As Tesla floundered early in the year, hamstrung by the production hell of its Model 3, Musk’s company SpaceX made history when it completed a test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. 

As production hell dragged on through the first quarter and into the second, Musk locked in a performance-based package that granted him $2.6 billion in stock options over 10 years. Moody’s would downgrade Tesla’s credit rating to negative from stable and Musk would make an untimely April Fool’s Day joke that the company was “bankwupt.”   

It turns out those jokes weren’t so far off.

Tesla was burning through millions of dollars a day as the company tried to solve production bottlenecks in its factory.

“Tesla really faced a severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ramp,” Musk said in an interview with Axios in November. The company was within “single-digit weeks” of dying, he added.

Other problems emerged as Musk and his employees scrambled to solve that very real and impending existential threat to Tesla. There was the unfortunate unhinged analyst call and a spat with the National Transportation Safety Board over a fatal crash and investigation into the automaker’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system.

And then it happened. Tesla, which appeared to be in a death spiral, produced 5,000 vehicles in a week. It was a triumph. The naysayers were proven wrong; the critics were silenced; the shorts would convert!

And it was only July 1.

The rest of the year played out much the same way the first half did, just with a few new characters and twists, from the “pedo guy” episode that played out on Twitter and Musk’s “funding secured” tweet to pot-smoking, SEC investigations and earning its first profit in two years.

The last quarter of the year was marked by advancements in its Autopilot system, lawsuits and subpoenas, a new Tesla chairman, two new board members Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson and further expansion into China.

Tesla’s roller coaster ride of a year was stomach-churning — or thrilling, depending on your point of view — without Musk engaging in Twitter. But his frequent use of the social media tool repeatedly pulled the company, or himself, back into an abyss of petty fights, distractions and, at its worst, potential derailments to a company in which he has invested so much of his time, money and emotion.

In 2019, with the Model 3 moving into new regions of the world and hints of other grander plans, Tesla deserves, and will need, a captain with both hands on the wheel. Elon, take the wheel.

“Bandersnatch” offers an unusual television experience — but not a very satisfying one.

The new “Black Mirror” special follows Stefan Butler as he attempts to turn a science fiction novel (also called “Bandersnatch”) into a Choose Your Own Adventure-style video game. As the story progresses, Stefan gets pulled deeper into the mystery of what happened to “Bandersnatch” author Jerome F. Davies, a mystery that eventually involves parallel universes, government conspiracies and Stefan’s own family tragedy.

Netflix has experimented with interactive content before, though previously aimed at kids — for example with an adaptation of “Minecraft: Story Mode” from Telltale Games. The format, where the viewer is periodically given a limited time to choose Stefan’s next action, should also feel familiar to players of Telltale titles like “The Walking Dead” and “Batman: The Telltale Series.”

The big difference, however, is that most other games want you to feel that your choices are meaningful. “Bandersnatch” flips the formula on its head, ripping away the illusion of free will and consequence and instead exploring a scenario where your choices can often feel reversible or otherwise meaningless.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Kirsten Korosec to review the show. Our reactions ranged from outright hatred to tentative admiration for the creators’ ambition — but even when we found “Bandersnatch” to be at least conceptually interesting, the experience itself became tiresome by the end.

We also review “Bird Box,” the new Netflix thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a woman navigating a world overrun by monsters who cannot be seen — because if you see them, you’ll immediately kill yourself. According to Netflix, “Bird Box” set a record among the streaming service’s original films for most viewers in its first week.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Over the last few years, millions of Chinese workers managed to earn extra money by being ride-hailing drivers. Many picked the gig because of its flexible schedule. For those who could not otherwise afford to own a car in China’s pricy metropolises, driving around is also a status symbol, even if they are paying off car loans every month.

Most drivers on Didi Chuxing — the startup that captured 90 percent of China’s e-hailing trips in 2017 per consulting firm Bain & Company — were part-time. That’s according to a report Didi put out in October 2017, which said half of its drivers worked less than two hours a day.

The report also hailed Didi as the epitome of China’s “sharing economy,” something that Beijing has been keen to promote to spur economic growth. The all-encompassing term, which includes shared platforms from mobility to elderly care services, raked in $764 billion in 2017, shows a report by China’s Sharing Economy Research Center of the State Information Center.

But gig work in China’s fledgling ride-hailing industry is coming to an end as new regulations make part-time driving overly expensive.

No more gigs

On January 1, ride-hailing apps in China start banning drivers who operate without the required “double licenses”: one for drivers and another for the cars they steer. Municipal governments across the country have nuanced stipulations for what these certificates entail, but in general, the fresh rules aim to more closely vet drivers transporting passengers around.

To obtain the ride-hailing driver’s permit in certain cities, drivers must own a local hukou, the residency permit that controls where people can legally work. A lot of ride-hailing drivers don’t have an urban hukou as they are migrant workers from rural parts of China, so they immediately become ineligible for ride-hailing apps.

The car license, on the other hand, requires the vehicle to operate as a commercial one, bringing additional costs to drivers who must absorb the costs of car insurance and maintenance, and scrap their vehicle after 8 years.

All ride-hailing vehicles in China must possess the required license (circled in red) to be on the roads starting January 1, 2019. Photo credit: TechCrunch

Under the new legal framework, drivers can still work as independent contractors. But in effect, the policy shift is driving out casual workers. “No part-time drivers want to register their private car as a commercial one because of the high costs that come with it,” a Shenzhen-based Didi driver tells TechCrunch. “Being part-time doesn’t pay the bills anymore.”

Didi’s dilemma

Like a lot of China’s nascent industries, ride-hailing took off quickly in part thanks to relatively lax government oversight at the start. The first set of industry laws took effect in 2016 when the country officially legalized apps like Uber, which was later acquired by its local competitor Didi. Since then Chinese authorities have gradually rolled out more rules and the strictest regulations, including the rollout of the double licenses, came following the deaths of two passengers who used Didi last year.

The new policies have put a squeeze on driver and car numbers. In the Tier 2 city of Nanjing alone, Didi claims to have weeded out more than 160,000 illegal vehicles, local media reported. The sharp decline in cars available on the roads inevitably leads to longer wait time and user frustration, and the $56 billion giant will need to think of ways to maintain a constant supply of drivers.

Didi took off on account of generous subsidies for both users and drivers, but its staggering loss — which is said to stand at $585 million in the first half of 2018 — means it may not be offering cash-heavy incentives in the near term. To retain labor, Didi is offering test prep for drivers. It’s also lowered the barriers to entry by letting drivers rent licensed cars it sources from car rental and automaker partners. A catchphrase started to pop up on Didi’s mobile app for drivers in December: “You supply the manpower, we provide the car.”

Aside from regulatory hurdles, Didi also faces new challengers like BMW and Volkswagen’s China partner SAIC Motor, traditional carmakers that are entering the ride-hailing scene.

“Didi has educated China about what is ride-hailing. If it doesn’t react swiftly to changing dynamics, the billions of yuan it’s burned through will suffer from low returns,” Dong Feng, founder of a Chinese car rental startup suggests to TechCrunch.

After a limited rollout, Go-Jek said today that it will extend its ride-hailing service to all of Singapore tomorrow while continuing its beta phase. The Indonesian-based company began offering rides in Singapore at the end of November, but only for passengers riding to and from certain areas. It https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/gojek-introduces-dynamic-pricing-move-will-likely-attract-more-drivers-to-joinintroduced dynamic pricing there, which increases prices during peak times, a few days ago.

“We continue to welcome feedback from driver-partners and riders during this enhanced beta phase, as we work to fine-tune the app and create the best experience for our users,” the company said in a statement.

After Uber exited from Southeast Asia earlier this year by selling its local business to Grab, Go-Jek became Grab’s main rival. Uber still maintains a presence in the region, however, thanks to its 27.5 percent stake in Grab.

There is currently a waiting list for Go-Jek in Singapore, with customers of DBS/POSB being given priority.

When asked about how long new users need to wait, a Go-Jek spokesperson said in a statement that the time depends on supply and demand. “The response from the driver community since we opened pre-registration has been overwhelming with tens of thousands of drivers signing up via the pre-registration portal. While we can’t disclose figure at this moment, we are confident we can meet consumer expectations during the beta service period.”

The Federal Communications Commission said on Monday that it will need to suspend most of its operations by the middle of Thursday if the partial government shutdown continues.

The FCC will continue “work required for the protection of life and property,” as well as work related to spectrum auctions, since those are funded by the money raised by auctioning off spectrum licenses. The Office of the Inspector General, responsible for conducting internal reviews, audits, and investigations of FCC programs and operations, will also remain open until further notice.

In a document outlining what needs to happen for an “orderly shutdown,” the FCC said suspended activities will include: “Consumer complaint and inquiry phone lines cannot be answered; consumer protection and local competition enforcement must cease; licensing services, including broadcast, wireless, and wireline, must cease; management of radio spectrum and the creation of new opportunities for competitive technologies and services for the American public must be suspended; and equipment authorizations, including those bringing new electronic devices to American consumers, cannot be provided.”

The FCC added that it will release more information on Wednesday about what will happen if it needs to suspend operations, including how it will affect electronic filing and database systems, filing deadlines, regulatory and application fee payments, and “shot clocks,” also known as the length of time allocated for approving or denying pending transactions.

The partial government shutdown continued into its 11th day as President Donald Trump refuses to back down on his demands for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing 800,000 federal employees to go without work or work without pay. House Democrats have said they are preparing to introduce bills that will put an end to the shutdown but not include funding for the wall.

Among the many myths that were laid low in 2018, perhaps none was as welcome to throngs of live event fans as the fantasy of the sold-out show. Indeed, as the ticket market has moved to adopt new technology the new-found transparency has had one prime victim: The Sellout.

The highest-profile debunking of the sellout in sports for 2018 came from Washington, DC.

Originally reported by the Washington Post, the Washington Redskins officially ended their decade-long season-ticket waitlist this June. Once claimed to be 200,000 fans deep, the reality of Redskins demand hadn’t been as rosy since the glory days of Riggins and Theisman. In 2018, the Redskins have been selling single game tickets like never before — even using the secondary market as a favorable point of comparison.

Other high-profile examples of this shift include the Golden State Warriors, who, despite selling out 100% of their regular season games, had hundreds of tickets available on for Game 1 of the NBA finals in the minutes before tip-off.

If the Redskins and Warriors signaled a shift away from the sellout era in sports, Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour did the same for music. Having wrapped up earlier this month, Reputation finished as the highest grossing US Tour in history, despite a flurry of articles lambasting the artist for not selling out many shows.  Ironically, it turns out that the most important factor in her record-breaking success was exactly that: not selling out.

Rather than a lack of demand, these unsold tickets for high-profile events are the result of the latest trend in the ticketing industry — making sure you have tickets to sell when fans want to buy them. Anyone that has purchased tickets on the Internet knows that the most active buying window is in the days and hours leading up to an event.

Before the Internet, while this last-minute market existed, it was contained to street corners and run by local brokers. For most of the 20th century, managing this aftermarket was a job ticket owners were comfortable outsourcing. With it’s limitless reach and real-time distribution, however, Internet-based selling changed their comfort level dramatically, by removing the ticket owner from the supply chain and costing them billions in margin. It also created a product category that became one of the worst, if not the worst, on the Internet.

If not for the universal appeal of live events, ticketing as a product would have died with Pets.com .  Instead, teams, artists and promoters became the poster children for the Internet’s power to disrupt. The response from many ticket owners was to simply to hang up a ‘Sold Out’ sign at the box office in the weeks, days and hours before the game — one that is just now starting to be taken down.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

To understand why that happened, it’s important to recognize that when the Internet took off, teams were principally in the season-ticket business, while artists and promoters were in the record-selling business.  Selling last-minute, ‘on-demand’ tickets simply wasn’t a focus. The Internet, however, turned that secondary market niche into a product category worth $10 to $15 billion at it’s peak — two to three times the size of the primary market it was based on.

In order to compete in this always-on marketplace, ticketing technology has received billions of dollars of investment in the last decade, with the goal of making it more compatible with the Web itself. In the last two years, Ticketmaster, Seatgeek and Eventbrite have all announced ‘open platform’ models that make it as easy to sell tickets in places like Facebook and Youtube as it does in Stubhub.

In January, Ticketmaster and the NFL announced a new platform deal that, for the first time ever, allows teams and leagues to define their own distribution ecosystem.  As one of the biggest destinations for ticket buying online, sites like Stubhub and my company, TicketIQ, have become direct-to-fan distribution channels in the new ticketing marketplace.

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Before we singlehandedly credit technology for killing the sell out, it’s worth asking whether the decline in sellouts is simply the result of exorbitant ticket prices and increased competition for consumer attention. While there’s no question that it’s become harder to get people off of their couches for average events, the robust growth of the experience economy suggests the opposite trend.

According to a December 2017 McKinsey report, millennials spend 60% more on live experiences than GenXers — all in search of not only genuine connection, but also fresh social-media content. For the Reputation tour specifically, last-minute tickets on the secondary market were actually 35% cheaper than 1989 tour, which made buying tickets day-of the event more affordable than ever.

As for the Redskins, while their 2018 season hasn’t turned out as they’d hoped, at the box office, they’ve set themselves up for success in the years to come.  When demand spikes, whether as the result of a new stadium or a championship run, they’ll benefit directly and handsomely. As a point of reference for what kind of profit they might expect, the Financial Times reported that Taylor Swift’s per-show gross for Reputation increased by $1.4 million, including two dates in July at Fedex Field, home of the Redskins.

In “Look what you Made Me Do” the sixth song on the Reputation album, Taylor Swift sings about past “games”, “a tilted stage” and “unfair disadvantage”, for which she now seeks retribution. As a statement about her artistic and commercial stature, it’s clear she no longer wants to play nice. In addition to a jab at her artistic nemesis, Kanye West, it also reads like a farewell to the ticket market of old that has frustrated consumers for almost two decades.

Despite claims that she sold out her fans to achieve Reputation’s record-breaking success, the numbers mean that it’s a model we’ll be seeing much more of in the years to come. Regardless of how you feel about her forcing fans to Buy, Like and Watch to get their place in line for tickets, the good news for the ticket market overall is that it was her decision to make.