Jeff and Joanna Kaye have received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters. The award will be presented in April 2025. Joanna is executive director of Festival of the Arts Boca and has worked as a radio host. Jeff, a Local 655 member, is a renowned trumpet player who served as principal trumpet of the Florida Philharmonic and is a founding member of The Symphonia, Boca Raton. They have worked with the Healing Arts Project and Healing Sounds of Music to bring music to healthcare and assisted living facilities.
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has broken records by a mile. The tour began in March 2023 and by the end of the year, it had already become the highest grossing musical tour with $1 billion in revenue. By the time the tour ended in December 2024, over 10 million patrons had attended the tour and the tour had sold over $2 billion in tickets.
Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay $43.3 million to settle a gender pay discrimination lawsuit. The class-action lawsuit alleged that Disney paid women less than their male counterparts. About 14,000 women are eligible to receive a part of the award. Disney will also hire a third party to perform a pay equity analysis and hire psychologists to provide gender bias training to executives.
The Miami Music Project has been awarded the 2024 Music Cities Award by Music Cities Events for Best Initiative to Support Diversity and Inclusion in Music. Miami Music Project was one of 300 organizations from 19 countries competing.
An Ipsos Public Affairs study has found broad support for the arts. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have attended cultural events in person, and 76 percent feel that the arts are personally important to them. They also support arts education and government funding of the arts, with 92 percent believing students should have access to the arts and 70 percent believing there should be some public funding for the arts.
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Disney was king of the box office in 2024. With the success of Inside Out 2, Deadpool and Wolverine, and Moana 2, the studio earned $2 billion in 2024. This is the seventh time since Disney has topped $2 billion, with the last time being in 2022.
A report by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers expects that audiovisual artists will see their income plummet by 20 percent in the next three to four years due to generative AI growth. The loss will be due to unauthorized use of their copyrighted material by artificial intelligence models as well as competition from AI-generated material. Tech companies, however, will profit from the growth of AI. The organization recommends adoption of regulatory framework to protect human creators.
Comcast plans to spin off its cable TV networks. Entertainment and news channels including MSNBC, CNBC, USA, SyFy, and others will be spun off into a new company while Peacock, Bravo, and the NBC broadcast network will remain with Comcast. The split is meant to better position Comcast for growth.
On the heals of Comcast’s announcement, Warner Bros. Discovery is also planning restructuring into linear and streaming units. The linear unit would include CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV, and the Food Network, while the streaming unit would include Max and the film studios.
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The Chicago Symphony has received $50 million from the Zell Family Foundation. The funds will help reduce the orchestra’s debt as well as fund musician and staff retirement benefits. Helen Zell was the first women member of the orchestra’s board of directors, and her late husband Sam was a real estate tycoon and former owner of the Tribune Co.
San Francisco Symphony chorus members have a new two-year contract thanks to an anonymous $4 million donation. The donation will establish a San Francisco Symphony Chorus Endowment Fund. Chorus members had staged a three-day strike in September to protest their wages still being below pre-pandemic levels.