The world’s largest buildings - in ‘Albert Halls’
In 1967, the same year John Lennon said he knew “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”, the Boeing Company started work on another large hall, in Washington. The Everett Factory, where Boeing builds its aeroplanes, is so large that, were it possible to fill it with multiple Albert Halls, 153 would be required.
The 3.5km outer wall encloses a space that The Guinness Book of Records recognises by some margin as the world’s largest building. Clinching third place - we skipped Airbus’s factory in Toulouse - is the Aerium, just south of Berlin: a 5.5 million cubic metre edifice originally designed as an airship hangar, but which now houses a most unlikely tropical paradise. Underneath its 107 metre-high dome can be found a rainforest with 50,000 plants, a giant lagoon more than 1sq km in area (and heated year round to a cosy 25C) and a hot-air balloon riding facility.
It easily eclipses the Vehicle Assembly Building where Nasa builds its rockets. But our favourite big building fact still concerns the home-grown O2 arena, and is this: were we to take this deceptively large dome, turn it on its head, and set the full might of Niagara Falls to gush into it, at peak flow, it would take 12.5 minutes to fill.
Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?
This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.
It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years.
We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue - recorded music sales, for instance - you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)
Hopefully, this analysis - and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below - sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently - and the BPI - that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.
The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.
Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.
(It’s often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called ‘heritage acts’. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)
An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise.
(PRS revenues in fact break down into 4 categories - Broadcast and Online, Public Performance, Mechanical, International. You can explore this in more detail in this spreadsheet, which contains all our data.)
It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.
For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.
A couple of notes about our methods: the data, as pointed out, comes from the PRS and the BPI. We are grateful to the PRS in particular for helping us with a model to work out what percentage of a particular chunk of industry revenue was likely to be returned to artists. In the case of recorded music, we used an average 90/10 per cent split between labels/artists. In the case of live we used a 90/10 split between artists/promoters.
We hit one major snag. The PRS report gives a figure for annual live music revenues but it does not indicate what percentage of that goes to venues. (Before doing the split for live music revenues between artist and promoter, you first need to take out the percentage that goes to the venue.) We asked several big concert promoters and venue managers - AEG Europe, Carling Academy, and the PRS itself - what percentage of gig revenue one could reasonably assume, on average, went to the venue, and none would make an estimate. The closest we came to an answer was a remark from a senior industry source said ‘only a small percentage of live goes to venues’. That’s the best we had to work with.
We’ve therefore done the above calculations on the assumption that 10 per cent of live revenues go to the venue, but in these two graphs, we show how the situation would change if that figure rose to 20 per cent.
We would welcome any feedback on a more accurate figure to use for the venue’s share of live revenues, and any more general feedback on our methods.
Are computers outmanoeuvring TVs in the living room?
The TV industry may long have been trying to fight off the predatory might of YouTube and other web-based distractions, but there was always one trump card it held up its sleeve: it was a damn sight nicer watching video on that big black box in the corner of the room. No longer.
As the above graph - which plots screen size (the number of inches from corner to corner) against display resolution (the number of pixels on the screen) - shows, computer screens now easily compete with TVs on size. As for picture quality, see the horizontal line showing 1920 x 1080? That’s the most advanced form of HDTV currently available.
Now look at the extent to which the new Apple iMac exceeds that level. That means that, as well as easily handling HDTV, the iMac can also better display photographs from the highest quality digital cameras - which are much too detailed for most screens.
Add to this that the vast majority of the BBC’s and, as of two weeks ago, Channel 4’s content is online, and you have the makings of a genuine living room revolution. There’s just the small matter of price.
At 27 inches, the iMac may be nearly as big as the current, top-selling 32in TVs, but the £1,349 price tag means it’s £1,000 more expensive, too.
Larger graph
Over the course of its 97-year history, the British Board of Film Classification has classified 65, 770 films. Here’s our attempt to condense that vast and intriguing history into a single page. (”The gradual retreat of British prudishness”, you might call it.)
Each vertical “slice” shows one year’s worth of films, so you see, for instance, that as late as the mid-Twenties, as many as 50 per cent of films were being rejected as too immoral. Among the 43 grounds for deletion outlined in the BBFC’s early charter were: “situations accentuating delicate marital relations”; “subjects dealing with India, in which British officers are seen in an odious light”; and “the effects of vitriol throwing”, dousing one’s enemy in acid evidently having become a popular means of exacting revenge among ex-lovers.
The first “restricted” classification, X, didn’t come until 1951, and the era of the BBFC requesting cuts to films - almost all of the Sixties Bond films were cut for having too much sexual innuendo - didn’t start to ebb away until the Eighties.
The odd challenge has still flared up, though. Scandal, a 1989 account of the Profumo affair, narrowly got away with an 18 despite a shot of an erect penis in the background of an orgy scene. The member was deemed to be sufficiently obscured.
Many thanks to the BBFC and their wonderfully resourceful site. We’ve popped all the data in a spreadsheet in case you’d like to play with it.
Inventions: the product, mostly, of thirty-somethings
Over 40, and still not delivered your “great idea”? You may be too late. A sample of the 100 greatest inventions of the 20th century, as compiled by a patent expert at the British Library, suggests that it is in their thirties that men (and it is invariably men) are struck by inspiration. Curiously, happenstance can be just as much the mother of invention as necessity.
Consider the American engineer Percy Spencer, who, trying to help the British develop radar, walked past a magnetron one day with a chocolate bar in his pocket, found it had melted, and conceived of the microwave. Art Fry, an adhesives expert in Minnesota - and keen chorister - was frustrated that the scraps of paper he used as bookmarks in his hymnal would always fall out. One day, a colleague made some weak glue by mistake, and thus was born the Post-it Note.
There is, evidently, an under-representation of women - though it’s not for want of involvement in the process. In 1906, Bess Cary, the soon-to-be fiancée of a little-known American inventor, wanted an ice cream while picknicking on an island in Lake Okauchee. Her beloved was dispatched two miles to fetch one in a rowing boat - and he promptly had the idea for an outboard motor.
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