Numlock News: February 3, 2023 • Wrestling, Linda Ronstadt, Fake Diplomas

Feb 3

By Walt Hickey

Have an excellent weekend!

AEW

There’s a new fresh babyface in wrestling in the form of the All-Elite Wrestling, an upstart competitor to the WWE juggernaut staked by the scion of billionaire Khan family, worth $7.6 billion. AEW’s got a television contract worth $175 million that expires by the end of the year, with an option for 2024. By comparison, WWE made $1.1 billion in revenue last fiscal year. Wrestling is a bright spot in the world of linear television, and upon re-upping their deals both promotions are expected to continue to make a lot more money. Still, WWE has reason to fret: AEW’s viewership is up, at times reaching about half the audience of WWE’s top shows. The promotion sought to emphasize the wrestling more than WWE, which has faced critiques for prioritizing soap-opera style plotting over the actual main event that ostensibly draws in the eyeballs.

Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg

Roll The Tape

Cassette sales have exploded over the past several years in the American music business, rising from 81,000 sales in 2015 to 440,000 tape sales last year, a 443 percent increase. Obviously, the heyday of the cassette tape — when 450 million of them were sold in 1988 — are long gone, pretty much three music technology cycles ago: destroyed by the CD, then the MP3, and finally the streaming era. Nevertheless, the market is buying them. Taylor Swift, Maren Morris, My Morning Jacket and Megan Thee Stallion have all had solid cassette tape runs recently, and Death Row Records recently sold 20,000 cassette reissues of classic albums by the likes of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and 2Pac.

Steve Knopper, Billboard

NASCAR

Last year, Ross Chastain needed to get from 10th place in a NASCAR race in Martinsville to at least fourth place, lest he face playoff elimination. To accomplish the feat, he did the thing everybody did on GameCube, and at top speed drove along the wall and slingshot around the corner, and it worked to the utter bafflement of many in the NASCAR community. The result stood thanks to the legal precedent established in Bud v. Washington State High School Athletics and there’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t GameCube wall ride your way to victory in a NASCAR race. That changed this week, as NASCAR’s administration will moving forward consider such a maneuver a violation of rule 10.5.2.6.A. This opens up a bit of a can of worms, as the question of who will be the first to deploy a Mario Kart red shell in competition play is now a question of when and not if.

Owen S. Good, Polygon

Ronstadt

In Sunday’s episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, the Linda Ronstadt song “Long Long Time” plays a significant thematic role, and following the airing of the episode Spotify reported that streams were up 4,900 percent week over week in that 11 p.m. to midnight hour. On a broader look, the 1970 song went from 8,000 on-demand streams on the Saturday before rising to 149,000 streams the following day, according to Luminate. It’s the latest in a long line of catalog hits getting a major pop off a prestige television episode, the most significant being Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” getting a massive push back into the cultural mainstream following a Stranger Things episode. Ronstadt herself isn’t making any money off of it — she cashed out and sold her catalog in March 2021 for a pretty penny.

Steve Knopper, Billboard

Patch Me If You Can

Over 2,800 people may be employed as nurses under false pretenses after buying a fake diploma, according to federal investigators who busted a Florida-based scheme to sell diplomas for $10,000 to $15,000 a pop. The Department of Justice filed charges against 25 people, and alleges that the defendants sold 7,600 fake diplomas from 2016 to 2021 and hauled in $100 million in the process. Out of those 7,600 people with fake diplomas, 37 percent of them — or 2,800 people — passed the national nursing board exam.

Beth Mole, Ars Technica

Rental Cars

The U.S. car rental business is highly consolidated, despite the illusion of a highly competitive environment. Just three companies — Enterprise, Hertz and Avis — control 95 percent of the car rental market, as Enterprise owns Alamo and National, Hertz owns Thrifty and Dollar, and Avis owns Budget, Payless and Zipcar. The market power of those companies has facilitated laws that make it extremely easy to avoid paying taxes on cars; since the 1970s, the car rental companies have gotten at least 13 state governments to exempt them from the sales taxes when buying vehicles in exchange for an excise tax on rental cars of 6 percent to 14 percent. As a result, they can pass the tax directly on to the consumer, and also save a ton of money: Given 2 million vehicles a year bought by rental car companies, the biggest companies avoid paying $3.5 billion annually to states.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Chipotle

Full service restaurant prices rose just 0.1 percent in December, a sign that inflation in restaurant prices has slowed, after prices rose 8.2 percent year over year. Overall revenue was up across the quick service restaurant industry by 6.1 percent in the fourth quarter, thanks to average prices being up 16.2 percent despite foot traffic taking a 4.2 percent dip. One compelling sector is the burrito business. Chipotle embarked on price hikes over the past several years, with the price of a chicken entree at the burrito joint up 19 percent since 2018. That seems like a lot, but is in fact less than their two biggest competitors: The price of a chicken entree is up 21.5 percent at Qdoba and up 28.1 percent at Moe’s.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Philip Bump, author of the new book The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. Bump is out with an exciting new book looking at the colossal impact that the baby boomer generation had on America, and how it forced America to fundamentally change and expand and adjust at all points of their maturation and eventual political domination. The book is available wherever books are sold, and Bump can be found at The Washington Post.

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