Marvel cinematic series is the most successful series that have been ever made. The Endgame was the highest grossing movie of all the times. The critiques and the audience both like them.

It has experienced both rise and fall to reach to the place where Marvel is standing now.

It is the time of 1930s when the comics were used to be very popular before Marvel ever existed. In 1938, action comics number 1 was published exposing the world to the superman with the cliché superman suit consisting red and blue colours in it.

It was a huge financial success as people start looking at comic books with a huge business potential. Martin Goodman who was involved in publishing business. A company named Funnies Inc. which had the talented artists and writers working on the comic books approached Goodman for the publishing and the marketing purposes. Goodman saw potential in the comic industry , so he agreed to this proposal.

The first comic book that got published under that agreement was none other than Marvel Number 1. This comic was such a success that made Goodman to be motivated enough to make a company fully devoted to comics that was called “Timely Productions”.

The rise of the Marvel can be seen when the productions made the comic targeting world war 2. The comic was called “ Captain America” where on the cover he was punching Adolf Hitler right on the face.

Nevertheless, It was hilarious to see Captain America punching him tho..

This comic was published months before the phase where U.S. entered in the war. This content intrigued the older generation, even the people from the military was reading that comic..

The war was huge contributor to the success of this company  and to the comic books as well. Their first fall happened when the war ended and people took no longer interest in the superheroes they introduced. Eventually, the sales went down.

In 1961, Stan Lee who was working in the company since his teens created “The Fantastic Four”. It marked the beginning of the first era for the company and shaped the marvel to what we know them as today.

The characters that he designed were not flawless at all, they were quite relatable. All the characters like Spider man and Incredible Hulk made the marvel universe. These characters were standing under the marvel name.

In 2009, Marvel was acquired by Disney for around $4 billion for both cash and stock. The motivation  behind this acquisition was to buy all of their characters and rights to make movies. In 2005, Marvel studios was made to make the profits and to have all the characters together on a single floor. Since then, they have been creating movies which attracted loads of audience from all around the world that would go crazy over the characters named Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow etc..

Walt Disney, a name that would forever be in the history, was born on 5 Dec., 1991 in Chicago. He was a very creative child and he started selling his creative paintings to his neighbors. He started his company name Laugh-O-Gram which went bankrupt later during Alice Wonderland project. He went through a lot of hard-work. Disneyland started on 17 July, 1955.  

Not only we have spent our childhood while watching the movies made by Disney but we have been spending our current time while watching the movies made by Disney which are making everyone crazy all over the world.

Have you heard of the name of the movies like Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity war?

Of course, you would have, after all who doesn’t?

These movies are made by the Disney itself. They have a very higher market share in comparison to other studio. Disney has been growing like crazy over the past few years. In the recent years, Disney’s revenue has grown so much. In 1993, they bought up like$8.5 billion and in 2020, it went up to $65 billion.

Isn’t it amazing?

Disney is 8.5 times bigger than they were 25 years before. A big part of their growth can be assumed from their strategic acquisitions. One of them was of $71 billion acquisition involving Fox’s assets that was finalized in March, 2019.

In 1993, Disney bought Miramax, a movie company, for $60 million and really turned them into something. After running it for 17 years, they decided to sell in 2010. They ended up selling it for 660 million dollars.

In 1995, Disney spent $19 billion for Capital Cities. Capital cities had bought the TV network called ABC who was already the owner of ESPN. In 2001, Disney acquired Fox Family for about $2.9 billion. They quickly renamed it as ABC Family. In 2004, they bought Pixar for $7.4 billion, at that point Pixar had yet to create anything that could blow up the audience’s mind. In 2009, they bought Marvel for $4 billion and this acquisition is being continued to talk about the people. But before the acquisition, Marvel already sold a lot of character like Spider-man but Disney did get some good ones. In February 2015, Disney, Marvel Studios, and Sony made a deal to share the Spider-Man film rights. In 2012, Disney paid $4 billion dollars to buy Lucasfilm which is the owner of the Star Wars franchise.

Disney will continue to be dominant in the movie and streaming industry and would provide us with some marvellous movies in upcoming years.

Jeanne Marie Leprince d Beaumont published Beauty and the Beast in 1756. Her story, a short and sweet tale with a small cast of archetypal characters, loving yet helpless father, the protective brothers and jealous sisters, and the hideous but noble hearted hero. Beauty, the youngest, as she was handsomer, was also better than her sisters. The two eldest had a great deal of pride, because they were rich. They gave themselves ridiculous airs, and would not visit other merchants daughters nor keep company with any but persons of quality. They went out every day to parties of pleasure, balls, plays, concerts, and so forth, and they laughed at their younger sister because she spent the greatest part of her time in reading good books. One day her father mistakenly got shelter at Beast’s castle which made Beauty to come their to save her father. Beast, a prince, lost his father at young age. Selfish prince who along with his castle servants is cast under a curse by a wicked enchantress. The prince is turned into a beast, and sentenced to live as a beast until he learns to love and accept love in return. After Beauty comes into his life everything changes and later he becomes human by getting love from Beauty.

Petrus Gonsalvus, Spanish, Pedro Gonzalez, lived during the period 1537 to 1618c, referred to by Ulisse Aldrovandi as ‘the man of the woods’, was born in 1537 in Spain. His life has been well chronicled as he became famous during his lifetime because of his condition, hypertrichosis. Gonsalvus first came to the court of Henry II, King of France in 1547, and was sent from there to the court of Margaret of Parma, regent of the Netherlands. He married while there, later he was moved into the court of Alexander Darnedest, Duke of Parma. Four of his seven children were also afflicted with hypertrichosis universal is and painted. His family became an object of medical inquiry by Ulisse Aldrovandi among others. Despite living and acting as a nobleman, Gonsalvus and his hairy children were not considered fully human in the eyes of their contemporaries. But the power of strength came from his better half, his wife. Gonsalvus eventually settled in Italy with his wife. It is believed that marriage between Petrus Gonsalvus and Lady Catherine may have partially inspired the the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The greatness of a lady made history and romance.

I couldn’t even tell you how much time I’ve spent watching Netflix.

Today everyone thinks of it as a video streaming service but I’m sure many of you remember that they actually started out by renting DVDs.

There were two people who started Netflix together, they were Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. Before founding Netflix, they were working in the software industry in the Silicon valley.

In 1991, Reed Hastings was the co-founder and the partial owner of a company named pure software. Within five years, that same company became so big which made it involved in a near billion dollar merger to a company named Atria that further made a new company called Pure Atria.

Soon after that, they acquired a small start-up with only nine people in it and Mark Randolph was one of those people. He became the Head of the Marketing where he soon started working with Reed.

They became quite good friends as they used to live close together. After one year of that big merger, Rational software acquired Pure Atria. This transition led them to leave the company for the better. They had the money, experience and the time to think of a new business. They used to research on ideas for their new business in the big portion of the day.

They knew that internet community was growing at an excessive limit and will continue to grow in the future as well but they didn’t know what products to sell.

They were gravitated towards the ideas of movies but then they extract the exact potential of DVDs. For them, DVDs could bring them a profitable business. DVDs were released in early 1997 in United States and these two started testing them immediately.

They test these with CDs and the test went well. In April of 1998, they started NETFLIX. It is a startling fact that if DVDs would not have been released at that exact moment then Netflix was most likely would never been existed. So, starting of something can lead to the generation of something more marvellous phenomenon and only a starting push is required to do so.

When the service first started, they offered DVDs for a 7 days rental period. They procured more money by selling them rather than renting them.

In 1999, they completely stopped selling movies and it was kind of a bold move to cut off their main source of the revenue. For that year, their sales accounted for only 3%. They were getting sales due to lack of competition but once the competitions start their sales could have gone down. So, they came up with the idea of monthly subscriptions…

They called it as Marquee Program where some one can four rentals for $15.95 per month which also included shipping in it. In February, 2000, they extended their subscription to unlimited rentals at $19.95 per month with the limit of 4 at a time.

There were no due dates or late fees in Netflix which people hated in other rental shops. They always thought of a strategy for a long term. Basically, they were never concerned about making quick money. They wanted their product to be known for the better.

For their first five years, Netflix made about nil money and they sacrificed something to get much better in the further future.

Reed Hastings keep investing his money on Netflix for a long period of time. Even though the company was facing the losses, it had believers.

In 2002, they raised 82 million dollars through a public stock offering. Netflix went crazy with their marketing budget.  They would run advertisements all over the internet. They would run radio commercials, prints, mails and they even had the free trials to promote Netflix every place they could get into. Needless to say, all that hard work actually got paid off.

In 2004, they announced their partnership with TIVO saying that they would work together to develop an effective way of streaming movies over the internet. Everyone was excited about this. In reality, it was in 2007 when Netflix actually started its first streaming through their watch now service.

Today the streaming service make up of 98% of their total revenue and Netflix has become a leader of its own in the streaming of movies.

Twitter has become a new way to break the hot news everyday. Almost 83% of world leaders are on Twitter and it has become the method of disseminating the news. But the road of evolution of Twitter was not filled with all cherry blossoms.

It was filled with thorns of controversy and scandals. You can undoubtedly find more about Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey as the founders of Twitter but there was another man besides them who started this revolutionary company that is NOAH GLASS.

His twitter account has somewhat 45k around subscribers with a short bio in which he wrote that “ I started this”.

What were the behind the scenes of the growth and the fame of Twitter??

This story starts in early 2000s in San Francisco, Noah Glass created a product where a user would dial a number and the service would turn your voice message into an mp3 message which would be hosted on the internet.

Noah turned this idea into a company named Odeo. One of the early investors of Odeo was former Google employee , friend and the neighbour of Noah who was Evan Williams.

Evan sold his company named BLOGGER to Google and he had a ton of cash. The company work for turning mp3 voice messages into podcasting platforms transferred into a big office. Company started hiring more and more employees. One of them was a web designer named Jack Dorsey.

He was a university dropped out and was living in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. He had turned down his job in a  shoe store. Apple announced iTunes would include a podcasting platform which made them realize that Odeo was now doomed as the customers started drifting from their platform. Now, Evan Williams was the CEO of the Odeo believed that Apple had crushed them without warning.

For a comeback, all the employees of Odeo started working on the new ideas they could come up to bring Odea the success.  Jack and Noah became good friends meanwhile, Jack was not at all happy with the work he was doing back then. He then introduced the idea of status which could act as a lifesaver plan.

One day in February 2006, Noah and Jack presented their idea of status in front of the company. Through this you could send your message to all your friends in one go and you could add more friends via that text message.

They called this whole thing “TWITTER”. Noah took the charge of this project while Jack did the coding.

 After the February presentation, Evan Williams was skeptical about the potential of twitter but regardless, he put Noah as the in-charge of the project.

In August, an earthquake shook San Francisco and then the usefulness of Twitter was seen by the world that was “NEWS”.

Twitter is more of an information network rather than a social network. At that time, the company started to divide into two factions, one with the original audio tasks and other who were obsessed with twitter.

Evan Williams who was now the CEO of Odeo was regarded as a calculating person by the employees of the company.

Noah presented the idea of Twitter to Odeo investors but no one seemed interested in and couldn’t understand the point of it. Later, Evan wrote to Odeo investors that the company is going nowhere so to reduce the losses they should give all the stocks back to him which included Odea and Twitter both. The value of the assets the investors got through this deal was $5 million and after 5 years, those assets were worth of $5 billion, 1000 times more.

The question arises if Evan knew about the worth of Twitter and wanted to snatch all the assets to himself. Well, it’s normal to happen in Businesses but the betrayal to the person who had the original idea first came as a shock to the world.

Evan and Noah’s preferences started to clash as Evan wanted Twitter to get separated from Odeo and wanted to become the CEO. Noah share his insecurities to Jack but he only sympathized to it and said that it’s going to be okay. After that Evan told Noah that he was fired. The actual person who wanted Noah to get out from the company was Jack Dorsey whom Noah thought of as a friend and the reason for this was never been revealed. Jack soon became the CEO of the company and Evan went to a chairman position.

According to many employees and investors, Twitter could not have been created without Noah Glass. He was quite shocked by the betrayal he got by his friends and his company.

From then, Twitter became the platform for the millions of people to get the news instantly in their hands and the world leaders to make people know about what’s happening in their countries.

Not only politicians but now entertainers made their accounts on Twitter. Though Twitter recently has became a house of controversies and toxicity but it surely has taken a huge space in our mobile phones as a daily activity.

In the era of fast foods, one can not resist talking about Pizza at all. After all, Who doesn’t like PIZZA?

A slice of Pizza with topping of gold leaf and  caviar can cost you up to $400. But this dish has much humble origins in comparison to its costly personality. It first appeared in Naples, Italy in the 1700s  as food for the lower class.

When Italians migrated to U.S. , so did pizzas. New York people started to perfect the dish for good. If you go to that time period for Pizza then you would most likely be surrounded by the Italian Americans. To became a mainstream favourite, pizza needed a lot of help from the restaurant chains popping up in the mid-west.

Coming back to Domino’s, it was not founded by someone from Italian Heritage. In 1960, Toma and Jim Monahan , two Irish American brothers borrowed 900 dollars to buy a pizzeria called Dominic’s.

Within a few months, Jin gave his half of the business to Tom in exchange for Volkswagen Beetle, the same car they were using for the delivery for the Pizzas.

Now, the company was of all Tom’s and he changed the name of the company from Dominic’s to Dominos.

In 1967, Monahan started franchising the restaurants.

New franchises didn’t have to pay an initial fees to open their own stores. Instead of that, they had to manage the existing Domino’s restaurants for a whole year. The company decided to open these stores near colleges and the military bases as both of them had a lot of customers.

Domino’s ovens had rotating racks. It had standardized the delivery box and all of the pizzas started to look the same too. Around the same time, pizza hut and little Caesars were also getting their start in the Midwest. Little Caesars had 50 stores by 1969 but pizza hut was far and away the fastest growing chain of the 1960s.

Unlike domino’s, they wanted customers to eat their pizza inside their restaurants and it had more options.

Just 12 years after it was founded, pizza hut opened its 500^th location but domino’s was doing its best to catch up. By 1978, it had 200 stores and the chain just kept growing from there. The pizza chain’s 30 minutes or less delivery promise help set it apart from the competition.

Domino’s created the guarantee in 1984 and for nearly a decade, the incentive worked but the company dropped it in 1993.

By 1998, domino’s had thousands of stores and 3.2 billion dollars in annual sales. Monahan decided to sell the company so he could focus on philanthropy instead.

He retired from Pizza biz with the money from the sale of his company.

David Brandon became the CEO of the company in 1999.

In 2004, Brandon took Domino’s in Public. Pizza wars started heating up in the late 1990s. The different brands for Pizza were having a fierce competition during that time line. Pizza Hut even sued Papa John’s for the false advertising.

In the early 2000s, China and India have become the new battlefield for the pizza wars. As major American Pizza players started opening their franchises in these countries.

You know that these countries are the most populous countries in the world, so all the pizza players started to dominate the people with the magic of their own pizza.

Domino’s couldn’t boost sales by hiking prices, so starting around 2003, sales unsurprisingly flattened.

Another big problem for domino’s was that its pizza became forgettable as it cut corners on ingredients in order to keep its pizzas cheap.

Domino’s used frozen canned and pre-made ingredients to cut down on costs as the economy started to slip.

In late 2009 , it launched an ad campaign that admitted what customers already knew that Domino’s pizza wasn’t good as it had cardboard crust and ketchup like sauce.

The commercials told customers that they had totally reformulated its recipe with a brand new sauce and a garlic infused crust. As folks realize that this really is an improved product from what domino’s had for years and years.  It’s kind of been a snowball effect that continues

to benefit domino’s to this day. In the middle of its relaunch in 2010, Domino’s appointed Patrick Doyle as CEO, he had been with the company for more than a decade as an executive.

Now, he was entrusted to lead its turnaround.

Customers were buying the ad campaign and domino’s pizza. In fact the campaign was so successful that pizza hut later mimicked it in 2014 when it changed its own pizzas recipes.

In 2017, it overtook pizza hut as a market leader in the quick service pizza sector. Since 2010 , its stock has risen up more than 3, 200 percent. Even after Ritch Allison took over as CEO in June 2018, Domino’s tech focus has continued.

In early 2019, the company incorporated artificial intelligence into its loyalty program.

Users just had to take a picture of pizza to get points to redeem for a free pizza. But Allison isn’t just focusing on tech, he also has a big plan to revolutionize

the chain’s delivery strategy. Third-party delivery services have made it possible to deliver any kind of food that means that consumers options are virtually limitless.

Now, Domino’s is hoping that it will help the pizza chain reach 25 billion dollars in sales by 2025!!

In the year 2021, Apple is recorded as the most valuable brand in the whole world with an estimated brand value of about 263.4 billion U.S. dollars. It is followed by Amazon, the second most valuable brand, with the brand value of about 254.2 billion U.S. dollars.

Apple screams to whole world that it is here to dominate the tech market.

How Apple got the honour of becoming a King in this industry?

The birth of Apple began in the mid 1970s as an assembled circuit board Apple 1 invited by the co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Apple 1 did not have any keyboard or a monitor, it was just a circuit board.

Steve Wozniak was an Albanian inventor who was born in 1950. He met Steve Jobs while designing the calculators. Jobs was five years younger than Wozniak.  At that time, while working for the arcade game company Atari in the 1970s, Atari gave Steve Jobs the assignment of creating a circuit board for one of their video games.

Jobs having limited knowledge and experience of circuit boards made a deal with Wozniak to share the pay if he could design the circuit board. Though Wozniak designed the circuit board, it wasn’t accepted by Atari. The same invention that would later lead him to the Apple one.

Just two years later, Wozniak designed , developed and tested his first prototype by 1976. The Apple 1 was completed.  It was Steve Jobs idea to sell the Apple 1 themselves. They sold most of their belongings and assembled the first Apple 1 boards at Steve Jobs’s house. They sold the Apple 1 for 666 dollars and their first 50 system boards were sold to a new computer shop called The Byte Shop in California. Apple computers now called Apple Inc was founded.

One thing they lacked was money, though they had an order for 50 system boards with a

byte shop, they didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. They were both turned down by banks and Atari where Jobs worked and wanted payment for any components.

Steve Jobs convinced Intel executive and multi-millionaire Mike Markkula to invest two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into Apple.

The next three years Apple saw an incredible growth as sales grew approximately 118 million dollars . However, during that time, other companies began to emerge .IBM launched its own personal computers and took full advantage when Apple was facing losses.

Due to the lack of interest, the apple also faced a lot of in-house issues as Wozniak decided to leave Apple in the 80s. He was simply no longer interested in running Apple computers. Steve Jobs then brought on John Sculley to be the President.

Jobs became the interim CEO and immediately began implementing his plans to revitalize Apple. One of his first acts was forming an alliance with

Microsoft to create a version of their office suite software for Apple. This would help them to retain their current customers as well as gain those that

previously didn’t use Apple.

Steve Jobs launched the iMac in 1998. Its unique design and use of modern technology made it a favourite and Apple sold approximately 800,000 units in five months. Not long after that he reimagined, the personal computer and introduced the iBook.

Three years later, Apple launched their iPod a digital music player freeing up customers from portable cassettes and CD players, giving them the capacity of taking more music with them.

Steve Jobs in 2007 he showed the world the shift Apple was making in the direction of consumer electronics even further by launching the iPhone with phenomenal success.

Apple continues to launch innovative yet modern and stylish looking products that always come with a new assortment of upgrades.

Apple has also made shopping for their products and experience at their 506 branded retail stores worldwide. Apple believe that traditional retail stores would not provide the experience they wanted.

Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple, shared at Apple’s annual meeting that there’s a long great roadmap of fantastic products on the horizon.

Apple has begun developing its services category, there have been improvements to Apple music, the App Store and they may be launching a new streaming TV service with original television series.  Netflix may have something to worry about especially as consumers who subscribe to Netflix through their iPhone or iPad app, 30% goes to Apple every month for a year. Situations such as these are key factors in Apple’s growth.

It’s clear that Apple’s long term profitability is due to control and not allowing their products to be standardized. However, unless Apple creates the next iMac or iPhone, recreating some of their

historical profits may be quite a task especially with a trade war between the US and China.

In, 2018 Apple recorded its highest annual revenue of approximately 265.6 billion dollars. 218 billion was generated by iPhone sales.

Apple has been a pioneer in the computer industry on several occasions throughout history.

It believes in innovation and removing any boundaries that limit creativity in order to produce valuable products for its consumers. It is undeniable that Apple has provided immeasurable value and made an impact on technology influencing how we use it in our daily lives!!

K-pop, the South Korean music industry, this is name which has been ringing in the heads of music lovers from the recent years.

K-pop or should I say Korean Pop has taken Korea in top 10 in the music market. Not only Korea has achieved a successful acceptance from all over the world through their amazing dramas but also the music they produce has been making a chaos over the world.

BTS (internal screaming), yeah we all have heard this name, right? BTS  is one of the K-POP groups who made Korean music more popular in the western countries. BTS is the only group which brings in nearly 5 billion dollars to the Korean’s economy.

Shocking, right?

Well, they didn’t have an easy life tho. Working from a very young age, being a trainee who trains day to night, dedicated solely to dance, rap and singing, all these things are not easy to master. But BTS and all other K-pop groups did that and the results of their hard work can be seen by the love of the fans from different corners of the world.

Even though people can not speak Korean but they surely do enjoy their music. It is proven that music has no language and barrier.

But How did it start?

How did K-POP become a billion dollar industry?

The beginning of K-POP was accelerated in 1990s. The music at that was not like the Korean music we hear today. Trot music used to be popular during that timeline of music. A group was formed and called to be Seo Taiji and boys.

Seo Taiji and boys were formed from the breakup of a metal band called Sinawe. While Sinawe was metal,

Seo Taiji and boys went in a totally different route and introduced Korea to hip-hop. While Seo Taiji and boys was heavily inspired by the American hip-hop.

They turned around and made it their own . But when Seo Taiji and boys debuted, they weren’t met with praise.

Actually, they were met with criticism.

The older and previous generation saw this music as deteriorating the minds of the youth. Yet Seo Taiji and boys were able to succeed by being the highest selling group of their generation with over 8 million albums sold and regarded as legends in Korean music history.

So the beginning of K-pop wasn’t all bright and cheerful as many of us know what it is today. But in order to break the chains of Conservative Korea. Seo Taiji had to be the to pave the way for the first K-pop idol group, which was H.O.T.

H.O.T. was the first look at the real vision of a K-pop group created by Lee Soo-man , the founder of SM Entertainment which is  one of the three biggest K-pop companies in Korea.  H.O.T. had a brighter image than their predecessors , producing a more pop sound,

choreography and catchy songs. Unlike Seo Taiji and boys, H.O.T. was beloved by the public when they

debuted. They went on to be quite successful and led to the creation of more first generation K-pop idol groups like G.O.D and S.E.S. .

While the first generation was inspired by American pop, the second generation had to create something new and which they did too.

This is where we see Big Bang, Girls Generation, 2ne1, SHINee, Wonder Girls, BoA. When someone would ask K-pop fans today what caught them into K-pop, most will respond with one of these groups. The second generation of K-pop became the most influential and known by many as the the GOLDEN ERA of K-pop.

BoA was a solo artist who was known to do it all dancing, singing and the looks.

She was a top Idol even at a young age. Wonder Girls would be the first to break ground in America coming from JYP entertainment which is the another company from the big three. Wonder Girls adapted and created an English version of their breakout hit “nobody”.

They were even performing on US television and going on tour with the Jonas Brothers.

YouTube is an undeniable reason K-pop made it to people’s ears. Groups like BIGBANG, 2ne1 and girls generation would have music videos that surpassed millions of views in a day.

Steam was building up and on the verge of bursting in the form of one song “GANGNAM STYLE”. Everyone has caught wind of a viral video by PSY a solo artist in Korea.

His new song Gangnam style found overnight success.

For some reason, people were intrigued by a comedic odd yet catchy song. Most people didn’t know PSY

was a singer in Korea for years before Gangnam style.

He was considered one of the top performers in the country, but no one knew who he was internationally.

Gangnam style was meant to just be a new song by PSY but it grew out of control becoming the most viewed video on YouTube at the time with 800 million views and out today with over 3 billion views, with this PSY was all over the world radio, TV even New Year’s Eve shows.

PSY without knowing it opened the first window for K-pop with times dying down a

A second wave was on the horizon in the form of groups NCT 127, Monsta X, Black pink and of course BTS .

While PSY opened a window, BTS kicked down the front door.

BTS origins were a humble one, coming from BIGHIT entertainment.

They were practically unknown at debut. Similarly debuting with a hip-hop style like Seo Taiji but BTS was able to explode in Korea with lyrics that spoke to the youth and music that spoke to everyone. BTS made the history as the first K-pop group to attend and be nominated at the Billboard Music Awards in 2019 and then made history the same night as they won social artists of the year.

BTS couldn’t be stopped, breaking music video views, record number of streams and a lot more first for a K-pop act including selling out stadiums.

BTS  performed for over 1 million fans on the latest tour as people are, more importantly, companies saw the numbers and support BTS.

This led them finding interest in the next group that is BLACKPINK. BLACKPINK was the first K=pop group which performed in Coachella in 2019 when they perform.

Why is K-pop a billion-dollar industry?

Well, there are a number of factors.

One is Tourism.

K-pop is so beloved by fans that many of them dream of the day to make the pilgrimage to Korea.

It isn’t just to see if they can find their favourite idol on the streets, many fall in love with the music first.

Another thing is, if you sit with a person down and have them watch a music video.

The first thing they’ll say is “wow“.

This music video itself is amazing.

The color, dancing, outfits, the effects. One thing that many people admire is attention to detail.

It is something people are missing in other music videos. Likewise the physical album sales are in a decline across the world except Korea.

Why?

Well in K-pop, an album is much more than just a CD, a K-pop album will come with a CD, of course, but also random photo cards of a member from that group and a poster. K-pop is able to market and advertise everything to a max, they will sell anything from shirts, hats, cups, bag, stickers, pants, figures and even trash cans.

Groups have their own lightsticks.

Lightsticks are these devices that light up and sync to others at a concert and flashed with the rhythm of the music.

It is designed with the group’s colors which makes a fan to be more involved. It’s truly an amazing device.

There is just something special about K-pop . To put it simply , K-pop was able to utilize each and every technology and opportunity to grow.

K-pop is able to be more than a music.

It’s a niche community where people looking for something different and can learn a whole new culture a music where so much time effort and dedication are invested.

That’s why K-pop is a billion-dollar industry and will continue to expand to infinity in the upcoming future.

Music, an art, which has mesmerized all of us in this monotonous life. Music has become a part of our life which cannot be denied. Today, Not only Music but music artists are also getting recognized by millions of people through various mediums.

Music has been alive for hundreds of years. Streaming music online has become a common and a very popular practice nowadays.

What started out as Music piracy became an 11 billion dollar industry, making 56% of global music industry’s revenues in 2019.

And one company has become the clear winner globally in terms of paid subscribers, that’s none other than ‘SPOTIFY’.

Spotify has dominated the music streaming industry with about 130 million premium subscribers worldwide.

Despite being in number two behind Apple Music in U.S. in 2019, Spotify has been on a winning streak recently with the acquisition of Joe Rogan’s incredibly popular podcast, along with exclusive deals with Kim Kardashian and DC Comics, all in an attempt to broaden its scope from music streaming to audio giant.

The man behind the popularity of the name ‘SPOTIFY’ is Daniel Ek.

Daniel Ek is the reason behind that we know the name “Spotify” now. He was into programming way back then. He was earning thousands of money by designing websites. He co-founded the company back in 2006 and has been in charge as the CEO ever since. He’s from Sweden, by the way, Spotify is a Swedish company.

He was a genius programmer and businessman with the exact impressive background.

He went to college but only for a few weeks before dropping out and quickly becoming tremendously successful working at various tech companies. His big payoff was in 2006 when he sold his online marketing company for over a million dollars and briefly retired directly after. All of this happened before the age of 23 so he decided he wasn’t quite ready to retire especially considering he perceived a great opportunity for a new business.

They spent a couple years getting everything together and in September of 2008, they officially launched Spotify. Initially the service was only available in six large countries throughout Europe but by 2011, it was finally available in the United States and as of 2019 they claim to have reach in 79 different countries and territories

There are some reasons behind its success. First of all, the music Catalog that was their first big hurdle back in 2006 and it remains a huge risk for them today. this relates to what I talked about in the beginning a core difference between

Spotify and Napster (music file sharing site)  and all those other crazy illegal sites is that Spotify pays for the rights to stream the songs they have to make all these deals with record labels and original artists.

Spotify provided a potential solution as it was a cheap and easy way for the users to access the music but still have the labels and artists and everyone else get compensated.

After two years of making those deals, they had secured enough European streaming rights to launch their service in Europe. Their growth after the launch made them even more attractive to record labels. They made new deals with Universal Sony Warner and by 2011 had secured enough US streaming rights .

They’ve existed for over a decade in a way that they were the first of their kind predating any competitor that uses this model. Their biggest competitor Apple music didn’t exist until 2015.

They had a seven-year head-start.  In the United States, the two are very similar.

As far as paid subscribers are concerned, Apple music passed Spotify in April of 2019 The difference comes internationally which leads into the next reason. Spotify is more focused internationally. Not surprisingly, most of the revenue comes from outside of the US. They started in Sweden, focused solely on Europe for years and as a result are dominating the international market

Spotify is really good at figuring out what you want to listen. Many people agree that their recommendations are among the best in the industry. This may be related to their continued investment in research and development and the fact that they had that jump start in collecting the data and in perfecting their system.

The biggest reason of their success might be their free option. It’s got to be the biggest difference from Apple music.

Spotify has this option where you can listen to everything they have to offer for free. This version of Spotify has so many limitations and it allows to skip a few songs at a time that forces people into listening to things. Then the ads came on every few songs which you have to expect but it gets annoying.

The three-month trial for the premium is so much better. When the three months end, No one can go back and end up paying $10 a month.

As of September of 2019, they have 113 million premium members compared to 141 million members on the free plan. The money they make from those ads is almost insignificant but that’s a group of people that are very likely to upgrade.

More than 60% of their new premium members come from the free service and they have a very specific path to make it happen. Around 75% of those people who engaged in the free trial ended up converting to a paid premium subscription because it’s hard to go back .

This is a controversial yet effective way of attracting customers as being a big reason for their success.

Spotify took advantage of the conditions of the industry and later on their size to build up an impressive music catalog. With just about every song you can ever want to hear take an advantage of a head start over all their competitors in the US and internationally. Part of that includes their data collection resulting in sophisticated recommendations and playlists. The unique free service providing a path for millions of people to sign up for their premium service that they really care!!

In the world of sneakers and sportswear, ADIDAS ranks two and Of course the number one is NIKE. According to Forbes, it is 68^th biggest brand in the whole world. Their sales have been growing from the last five years and now ADIDAS has become a very big name.

How did ADIDAS became so big??

Most of the people who do sports or watch sports shows definitely know about ADIDAS. Even you know nothing about sports, there is a big chance that you know the name ADIDAS. You can take my example, I know a little about sports but I am familiar with the name ADIDAS. That’s how this name has become big within past years.

Like most companies, it didn’t start out big. In the 1920s, in a small town in Germany, Adi Dassler and his brother Rudolf Dassler started the company when they began producing shoes in their mother’s laundry room. At that time, it wasn’t even called ADIDAS yet it was called the Dassler brothers shoe factory. Now, obviously there’re numerous factors that are responsible for transforming that little business into the giant one that we know today.

There are three things that have made the greatest impact and are most responsible for their growth.

The First thing is a man named Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens was an American Athlete. In his time, he probably was the fastest man on the planet.

 In the 1936 ,Olympics held in Berlin, Germany. He won four gold medals and track events breaking records along the way. A very impressive performance. You know ,how in every Olympics there tends to be one or two people who become really famous and are just the star of the whole thing well in 1936, it was Jesse Owens.

These Olympics were in 1936 held in Germany, at the time the country was led by Adolf Hitler. He was planning for these Olympics to prove how the Aryan race was superior and obviously Jesse Owens ruined that Plan.

These Olympics took place in Germany and the Dassler Brothers shoe company was from Germany. Somehow, Adi Dassler convinced Jesse Owens to wear a pair of shoes during his historic races and it looks like he didn’t specifically target Owens rather he was just kind of trying to convince all the athletes but the one that paid off was Jesse Owens.

You can imagine the demand that it created for them and it really helped bring the small shoe company to the next level.

After the second world war, the two brothers that were running the company found it impossible to work together and they split apart.

Rudi left so that he can form his own shoe company. The company he started is now known as Puma that you probably know.

Adi stayed put and redesigned the existing company that’s where the name was changed to ADIDAS and he came up with the three stripe signature look and it really just started taking shape and to the company that we are familiar with today.

In 1954 World Cup final it’s been called the miracle in Bern that took place in Bern , Switzerland and showcased a very strong Hungarian team against the underdog team from West Germany. The game started with two early goals from Hungary which solidified their victory in the minds of many people but Hungary didn’t score for the rest of the game while Germany scored three times making them the winner by three to two. There were a lot of politics tied to this game as well. It was the second World Cup following the war. The first one was held in Europe since the war. It was held in Switzerland because they were neutral during the war and mostly unaffected. It involved a newly formed and weak German team.

The Winning German team was famously wearing ADIDAS shoes.

They called it “dassler boot” , with all its features that make it superior to the traditional boot.

You can imagine how being attached to such a big event like this could help the brand. The success with Jesse Owens was linked to the old brand before all the changes. So this helped bring the new brand into the mind of the public. It was where many people first saw their signature stripes and learn the name ADIDAS.

The third thing that I’d like to highlight may not be as significant as the first two but it’s worth mentioning Run DMC, it’s a really popular rap group from the 1980s. They were pioneers in the genre. They had a song called my adidas.

It was one of their most popular songs. They sang about how they wore adidas and they were known for wearing adidas.

Unlike the first two contributors to their success, this one started independent from adidas meaning Run DMC wasn’t approached by them to create the song or anything like that.

They made it on their own. The story goes that they invited an Adidas executive to one of their concerts and before they sang their song, they asked the crowd to raise their Adidas sneakers in the air and thousands of people did it showing the executive how influential they were.

It motivated them to sign Run DMC to an Endorsement  deal which is said to be the first-ever endorsement deal in rap.

Here we have a popular rap group singing about them and wearing them not just the shoes a head to toe adidas and they were obviously influencing their fans to buy them or at the very least familiarizing them with the brand.

All three of these contributors have something in common. It was someone famous and influential wearing their shoes which is a very common practice for companies like these.

ADIDAS continues to be reliant on their marketing and continues to be aggressive with this type of marketing a few years ago they had a big campaign labelled “Impossible Is Nothing” involving David Beckham and Muhammad Ali .

Today they have some of the top athletes in each sport signed to endorsement deals.

For soccer, they have Lionel Messi. For Basketball, they have James Harden. For Football, they have Aaron Rodgers. For baseball ,they have Kris Bryant.

Almost half of their marketing budget every year goes to paying all these players from different sports to wear and endorse their shoes.

Today, ADIDAS is the largest sportswear manufacturer in whole Europe and the second largest in the world with nearly 20 billion Euros in annual revenue!!