“I do feel a large wave of worry in the music community right now,” Fohr said. She had to rent an Airbnb in France to isolate for two weeks. Haley Fohr of Circuit Des Yeux recently told the Los Angeles Times she tested positive while on tour in Europe recently.
As touring returns, a number of musicians are taking precautions including scaling back to smaller solo sets, near-daily testing, no backstage guests, and requiring masks and vaccines. They need touring to bring in revenue, but touring was devasted by the pandemic. Pearl Jam, Low, the Strokes, Dave Matthews Band, Animal Collective, Willie Nelson, and Journey are among the musicians who have either postponed or canceled shows recently because of personnel coming down with COVID-19. All it takes is one band member testing positive for COVID-19 to derail a tour, which can cost a band enormously. Artists who perform at events experience both health and financial risks. Even still, attending events remains a calculated health risk as the pandemic ebbs and flows. And it’s easy to see why: there is an enormous pent-up demand to socialize in person. Never have the tailwinds to our business been so strong, and I believe this is just the start of what will be the strongest multi-year period ever for the concert industry.”Īs the weather gets warmer across the United States, in-person events will become even more popular.
He wrote, “The two-year wait for artists and fans is over.
MSG, which operates Madison Square Garden in New York, reported strong quarterly earnings this spring because attendance for the venue’s pro sports teams returned to historic levels.Ĭoncert promoter Live Nation said that it is experiencing “a record pipeline of concerts, ticket sales and advertising commitments for 2022,” according to a company earnings letter from President and CEO Michael Rapino. In-person events are back even under the lingering cloud of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple’s software is unleashing an army of tools to help. Apple has supplied everyone with Trojan horses for wellness: watches and phones. And the pandemic has made people even more conscious of managing their health.
The spiraling costs of healthcare are a strong deterrent for people to take care of their health. For instance, the Workout app has been updated to provide richer metrics for measuring performance, as well as new training experiences to help users reach fitness goals.Īccording to recent McKinsey survey, the global health and wellness market has reached a market evaluation of $1.5 trillion and growing at a rate of 5%-to-10% per year. In fact, Apple is rolling out features that make the Apple Watch a more powerful fitness app for people who are really serious about working out. This does not mean that Apple is marginalizing the Apple Watch. That's why the iPhone will get Apple Fitness going forward. But Apple needs to balance its wearables strategy against its healthcare aspirations while protecting the nest egg, the iPhone. The iPhone accounts for more than half of Apple’s revenue.Īpple needed to give the Apple Watch something special to encourage people to buy it. But the Apple Watch sells nowhere near the units as the iPhone. That strategy has succeeded: the Apple Watch now outsells the entire Swiss watch industry. That's why has made Health, Fitness, and Fitness+ available on the Apple Watch, with the iPhone limited to Health. Since launching the Apple Watch years ago, Apple has encouraged people to consider that device a wellness app.
Fitness+ offers all of the above plus a catalog of guided workouts for a fee. Each time a person achieves a personal goal, a ring closes, and the user is rewarded with a celebration on their Apple Watch. Fitness gamifies personal fitness by visualizing as rings your progress in three categories: standing, exercising, and moving (calories burned). Fitness is Apple’s exercise tracking app. Health syncs with the most popular health apps and stores all of your personal data in a single spot. Health is probably the best known app because it’s available on both devices. This move is part Apple's strategy of being the data backbone of healthcare through hardware, software, and relationships with healthcare providers such as hospital networks to monitor and share data.Īs part of this, Apple has pursued a somewhat confusing approach of offering three types of wellness apps available to owners of either the iPhone or Apple Watch: Health, Fitness, and Fitness+. You’ll no longer need to own an Apple Watch to use the app. On June 6, Apple announced at WWDC that its Fitness app will be available on the iPhone. The 2022 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) underscores this reality.
Apple wants to be be the data backbone of healthcare.