Music festivals, summer vacations… and a pandemic? - Vested

Music festivals, summer vacations… and a pandemic?

The melody of the pandemic: The coronavirus has hit the music industry hard with live shows being cancelled and revenues plummeting. As per The World Economic Forum, a six-month shutdown will roughly cost the industry more than $10bn in sponsorships.

However, the industry is combating the ill-effects by hosting live online shows – Fortnite hosted a live rap concert that attracted nearly 30 million live viewers and highlighted new opportunities for cross-industry partnerships. Still, the crisis is expected to accelerate underlying trends in the industry.

Ottawans to the rescue: $30 million originally earmarked for attracting foreign visitors to Canada will be reallocated to promote domestic holiday travel in a bid to boost the hard hit travel industry. Tourism accounted for $100 billion and 1.8 million jobs in the pre-COVID19 Canadian economy.

The initiative aims to encourage provinces and territories to discover their “own backyard” as the country’s international borders largely remain closed. An additional $40 million is being allocated to tourism agencies in southern and northern Ontario as well as western Canada so they can adapt their operations to the pandemic as their normally busy summer season approaches, reports 680 News. A report by Destination Canada in April suggested the industry would see a decline in spending by a third compared to 2019 which could result in as many as 263.000 jobs in small and medium sized companies.

A gaining market: As the novel coronavirus took its toll on America and the globe, the stock market was expected to drop – and it did. However, a rebound soon surfaced which left many in fascination. Even while the Fed was pumping $1 trillion into the markets to stave off a shutdown, the effects were quite jarring considering the millions of people who were now negatively impacted by the pandemic.

“But even with most of the country shut down, almost 100,000 Americans were now dead, and some 38 million were out of work. So why was the stock market going up?” Read on more in this piece by The New York Times Magazine to get a detailed insight.

Solidarity in strength: As the coronavirus tightened its grip around Hong Kong, an appeal went out on social media to save Renee Cheung’s Dose, a “yellow” restaurant (meaning it openly supports Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement). Many people responded to the call, including senior citizens willing to pay more than their meals would normally cost, reports Bloomberg.

Dose is just one in a network of thousands of loosely affiliated businesses part of the “yellow economic circle”. Having adopted the color yellow as a nod to the American suffragists of the 1800s, establishments put up posters bearing protest slogans or depicting demonstrators in heroic poses. Many Hong Kongers choose to support these yellow businesses as a more subtle way to sympathize with the political movement than joining protests in the streets.

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