Readit NewsMinecraft (Mojang/Microsoft) have also made it clear that with them moving from OpenGL to Vulcan they're maintaining the ability for Minecraft to run on Mac as well as Windows/Linux, which is fantastic.
My bet is that the real different lies in mobile devices - iPads/tablets and phones are something that kids have more access to than laptops or desktops, and lots of people don't bother with parental controls.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money; about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
They are doing fine.
It was the RIAA that certified sales figures and awarded the Gold Record, Platinum, and Double Platinum prizes. There were various formats that records could be distributed in, but let's simplify to the "album" and the "single".
A single was typically one song on each side, A/B, and the A-side was considered desirable and marketable. Singles were purchased first by radio and dance DJs so they could be played individually on demand. There was a secondary retail market for singles, so consumers could purchase them as well.
The record album developed from a set of many 78 discs and coalesced into a single, Long-Play, 33.33 RPM record. Its capacity was about 6 songs per side, depending on their length.
There were various strategies for collecting songs into an album, such as a sampler of the artist's best, all their performances in a year's sessions, or even various artists. During the Beatles' fame, the "Concept Album" and "Album-Oriented Radio" (AOR) came into being.
So you could sell singles with one hit song, and this would propel the "B-side" into people's homes as well, so they may get curious, flip it over, and play the B-side, but B-sides were often considered lower quality, disposable, or less popular.
An album could sell great if it had one hit track. Recording companies would usually peel off the best tracks on an album to release as singles too, so that the radio play would promote the band and drive sales of the entire album. Many people who heard a hit song would be disappointed when they spent a lot of money on an album, only to find "filler" in-between, because the album format usually guaranteed a certain runtime or number of tracks.
When the Beatles produced "Sgt. Pepper" it was a foray into the "concept album" where all the tracks contributed to a cohesive idea or theme. This tended to enhance album sales over singles, because the single would be a peek into the larger "concept" and whet the public appetite for the whole thing.
When "Album-Oriented Rock" became popular, the DJs were freed from the constraints of playing "hit singles" in isolation and they were more encouraged to explore the unreleased tracks ("deep cuts") from albums, as well as tracks of longer duration that weren't appropriate for hit radio stations. In turn, AOR bands were under less pressure to release their "hit single" for every album and shielded from the phenomenon of "one-hit wonders" while instead their audience was, again, encouraged to invest in an entire album.
In the 1980s, a 45 RPM single may cost $1.50 or $2, while a full-length album was $8.99 to $12. The format switch to cassettes was sort of masterful, because for a while, the 2-track single format was abandoned, and consumers were kind of forced to get the entire album on cassette.
Yes I've ignored a lot of rough edges here, like the older 78s, and 8-track cassettes, and classical radio, but that was basically the landscape for pop artists, who needed hits but first and foremost, needed sales. The Beatles also capitalized on another enduring method of driving record sales: live performances and world tours. It wasn't called "The British Invasion" for nothing.
That came as a big relief as he always struggled to make money, but it's still not a thing that a lot of people get.
Where is this magical land with no homeless people?
I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.