The global live music business is chugging along through its busy summer season as strong as ever, defying even what has long been its biggest challenge: ticket-price sensitivity.
Consumers consistently cite cost as the biggest barrier to attending concerts. But the percentage of respondents on Luminate’s U.S. Music 360 survey who cite ticket prices as a deterrent has trended downward from 59% in the first quarter of 2024 to 53% in the same period two years later. The survey and Luminate’s latest special report, “Live Music 2026,” is the focus of this week’s episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business.”
Photojournalist Frank West is heli-dropped into the Willamette Parkview mall, following a tip-off that there’s something sinister going down in the sleepy Colorado town. Impressively undeterred by the sight of people eating each other by a school bus during his fly-by, he instructs his pilot to drop him off on the mall roof and return for him in exactly three days.
Farmers have always managed uncertainty. Weather, labor shortages, fluctuating commodity prices and rising input costs have long shaped the economics of agriculture. Today, another challenge has emerged: making sense of the enormous volume of data generated by modern farming operations.
The sunny 2002 platformer was the direct follow-up to Super Mario 64.
Nintendo
It's taken a bizarrely long time, but Nintendo is finally adding the summeriest game ever made to Nintendo Switch Online, with Super Mario Sunshine joining the Switch 2's GameCube library next month. The 2002 follow-up to the industry-defining Super Mario 64 was one of the first games Nintendo announced for the GameCube Classics app before the Switch 2 launched, but for whatever reason we're only getting it now.
We haven't met a single person who has leapt for joy over the fact that the average new-car transaction price is hovering around the $50,000 mark. In fact, the chorus of people crying out for something genuinely affordable to the bottom half of the K-shaped economy continues to grow. Enter Slate, a plucky startup that hopes to break into the market with its ultra-modular electric truck that forgoes nearly every creature comfort to keep its base price well below $30,000. We headed to Rhode Island to take a brief spin in a prototype and see if Slate's got the sauce ahead of its fourth-quarter debut.
I was excited to learn about a new use of artificial intelligence to make a potentially significant breakthrough in detecting patients at risk of sudden cardiac death.
Americans outside the nation’s capital will soon be able to get limited-edition passports that feature a picture of Donald Trump and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the state department announced.
Everything’s coming up Spider-Man lately. Barely a week passes without news of some new movie, TV or game featuring our favorite wall-crawler. Currently, fans are celebrating the return of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day
While the discussion of AI has largely centered on its powerful models and capabilities, a new challenge is emerging: how to run AI agents efficiently at scale. As organizations embrace agentic AI, technology leaders are rethinking everything from infrastructure and computing strategies to the economics of enterprise AI.
Reported closures at SSA offices are raising questions for some U.S. Senators.
getty
A group of U.S. senators is demanding answers from Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano after reports that Social Security field offices in multiple states temporarily stopped offering in-person service, raising new questions about customer service at an agency millions of Americans depend on.
