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      Maya Rudolph’s Super Bowl Challenge: Make M&M’s Sweet Again

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      Unpopular companies and brands in trouble go with a strategy of hiring a likable celebrity and hoping for the best. But they might be better off with a puppy.There are 179 actresses who are better known than Maya Rudolph, including Whoopi Goldberg (third most famous), Lindsay Lohan (15th) and Gwyneth Paltrow (32nd). But Ms. Rudolph is more likable than those three and many others who are household names, according to the market research firm YouGov.So it made sense that M&M’s, the candy that has found itself in the cultural cross hairs, would enlist Ms. Rudolph as its corporate pitchwoman and make her the star of a commercial scheduled to air during Super Bowl LVII on Sunday.Nearly 75 percent of the people who have heard of Ms. Rudolph said they liked her, and her popularity was on an upswing in the fourth quarter of 2022, YouGov reported in its most recent ranking. Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Paltrow each came in around 55 percent, and Ms. Lohan at 39 percent.Ms. Rudolph, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 2000 to 2007, is likable enough to make the multibillionaire she plays seem down to earth on the AppleTV+ series “Loot.” She managed something similar more than a decade ago in “Bridesmaids,” winning over audiences as a bride-to-be who develops bride-zilla tendencies. Now she will attempt to do the same for a candy brand in trouble.M&M’s got some blowback from cable pundits and social media warriors after it made cosmetic changes to its long-running cartoon characters. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others accused the brand of “woke” advertising, arguing that the “spokescandies” had lost their sex appeal. A point of contention was that one of the cartoon candies had replaced her high-heeled go-go boots with sneakers — and at times it was hard to tell if M&M’s was trolling right-wing commentators with its promotional stunts or if it was the other way around.“M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Mr. Carlson said on his show more than a year ago. He was at it again last month, saying, “The green M&M got her boots back but apparently is now a lesbian, maybe, and there is also a plus-sized obese purple M&M.”In the commercial to be shown during the second quarter of Sunday’s game, Ms. Rudolph will try to calm the brouhaha. (A spokeswoman for M&M’s “Chief of Fun” declined to comment for this article.)Marketers, especially those trying to create an appealing image for unlikable industries like pharmaceuticals and airlines, know that a bit of charm can do a lot to disarm doubters and critics. In addition to Ms. Rudolph, other “Saturday Night Live” alumni have brought some warmth to companies that could certainly use it. Amy Poehler, whose affability set the tone for the sweetly humorous sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” has taken on the challenge of making a cable, internet and phone company seem sympathetic in a series of commercials for Xfinity. Cecily Strong, who left “Saturday Night Live” in December after a 10-year run, has lent her services to Verizon.Rashida Jones, a onetime regular on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office,” manages to make banking seem almost fun in commercials for Citi. Jennifer Coolidge, an endearingly kooky addition to the America’s Sweetheart club thanks to her performance on “The White Lotus,” was featured in two Super Bowl commercials last year: one for Uber Eats, which had faced criticism for its treatment of pandemic-shocked restaurants and gig workers, and another for FanDuel, part of a growing sports betting industry that has drawn worries about gambling addiction.Put on a happy face: Cecily Strong, Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones and Jennifer Coolidge have all appeared in commercials for brands that needed help with their public images.But companies can sometimes make a misstep in their attempts to capitalize on the amiability of certain celebrities. In 1984, Burger King introduced “Mr. Rodney,” a character based on Fred Rogers, the esteemed host of the PBS children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Wearing a cardigan, Mr. Rodney addressed the camera in a gentle voice: “Hi, neighbors. Today’s new word is something McDonald’s does to every burger: Let’s call it ‘McFrying.’ Can you say that?”One call from the real Mr. Rogers got the commercial bounced from the airwaves. “Mr. Rogers is one guy you don’t want to mess with, as beloved as he is,” an apologetic Burger King spokesman said at the time.Beer companies may not need the assistance of likable celebrities as much as banks and phone companies, but Anheuser-Busch InBev is taking no chances on Sunday, with several Super Bowl commercials, including one starring Serena Williams.Likability “is paramount” in the choices of corporate spokespeople, said Shana Barry, the head of celebrity, entertainment and influencers at Anheuser-Busch. “You want to associate with a talent that is having a good time,” she said. “We want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the ads and that you can connect with them onscreen.”Social scientists who have delved into the mysteries of likability point to the mere exposure effect (sometimes known as the familiarity principle), which posits that people tend to like something the more they are exposed to it. They also cite emotional contagion, a phenomenon in which people often sync up with the emotional state of others in their orbit, meaning that viewers may get a lift when they see someone having a good time in a TV commercial. And a 2021 academic study found that experts who testify in civil and criminal trials have an easier time persuading jurors if they are perceived as likable.“The essential elements are true no matter who you are,” said Natalie Anne Kerr, a psychology professor at James Madison University. “Companies can manipulate the situation to promote liking and connection to their ambassadors, especially if they’re actors who can intentionally choose to play the role of a likable person.”Keanu Reeves appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace.But being seen as trying too hard to be liked can backfire, Dr. Kerr said. Truly likable people show vulnerability (this is known as the pratfall effect) and are relatable (the similarity attraction effect). See Keanu Reeves, who appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace, doing a motorcycle stunt while reciting the words of the 1983 cult hit “Adventures in Success” as the track played in the background. Quirkiness may also be an asset, Dr. Kerr added, noting that one of her favorite actors is Nick Offerman, who is known for playing gruff but kind loners, as well as for his good-natured appreciation of carpentry and his wife.Tone deafness can destroy likability, said Mitch Prinstein, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina and the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association.“We always tell elementary school kids that they can’t walk up to a bunch of kids playing Legos and say, ‘That’s stupid; let’s play with trucks,’” said Dr. Prinstein, the author of “Popular.” “You can include your truck with the Legos, but you can’t just disregard the group norm.“The same thing applies to adults,” he continued, “whether you’re leading a boardroom or you’re a celebrity. You have to read the room.”Public figures may have a tougher time connecting with audiences when they become so famous and wealthy that they lose touch with everyday experiences, he added. An out-of-touch star is rarely likable, especially at a time when fans have grown accustomed to joining their favorite entertainers on social media as they document a date night or grocery run.Rather than relying on big stars to pitch products, some companies are tapping TikTok tastemakers and Instagram nanoinfluencers to chase niche groups. “Brands are really looking for authenticity, for somebody that can talk about the brand in a way that others might not be able to,” said Adma Ortega, who handles celebrity and influencer relations for the Wieden & Kennedy ad agency in New York. “They want to talk to a specific audience, because you can’t talk to everyone anymore.”Some companies break through the noise by ignoring likability altogether, as Samsung did in building ads around the reality TV star Christine Quinn, who once said of her role on “Selling Sunset”: “I love being the villain, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”Deciding on a spokesperson is increasingly complicated, involving metrics like social media follower counts, audience demographics, algorithmic calculations including the Klear Score, the Aspire authenticity score and E-Score polls. After the Super Bowl, Anheuser-Busch and other companies will study rankings like Ad Meter and the Super Clios to see how viewers reacted to their commercials.Some firms still use the Q Score, a nearly 60-year-old measure of appeal that costs $1,750 per name. Clients get a detailed breakdown of sentiment among different demographics, and can also buy a full work-up of more than 1,200 personalities or a ranking of celebrities customized by their appeal to a particular audience. The score is used by ad agencies, movie studios, TV networks, lawyers and estates, said Steven Levitt, the president of the Q Scores Company.The “Q” stands for “quotient” — a reference to how the rating is calculated, by dividing the percentage of respondents who say a celebrity is one of their favorite personalities by the percentage of those who have heard of the person. Another part of the rating evaluates unpopularity. The highest score ever, a 71 in 1985, went to Bill Cosby; nowadays, celebrities rarely score above the low 40s, Mr. Levitt said. Ms. Rudolph’s score is 19, three points above the average for actresses, he said.Ad makers often ignore Q Scores in favor of gut instinct, Mr. Levitt added. “A lot of decisions are not based on data,” he said. “They’re based on creative appeal, or the strength of an executive to outshoot and overpower subordinates and say, ‘No, I think this is the way to go.’”But celebrity likability may not last. It takes only one slap at the Oscars, one rude complaint about an omelet, or one too many reports that a nice talk show host with a penchant for dancing was perhaps not so nice after all.Which may be why some of the most popular Super Bowl commercials of recent years have had no recognizable celebrities front and center, according to an analysis by the measurement firm iSpot.TV. Last year, the most likable ad featured a variety of wild animals grooving to the 1987 Salt-N-Pepa hit “Push It” after sampling some Flamin’ Hot Doritos.And the stars of the most likable spot on record, a Budweiser commercial from 2014? Clydesdale horses and a golden retriever puppy. More

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      Football Gave Us a Carrie Underwood-Based Solution to Existential Dread

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      Carrie Underwood’s musical intro to “Sunday Night Football” offers a dazzling gift — even if you’re not a fan of the game.To an astronomer, the longest night of the year occurs once in each hemisphere, as the earth makes its ponderous revolution around the sun. For regular people — people with everyday problems, who don’t live in a fancy observatory surrounded by brass astrolabes — the winter solstice is a weekly event happening every Sunday. Sunday evenings are black holes from which no hope escapes; a time of rumination on the failures of the past seven days, and pre-emptive haunting by fiascos to come. Yet the universe has been known to attenuate misery with fleeting comforts: the sensation of incredible warmth that overtakes a body dying of hypothermia, for instance. And to those souls mired in Sunday-night gloom, it offers a dazzling gift: Carrie Underwood doing the “Sunday Night Football” song on NBC.If unshackled from the bonds of terrestrial experience, what might Carrie Underwood experience?This song is not one song but many songs. Since the show’s debut in 2006, its intro has been updated every year, and, within a given season, the song mutates constantly: Each week incorporates a different rhyming line tailored to the current matchup. A schedule may announce a contest between the Colts and the Cowboys; only Carrie Underwood reveals if this promises to be a “righteous showdown” or a “nasty showdown,” or that the teams are “about to throw down” or are “breaking new ground,” and so on. According to representatives from NBC Sports, Underwood annually records 85 permutations of this line back to back in a single session.The “Sunday Night Football” song extols not the thrill of football, nor the value of sport, but the highly specific ouroboric pleasure of turning on NBC to watch “Sunday Night Football” on NBC on Sunday night. The most frequently recurring version of the song, “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” is set to the tune of Joan Jett’s 1988 single “I Hate Myself For Loving You.” I do not enjoy football, or any sport other than Olympic women’s gymnastics finals when the United States is in first place. My comprehension of the rules is nil and my desire to learn them would have to be represented by a negative number. Nor am I a fan — or nonfan — of Carrie Underwood. Yet, when I hear the first word of the song explode from her confident lungs — “Oh,” pronounced “Hohawhunhohhuhawnhohn” — my consciousness abruptly recedes. Mechanically, I sprint to the living room and stare, bewitched, until the segment’s conclusion.The “Sunday Night Football” music video is beautiful to behold, each incarnation a novel response to the question: If unshackled from the bonds of terrestrial physics, what might Carrie Underwood experience? Answers include: strutting in a dress of rhinestone chain mail through a liminal space filled with floating videos of football fans; calmly standing on a platform that shoots her skyward through hoops of light at a thousand miles a minute; the stage at the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, the site of her residency, “Reflection: The Las Vegas Residency,” magically opening up onto a football stadium where approximately seven million fans, packed with atomic density, are losing their everloving minds to a song about “Sunday Night Football.”The “Sunday Night Football” song is most likely the theme song familiar to more Americans than any other, because more Americans watch “Sunday Night Football” than anything else on weekly television. In fact, of the 30 most-watched U.S. television broadcasts of all time, 29 are football games. There might be a need to gin up excitement for “Sunday Night Football” if, somehow, every week, “Sunday Night Football” were scheduled to air directly opposite the original 1983 broadcast of the series finale of “M*A*S*H” — the only nonfootball program to appear in the all-time Top 30 most watched. Under normal conditions, however, highlighting the fact that a football game is about to be televised for the American TV audience is an act equivalent to reciting the daily specials to a starving man.It is this unnecessity — the fact that it exists merely for its own sake — that makes the segment so moving. I don’t mean to imply that the opening sequence could compare favorably to, say, a sunset, which is likewise “beautiful” and “capable of reproducing itself in infinite variations”; I mean to say that outright. The tremble-inducing allure of the “Sunday Night Football” song surpasses nature’s awesome generative capacity. It is a spectacle that could only be conjured from a colossal amount of money.Tripp Dixon, the NBC Sports “VP of Creative” tasked with supervising this visual triumph, likens the sequence to an “airlock” designed to safely transition viewers from the grim reality of everyday existence to the high-octane fantasia of “Sunday Night Football.” In exchange for submission to the spectacular, “Sunday Night Football” promises a respite from all concerns.The sly genius of American football is that its accouterments — Super Bowl ads with feature-film budgets, stupefyingly cutting-edge bumper graphics — replicate, even or especially for those with no interest in football, the draw of football itself: a celebration of human aptitude and a diversion of attention away from anything more important. Through judicious application of Carrie Underwood and C.G.I. technology, the “Sunday Night Football” song offers a brief yet total respite from the horror of Sunday night.Caity Weaver is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. More

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      Ginny Redington Dawes, Composer of Memorable Ad Jingles, Dies at 77

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      She collaborated on the melodies for signature commercials that sang the praises of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other brands.Ginny Redington Dawes, a songwriter whose compositions included memorable advertising jingles like the chipper McDonald’s declaration “You, You’re the One” and Coca-Cola’s boast that “Coke Is It,” died on Dec. 31 in Manhattan. She was 77.Her companion and only immediate survivor, James McCullar, said the cause was complications of hepatic cirrhosis.Ms. Dawes never became well known herself, but she helped maintain or boost the popularity of the products she promoted. And she insinuated infectious tunes into the nation’s repertoire that Americans whistled and hummed as much as the songs played on Top 40 radio.She hooked listeners with melodically and rhythmically catchy jingles that accompanied slogans for everything from Tide detergent to Hartz’s tick and flea-fighting pet collars, Kit Kat candy bars and Johnson’s baby powder.“When I’ve got a really great lyric,” she told Charles Osgood of CBS in a 1977 television interview, “I put a very simple melody to it.”Ms. Dawes started writing the music and lyrics for commercials in 1975 after the firm of Sidney E. Woloshin — who composed the original McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” jingle in 1971 — was commissioned to do one for the chain’s new “You, You’re the One” advertising campaign.Mr. Woloshin invited about 20 jingle writers to submit proposals. Ms. Dawes produced the winning tune. Adopted by the ad agency Needham, Harper & Steers, it was suddenly everywhere.In 1979, she married a jingle-writing competitor, Thomas W. Dawes, whose credits included Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” and “7Up, the Uncola.”They later collaborated on the music for, among other campaigns, American Airlines’ “Something Special in the Air” and the familiar “Coke Is It.” Mr. Dawes died in 2007.The jingle that underscored Coke’s claim to be “It,” introduced in 1982, was described as a “piece of dynamite” by John F. Bergin, the worldwide director of the Coke account at the McCann-Erickson agency.While David Ogilvy, a founder of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, was credited with the credo “If you don’t have anything to say, sing it,” Mr. Bergin argued that the musical accompaniment to the Coke commercial was anything but an afterthought. If soda drinkers paused to parse the ambiguity of what “It” was, the tune was intended to define the term and embellish it.“It’s like a football fight song,” Mr. Bergin told The New York Times. “Usually you get a languid ballad. We were looking for a big, bold sound, and a big, bold statement. This isn’t an ipsy-pipsy drink, and the music says that loud and clear.”The song, composed by Ms. Dawes and arranged by her husband, was one of 18 jingles and 36 proposed slogans presented to Coca-Cola executives to succeed “Have a Coke and a Smile.”The music and copy were tested separately in consumer focus groups and individual interviews until the agency and company reached a consensus that “Coke is it” was, indeed, it.Ms. Dawes also wrote pop songs, including “Hurtin’ Song,” recorded by Eddy Arnold, and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (written with Rose Marie McCoy), recorded by Sarah Vaughan.She began her musical career as a singer, to glowing reviews.When she appeared in 1975 at the Coriander, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, John S. Wilson of The Times called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.”Virginia Mary Redington was born on May 13, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bay Ridge section of the borough. Her father, Joseph, was a naval architect. Her mother, May (O’Brien) Redington, was a teacher.Virginia attended Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn and graduated from St. Josephs College, also in Brooklyn, with a degree in English in 1966.She and Mr. Dawes — a founder of the folk-pop group the Cyrkle, best known for its 1966 hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers — married in 1979 and, merging their talents, formed TwinStar Music to produce jinglesThe couple also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Talk of the Town,” a show about the fabled literary round table at the Algonquin Hotel, whose members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. First produced in 2004, it ran nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater before it moved as a cabaret show to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.Reviewing the show for Bloomberg News, John Simon wrote that its music and wit matched “the infectious energy and sophistication of the real-life luminaries it is based on.”Ms. Dawes was also a collector of antique jewelry and the author, with her husband (who took the photographs) and others, of several books on the subject, including “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” (1988), with Corinne Davidov, and “Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830” (2007), with Ms. Dawes’s fellow collector Olivia Collings. More

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      Movie Trailers Keep Tweaking Well-Known Songs. The Tactic Is Working.

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      Composers are increasingly in demand for trailerization — reworking existing tracks by artists including Kate Bush, Nirvana and Kendrick Lamar to maximize their impact in film and TV previews.David James Rosen’s work has been streamed on YouTube hundreds of millions of times. He’s played a crucial role in some of pop culture’s biggest recent moments. But few people outside of the space where the entertainment and marketing industries overlap know his name.As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.He married vocals and motifs from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to a thunderous version of the “Stranger Things” theme in the lead-up to the second volume of the show’s fourth season. He intertwined the Nigerian singer Tems’s cover of “No Woman No Cry” with Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” in the teaser for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” symbolizing the meeting of the franchise’s future and its legacy. He put a sinister singe on Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” for the diabolical doll thriller “M3GAN.” He added cosmic drama to Elton John’s classic rock staple “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” for the upcoming “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”As potential viewers are inundated with an ever-growing number of options, studios have limited chances to build anticipation for their projects. At the same time, technological advances have made it easier than ever for products to stand out. “People want their film to have its own identity,” Rosen said in an interview at a Los Angeles coffee shop. “The genie’s out of the bottle as far as the limitless ability to customize something for your film. Clients, studios, agencies, whatever, they all know that and like to take advantage of it.”Rosen spent his 20s playing guitar in the New Jersey band the Parlor Mob. After moving to L.A. in 2014, he got a job as the in-house composer at a trailer house — the specialized production companies behind these promos. Three years later, he co-founded Totem, a music library that creates custom tracks for trailers. Much of Rosen’s output is original compositions, but the ones that get the most attention are his overhauls.“Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said. “Maybe it needs to feel more epic or more emotional, or maybe it needs to feel subtler with things pulled away.”“I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs,” Rosen said of his custom work for trailers.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesTrailerization is a relatively new term and the distinctions within it are malleable. There are reimaginations, which are usually instrumental covers by composers. There are overlays, where elements are added to a song in varying degrees. Then there are remixes, where the source material is distinctly altered, often to shift the context.Some distinguish between remixes and overlays by what the composer has to play with. If there’s a full set of stems — the separated digital parts that comprise a song — it’s a remix. If stems aren’t available, it’s an overlay.Occasionally composers will be asked to create “invisible overlays,” where they make adjustments that are imperceptible to most listeners but nudge a song toward a more wide-screen sound.The trailerization process is now so common that even when a trailer uses the film’s original score, it too will be adjusted. “Trailers are a mini version of the movie,” said Cato, the one-named composer whose credits include performing a system update on Vangelis for the “Blade Runner 2049” trailer and giving Guns N’ Roses an anguished-turned-pulverizing remix for Jason Momoa’s Netflix revenge film “Sweet Girl.”“You have to suck people into the theater and tell a story in two-and-a-half minutes,” Cato added. “That is so intense and builds so quickly that most music written for the actual movie will be way too long and drawn out.”IN THE PAST, trailers often relied on the scores of previously released films, but that practice has basically become verboten. Starting in the late 1970s, the composer John Beal pioneered original scores for trailers, but that required a recording studio full of musicians, making it a costly, resource-heavy endeavor. Today, with developments in software, it’s easier than ever to simulate those sounds.“I could sit at my computer at home and you wouldn’t know that there wasn’t a 100-piece orchestra there,” Rosen said. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”Many point to the trailer for “The Social Network,” from 2010 — which featured a Belgian women’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep” — as the origin of what became the trailerization trend. Its success incited a deluge of trailers using slow and sad covers of well-known songs, usually featuring female vocalists. Recent examples include Liza Anne’s version of “Dreams” by the Cranberries for “Aftersun” and Bellsaint’s interpretation of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” for the second season of the “Chucky” TV series.Sanaz Lavaedian, the senior vice president of music for the trailer house Mocean, said that when she entered the industry in 2011, there was still a lot of resistance from artists who didn’t want their music used for commercial purposes. Covers provided a workaround. Now, as more musicians are struggling to make a living, they’re often more open to trailers not just using their music but modifying it.“There were so many bands that didn’t think licensing was cool, so they never let us do it,” Lavaedian said. “Now they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re going to make half a million dollars on this? Nevermind.’”Many high profile trailerizations are applied to songs that are decades old: Remixes and overlays allow the trailers to tap into the nostalgia evoked by the original. “If we were able to remix an Elton John song or a Beatles song, these are iconic artists,” Lavaedian said. “The second you hear their voice, you know who it is, and there’s a lot of weight in that. More weight than if it were a cover.”The composer Bryce Miller’s big breakthrough came in 2019 with the “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” trailer, which featured his custom orchestral rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” atop images of kaiju carnage. His subsequent credits include a modernization of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” for “House of Gucci,” an orchestral blend of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the “Addams Family Theme” for “Wednesday” and a haunting overlay for Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” in “The Batman” trailer.“As soon as I can get rid of dated-sounding guitars and drums, I can build a more contemporary production that is pulling from more pop music sounds,” Miller said. “Older recordings sonically are a little thin and lack the heft that so many contemporary songs have.”Unique remixes began appearing in trailers going back to the mid-2010s, but it wasn’t until the one for Jordan Peele’s 2019 film “Us” that studios and audiences began to really take notice. In the fresh interpretation, with its piercing strings and moody atmospherics, a celebratory weed rap by the Oakland duo Luniz became deeply unsettling.“Every once in a while we get one of those game-changer trailers,” Lavaedian said. The “Us” trailer “is taking a song and deconstructing it down to its bones and then constructing it again to do what that film needed it to do. It was kind of groundbreaking.”MARK WOOLLEN, THE founder of the trailer house Mark Woollen & Associates, specializes in award-season films and was responsible for that transformative “Social Network” trailer. New York magazine once called him “the uncontested auteur of the trailer era.”In a phone interview, Woollen noted that in contemporary trailers, omniscient narration has largely disappeared (that means no more hackneyed “In a world …” setups) and there’s less dialogue from the film. Trailers “can be more impressionistic and elliptical in their storytelling,” he said. “It’s more about creating a feeling in a lot of the work.”As a result, the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”For Amazon’s recent love triangle “My Policeman,” Woollen used Cat Power’s “Sea of Love,” which has become a romantic favorite among aging millennials. Though Cat Power’s original interpretation was stripped down to just the singer Chan Marshall’s voice and strums on an autoharp, Woollen had a composer overlay swelling strings as the drama became more fraught.Rosen with two of his semi-modular analog synths. “Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesBeyond providing the vibes, a song is often selected for a trailer because the lyrics convey the film’s narrative themes. Woollen didn’t just select “Sea of Love” because it is mysterious and seductive. He was equally guided by the refrain “I want to tell you how much I love you” and the ambiguousness of who that “you” might be.In Marvel’s “The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” trailer, as the heroes realize the size of the predicament they’ve gotten themselves into, the sound design emphasizes Elton John singing, “I should have stayed on the farm/I should have listened to my old man.”Deciding which song a trailer uses and how it’s employed can involve studio marketing executives, the filmmakers, the team at the trailer house and the composer. A trailer’s creation can take years and is often covered by restrictive nondisclosure agreements, preventing the people behind it from discussing the details of making it, even after it has been released.Because the material is so protected, the musicians rarely see the images that will be included in the trailer. Instead they have to rely on a music supervisor or creative director at a trailer house to guide them through inception and multiple rounds of revisions. “We’re literally dealing with billions of dollars in unreleased assets,” Lavaedian said of the footage from the films. “There’s no way we can send that to a composer.”UNLESS YOU KNOW where to look on the internet, the pieces made by trailer composers are largely uncredited, and sometimes contractually so. Trailerizations are created “to live exclusively in the trailer,” Rosen said. “They serve as a piece of marketing.”But that may be changing.When the agency Trailer Park approached Miller about doing a trailerization for the first volume of the fourth season of “Stranger Things,” he was told the general plot and tone of the episodes. He’d long wanted to do something with Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and it turned out the song was on the agency’s shortlist as well.After spending months on his ominous remix, it made it to the final stages of the approval process where the original musicians had to sign off. Steve Perry, the song’s singer, loved it and came to Miller’s studio to help construct an extended remix. Then he got Netflix to release both versions on the official soundtrack, with Miller’s name attached.Miller called Perry inspiring and a joy to work with. “He’s also like a runaway train. As soon as we finished ‘Stranger Things,’ he’s like, ‘What are we doing next?’” The pair collaborated again on a trailerization of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” for the Hulu series “Welcome to Chippendales.”Where will trailerization at large head next? Recently, there’s been an interest in 1990s alternative rock hits, with remixes of Spacehog and the Toadies appearing in trailers for “Guardian of the Galaxy Volume 3” and “The Midnight Club.” In the promo for “Babylon,” the team of composers known as Superhuman created a Jazz Age-influenced interpretation of David Bowie’s “Fame” that’s almost as nutty as the film itself.With decades of material to work with, Rosen hopes the trend continues. “There’s more opportunity for creativity from me and other people,” he said. “I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs.” More

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      in Music

      How to Mint a Holiday Hit

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      Grabbing a piece of the lucrative holiday market requires planning, luck and the occasional battle with a seasoned superstar like Mariah Carey.Last December, while the popular a cappella group Pentatonix was on tour with its fifth holiday album, the ensemble’s five members gathered backstage around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas for 2022.High on the list: a sixth Christmas album.“Holidays Around the World,” Pentatonix’s latest, joins a holiday release wave that gets more crowded every year. Alicia Keys, Sam Smith, Lizzo, the Backstreet Boys and the duos of Dolly Parton-Jimmy Fallon and David Foster-Katharine McPhee are all out with new seasonal albums or singles, vying for radio time and the most coveted real estate of all: plum placement on the streaming services’ big playlists.Holiday music has long been a big business; back in 2018, Billboard estimated it at $177 million in the United States alone, and since then the overall recorded music business has grown by well over 50 percent.But streaming has supercharged it. Listeners now have easy access to decades’ worth of material, leaving contemporary artists to compete against not just each other but also all the hits of the past, by Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley or Mariah Carey. This week, streaming helped send Carey’s 28-year-old “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, beaten only by Taylor Swift’s latest.A vast audience awaits the victors: In the week leading up to Christmas last year, holiday songs accounted for 10 percent of all music streams in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. And on Christmas Eve, Amazon Music received 35 million voice requests around the world for holiday songs through devices like the company’s Alexa-enabled smart speakers.The a cappella group Pentatonix has made holiday music a core part of its identity and business.Jason Szenes/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the standard strategies of pop streaming can help get an edge, music executives and marketers say. Front-load a song’s hook to deter skips. Tee up plenty of “features” — track-by-track collaborators, the more famous the better — to invite fan cults.Pentatonix’s new album, for example, includes Meghan Trainor, the classical pianist Lang Lang and Lea Salonga, who has been the singing voice for Disney princesses, alongside guests less known by mainstream American audiences, like the eclectic Los Angeles group La Santa Cecilia and the Indian vocalist Shreya Ghoshal. The group said it created a detailed spreadsheet to track all the cultures, songs and artists it wanted to include.Media tie-ins also help. Last week, Disney Plus released “Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays,” a special in which the group pokes gentle fun at its specialty. In the show, the members find themselves stumped in a recording studio, having already done every Christmas song in the book. So, while locked in a magical break room with candy cane décor (hey, it’s Disney), they sift through fan mail from around the planet and arrive at their concept: a multicultural holiday album with far-flung collaborators.“There’s a sense of spirituality in Christmas music,” Mitch Grassi, one of the Pentatonix singers, said in a recent interview. “It creates an atmosphere of togetherness and community, acceptance and warmth.”Yet holiday music can also be the most unforgivingly conformist side of the industry, in which old songs and styles dominate the market and anything new or unorthodox risks being buried under decades of tinsel.In an interview, Foster, the golden-touch pop producer who has worked on hit Christmas albums by Celine Dion, Michael Bublé and Josh Groban, relayed what he has learned as the three rules of the game.No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”Foster stressed the importance of the first rule, noting that violating it could sink any holiday album. “In general, people want to hear the old songs,” he said. “They don’t want to hear a songwriter like me write a song about sitting by the fireplace, Santa’s coming down the chimney, there’s snow outside.…” He trailed off.“Christmas Songs,” Foster’s seven-track mini-album with McPhee, his wife, is an illustration of this approach, featuring swinging pop-jazz takes on “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and others (though it does have one original, “My Grown-Up Christmas List”).To capture attention on streaming playlists, record labels start their work early. Lyn Koppe, the executive vice president of global catalog at Sony Music, said the company begins marketing songs in the summer, seeding search engines and prepping their own playlists. During the holiday season, Sony — whose thick portfolio of evergreens includes Presley’s “Blue Christmas,” Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” and Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — runs a global data dashboard tracking songs’ performance.David Foster, left, and Katharine McPhee released a mini album called “Christmas Songs.”Paul Archuleta/Getty Images“It’s not like we just wake up and go, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas,’” Koppe said. “We’ve been thinking for many, many months.”For current artists, the biggest challenge is turning a new song into a classic. In the old days, that meant having a catchy music video, pushing the song at radio and hoping that it stuck. Now the process can still take years, but it involves TikTok virality, perhaps a movie usage and, most important of all, user attention on streaming playlists, which can translate into return appearances year after year.“Getting on key algorithmic stations is really everything,” said Andrew Woloz of the music company Concord, who pointed to the version of “Carol of the Bells” by the crossover violinist Lindsey Stirling, which was released five years ago but has stuck around on TikTok, giving it an edge on current playlists.Relatively few new songs from the streaming era have become anything like classics. One of them is Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” from 2014, which Karen Pettyjohn, the principal music programmer for Amazon Music, added to its giant Holiday Favorites station last year — which sprinkles some new tracks in with the old chestnuts — and saw it “cut through” very well.“Ariana’s fans are aging with her,” Pettyjohn said. “It becomes a classic to them.”Grande’s song gets a small boost on TikTok, where it has been used in 371,000 videos — peanuts compared to Carey’s smash, which has been used on TikTok 12 million times and racked up more than 1.2 billion streams on Spotify alone.The enduring popularity of Carey’s song is one of the great phenomena of the contemporary music business. In 2019, after a yearslong push by Carey and her label that involved a children’s book, a new music video and numerous live Christmas shows, “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, 25 years after its initial release. (It topped that chart again in 2020 and 2021, and has a good shot of doing so again this year.)But Carey’s dominance in another arena became the subject of a legal fight this year, after she attempted to trademark the term “Queen of Christmas,” not only for music but also for fragrances, clothing, dog collars, hot chocolate and dozens of other products.Her only challenger was Elizabeth Chan, who a decade ago gave up a marketing job at Condé Nast to devote herself to writing holiday music, and who has called herself — and titled one of her albums — the Queen of Christmas.In a recent interview at her small home office in Lower Manhattan, which she keeps decorated for Christmas year-round, Chan said the trademark was a threat to her livelihood. While strictly D.I.Y., Chan has built a full-time business making holiday music, releasing 12 albums to date, including her latest, “12 Months of Christmas.” She would no longer be able to use the term “Queen of Christmas” if Carey’s application was approved.The costs of litigating a trademark can be huge, but Chan’s attorney, Louis W. Tompros, said his firm, WilmerHale, took the case pro bono because they viewed Carey’s application as an example of “classic trademark bullying.” Carey never responded to Chan’s opposition, and on Nov. 15, the Trademark Office’s trial and appeal board issued a judgment by default, denying Carey the trademark. Chan, and anyone else, is free to call themselves Queen of Christmas.Chris Chambers, a representative of Carey, said in a statement that the “world at large” began calling her “Queen of Christmas,” and added, “Ms. Carey wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and says anyone who wants to call themselves a queen can freely do so, anything else is petty and unfestive.” (Had her application been successful, other performers, like Chan, would not have been able to.)Chan said she had no choice but to fight the trademark, but still framed the result as suited to the holiday.“Everyone in this business wants to tell you what’s not possible because they don’t know what’s possible,” she said.“Not only do I want to leave a great Christmas song behind, I want to leave that lesson behind,” Chan added. “That’s Christmas too — the season of perpetual hope.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s Smash ‘Midnights’ Sells More Than 1 Million in a Week

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      The singer-songwriter’s latest album is a blockbuster, debuting with the biggest weekly total for any LP since Adele’s “25” in 2015.Taylor Swift’s latest album was always going to be a hit.She’s Taylor Swift, first of all. And “Midnights,” which was released on Oct. 21, is her first new pop album since 2019, after an extremely productive couple of years in which she released two indie-folk-style LPs and two rerecorded versions of old records.Yet even for a superstar like Swift, the scale of her latest success has stunned the music industry.In its first week out, “Midnights” had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years, since Adele’s “25” arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million (and with the full album then absent from streaming).On the Hot 100 chart for songs, Swift benefits from her strong streaming numbers, currently occupying every spot in the Top 10, a Billboard first.Streaming has so rewritten the math of the music business that in recent years it had become practically an article of faith that no record would ever again cross a time-honored threshold of blockbuster sales: moving more than a million copies in a single week, as artists like ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Eminem did multiple times in the old days. The last record to hit this mark was Swift’s “Reputation,” in 2017. Since then, both Swift’s “Lover” (2019) and Adele’s “30” (2021) failed to reach the magic seven digits.But “Midnights” has easily crossed that line, and not only in “equivalent sales,” a composite number used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways fans consume music now, counting streaming, sales and track downloads. Of the 1,578,000 “equivalents” for “Midnights,” 1,140,000 were copies sold as a complete package — in other words, purchases of the album as a whole. It is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least a million copies in a single week, and no album by any artist has had better weekly sales since “Reputation” opened with 1,216,000.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.How did she do it?That is always the question for Swift, who is not only one of the most vital creative forces in 21st-century pop but also perhaps its greatest marketer. In a year of many disappointing releases, with albums by Drake, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar and other big names posting surprisingly low numbers, Swift promoted her release cleverly online, with cheeky TikTok videos and drip-drip revelations, and advertised an array of product variations that got fans reaching for their credit cards.“She can create an event record,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “She’s done that with ‘Midnights.’”The biggest factor ended up being physical media. Those formats, like CD, vinyl and cassette, now make up just 10 percent of all recorded music revenue in the United States — streaming is 84 percent — but they are often embraced by fans eager to own something tangible by their favorite artists, and can play an important role in a new record’s chart position.The standard CD and LP versions of “Midnights” came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-colored vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD. Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after “Midnights” came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven extra tracks. In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.It worked. “Midnights” sold 575,000 copies on vinyl, along with 395,000 on CD and even 10,000 on cassette. There were also 161,000 copies of the album sold as a digital download.Collectible CD and vinyl versions are nothing new. K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink have been releasing new albums with elaborate CD packaging for years. Two weeks ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released a new album, “Return of the Dream Canteen,” in 10 vinyl variations.Yet Swift’s success with the strategy is as extraordinary as you might expect. Her 575,000 vinyl sales are the most any album has sold on that format since at least 1991, when SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, began keeping reliable data on music sales. It is more than three times as many as the previous record, when Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” notched 182,000 vinyl copies in May.The success of “Midnights” is not just a vinyl or CD phenomenon. It also had 549 million streams, the third-best weekly total for any album. Drake has the two best showings in that metric, with “Scorpion” (746 million in 2018) and “Certified Lover Boy” (744 million, 2021). So far this year, the only other album to come close was Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened with 357 million streams back in May. (For now, “Un Verano” is still the year’s biggest album, with the equivalent of 2.9 million sales, largely from streaming.)“Midnights,” of course, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart. It is Swift’s 11th album to reach the peak, tying her with Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Drake. Only Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19) have had more titles at No. 1.Also this week, Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano” slips to No. 3 in its 25th week out — its first time dipping lower than second place, including 13 times at No. 1.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” now in its 94th week out — all but one in the Top 10 — holds at No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5. More

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      Kanye West, Dropped by CAA, Makes Adidas and Corporate Partners Squirm

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      The antisemitic outbursts and provocations by the artist now known as Ye have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Update: Adidas said on Tuesday that it is cutting ties with Kanye West.Kanye West had already been burning bridges in the music industry. He was disinvited from performing at the Grammy Awards last spring after erratic behavior. He withdrew from headlining this year’s Coachella festival just over a week before it began. His last album was released not on streaming services, but exclusively on a proprietary $200 speaker device.This month Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, came under fire for making a series of antisemitic remarks and wearing a shirt with a slogan associated with white supremacists, putting some of his fashion-related businesses — which appear to be more lucrative these days than his musical ventures — in jeopardy.It has become a make-or-break moment for his career, and raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas, the German sneaker giant whose collaboration with Ye’s company, Yeezy, has been estimated to be worth billions, has said that their partnership was “under review” — prompting the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “what more do you need to review?” It appeared that Adidas continued to sell his products, though. (On Tuesday, after this article was published, Adidas announced it would cut ties with Ye.) Ye ended his Yeezy Gap partnership last month, before the latest controversies erupted, but in recent days Gap sent out promotional emails for the Yeezy Gap hoodie.There have been some signs that the fashion industry is distancing itself from Ye, as the former halo effect of his celebrity turned into an Achilles’ heel after he appeared at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month in a shirt that read “White Lives Matter,” and then went on to make antisemitic remarks on social media and in a series of interviews, posting on Twitter that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”Balenciaga, whose fashion show Ye opened in Paris this month with a surprise modeling appearance, deleted him from its pictures and videos of the show. Similar images disappeared from Vogue Runway, the platform of record for fashion shows. And Skims, the shapewear brand started by Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, that he reportedly helped shape in design and aesthetic, described him as a “small minority shareholder” and said that he had “no active role at Skims.”And Ms. Kardashian condemned “hate speech” in a post on Twitter on Monday, which named no one but said: “I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”The designer Willy Chavarria, who last worked with Ye in 2020 on Yeezy Gap, said in an email, “I think it’s important for brands that use Ye for their gain like Balenciaga and Adidas to be forthcoming on their position on hate speech.”Ye has weathered crises before, especially since 2016, when he was hospitalized; he later said he had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In recent years he has been condemned for saying that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves” and that centuries of slavery had been “a choice”; polarized fans with his embrace of right-wing politics and former President Donald J. Trump; launched a quixotic campaign for president in 2020; and split with Ms. Kardashian. He has continued to work amid it all.Much of the music industry, where an artist’s notoriety is often a key selling point, has appeared to take more of a wait-and-see attitude about his latest controversies.But there is uncertainty about his musical future, too. Ye is no longer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world’s major booking agencies, a representative of the company said. On Monday, the film and television studio MRC announced that it was shelving a completed documentary about Ye following his antisemitic outbursts. He is no longer signed to Def Jam, his longtime record company; his contract expired with his 2021 album, “Donda.” And Ye’s own label, G.O.O.D. Music, which has released music by other artists like the rapper Pusha T, is also no longer affiliated with Def Jam, according to a person briefed on the deals. A representative of Def Jam declined to comment, and Ye did not respond to questions sent to a representative.“Will Kanye bounce back from this?” asked Randy Phillips, who was the promoter for a benefit concert Ye performed with Drake last December at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum that drew more than 60,000 fans and was streamed live by Amazon. “He could. He’s a musical genius. But it’s going to take time. It’s not going to be immediate.”Reaching a High Note, Then FallingYe, floating above it all during his 2016 Saint Pablo Tour. After a series of onstage monologues, the tour was cut short.A J Mast for The New York TimesIn 2016, as he performed on a spaceshiplike platform that hovered over sold-out arena crowds during his Saint Pablo Tour, Ye appeared to be at the peak of his creative powers.More on Kanye WestKanye West, the rapper and fashion designer who now goes by Ye, has been at the center of several controversies.Runway Scandal: Ye wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt during a Paris fashion show. The use of the phrase, which the Anti-Defamation League has attributed to white supremacists, was widely condemned.Corporate Partners: A series of antisemitic outbursts by the artist have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas Cuts Ties: The German sportswear giant, the most important partner in Ye’s fashion empire, ended its lucrative relationship with the rapper after his antisemitic remarks.Parler Deal: Parler, the social media service known for its right-wing audience, said that Ye would purchase its site, days after Instagram and Twitter restricted his accounts.His seventh studio album, “The Life of Pablo,” was his latest No. 1 hit and his show was received as an event. He was moving full-steam into the fashion world. His marriage to Ms. Kardashian, a reality-TV princess, had made him even more famous.But Ye never finished the tour.Shortly after he delivered a long, grievance-filled monologue at a concert in Sacramento that November, and abruptly ended the show after just a few songs, Ye was hospitalized, and the remainder of the tour was canceled.In some ways Ye’s music career has never quite recovered. In the six years since, his only performances have been scattered dates, with no proper tour befitting a major star. Once a frequent presence at the top of the Billboard charts, Ye has not had a huge hit in years. While his recent albums have usually opened at No. 1, they have then slid down the charts and been overshadowed by other releases.His career since has toggled between increasingly outrageous public controversies and sometimes remarkable creative achievements.On his 2021 album, “Donda,” he included industry pariahs like Marilyn Manson, who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and DaBaby, who had made homophobic remarks and waffled about apologies. He made attacks on the comedian Pete Davidson, who was dating Ms. Kardashian, including in a music video in which an animated figure closely resembling Mr. Davidson is kidnapped and buried.Yet Ye’s “Sunday Service” performances — intimate, spiritual events including one at the Coachella festival in 2019 — mesmerized audiences. And his earlier period remains so popular that his catalog has held strong on streaming services, with more than 90 million streams a week in the United States over the last month, and a total of nearly four billion streams so far this year, according to the tracking service Luminate. His audience on the radio, on the other hand, has fallen by about 22 percent over the last month, as some stations have cut back on playing his songs.A Lucrative Fashion Partnership JeopardizedAt New York Fashion Week in 2015. The following year, he drew a crowd to Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and album premiere.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAs his music career has stumbled, Ye’s work in fashion has taken on new importance. The most lucrative corner of his empire appeared to be Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas, which began in 2013 after he left a collaboration with Nike. The Adidas deal, which involved both shoes and clothing, became hugely successful.Even before his recent controversies, Ye had been sparring publicly with Adidas executives, but so far the company has not elaborated on its statement more than two weeks ago that the partnership is “under review.” (The company announced Tuesday, after this article was published, that it was over.) There had been increasing pressure on the company to take action. On Sunday, after a group hung a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” over a Los Angeles freeway, Jeffrey I. Abrams, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director there, released a statement that concluded, “Decisive action against antisemitism by Adidas is long overdue.”It put Adidas in a difficult position. Its founder, Adi Dassler, belonged to the Nazi Party, and in Germany, where antisemitic statements made online can lead to prosecution, companies that played a role in the country’s dark history are often expected to uphold their responsibility to prevent the return of such sentiment.Ye has long been interested in fashion. In 2009, he interned at Fendi with Virgil Abloh, who went on to work with Ye’s Donda creative agency before starting his own brand. That year Ye also brought a group of collaborators and friends to “crash” Paris Fashion Week.A luxury debut (DW by Kanye West) at Paris Fashion Week in 2011 was critically savaged and lasted only two seasons, but his partnership with Adidas proved transformative. The company underwrote his clothing brand, Yeezy, which unveiled its first collection at New York Fashion Week in 2015, with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna and Diddy sitting in the front row.Within a few seasons Ye packed Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for a fashion show and album premiere. While his Season 4 show on Roosevelt Island in September 2016 proved a debacle, his potent combination of reality-TV celebrity, music stardom, sneaker success and establishment disruption was impossible to resist for an industry that often felt stuck in the last century.It is also why partnering with Yeezy was so appealing to Gap, the mall brand whose sales and cultural relevance were floundering. Gap hoped the partnership, announced in 2020, would last 10 years and generate $1 billion in annual sales.Instead it lasted about two years, and produced only two products until a third party — Balenciaga — was brought in to accelerate the line. Lawyers for Ye argued that Gap broke “contractual obligations.” Gap said it was “deciding to wind down the partnership.” Ye has suggested that he may open his own line of retail shops.Then, last month, Ye went to Paris. He modeled for Balenciaga, and held his own show, where he proved he could still draw top industry names — including the Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful and the designer John Galliano, who attended, and the model Naomi Campbell, who walked in the show.Before the event began, Ye offered what turned out to be a preview of what was to come: “You can’t manage me,” he told the crowd. “This is an unmanageable situation.”He made good on his promise.Courting Controversy, and the RightYe meeting with Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office in 2018.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesWith Ye in Paris, photographed in her own “White Lives Matter” shirt, was Candace Owens, a conservative activist and media personality who shares his love for the spotlight and taste for provocation.Ye has embraced conservative politics since 2016, when he announced his support for Mr. Trump, meeting him at Trump Tower while he was president-elect and later in the Oval Office when he was president.For several years he has associated with Ms. Owens, a fellow Trump supporter who has become one of the country’s most prominent Black critics of the Black Lives Matter movement. In April 2018, Ye tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” Ms. Owens accompanied him to an interview with TMZ Live the following month in which he called American slavery a “choice,” spurring outrage.“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years?” he said. “That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? We’re mentally in prison.”This month Ms. Owens posted on Twitter that Ye had been “officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank,” which she described as “frightening.” In fact, Ye had decided to leave the bank, and he announced his intention to do in September on CNBC.Ye attended the Oct. 12 Nashville premiere of Ms. Owens’s documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.” Ye then went on the podcast Drink Champs and questioned the official account of Mr. Floyd’s death, for which a police officer was convicted of murder. His remarks prompted outrage from the Floyd family and an apology from the show’s host, N.O.R.E.After Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts this month in response to antisemitic posts, the social media platform Parler, which bills itself as a platform for uncancelable free speech, announced that it would be sold to Ye. Its chief executive, George Farmer, is Ms. Owens’s husband.Struggles With Mental HealthYe’s recent antisemitic outbursts and other provocations have prompted some in the music industry to wonder whether his behavior was related to his mental health struggles.Ye has long alluded to mental health issues in lyrics — as early as 2005, in “Gossip Files,” he raps, “They told my mama I was bipolar, had A.D.D.” — but his psychiatric treatment did not become part of the public record until 2016, when he was hospitalized.He has acknowledged a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but at times, including during his 2018 meeting with Mr. Trump, questioned it and said that his problem might have been sleep deprivation. He told David Letterman the following year that he had been “hyper-paranoid” when he was hospitalized, convinced that people wanted to kill him.He continued to address mental illness over the years in interviews, on social media and in his work, often expressing reluctance to take psychiatric medications. In 2018 he tweeted, “6 months off meds I can feel me again.”During the summer of 2020, when he was often disjointed, emotional and meandering on social media and in public appearances, Ms. Kardashian, who was still married to him, issued a statement on Instagram asking for “compassion and empathy” as he managed his symptoms, suggesting his family had tried and failed to get him into treatment.For a person with bipolar disorder, a manic episode is “a very sped-up state,” said David Miklowitz, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide.” “They’re full of ideas, sometimes ideas that get grandiose and delusionally unrealistic.”It can be difficult for friends and family to disentangle whether a person in a manic episode is delusional, or expressing their true beliefs.Rwenshaun Miller, 35, a psychotherapist who has bipolar disorder, said he regretted that Ye “doesn’t have someone around to take his phone” and ensure that he receives treatment. But he said the rapper should be forced to reckon with the consequences of his behavior. “I know it can make you do certain things, but it is also up to me to take accountability for things that happen when I am in a manic episode,” he said.The Industry Watches, and WaitsYe brought a Sunday Service performance to Coachella in 2019.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesWhile people in the entertainment industry, including many who have worked with Ye in the past, privately express shock about his recent comments, few have spoken publicly.But the heads of two major talent agencies that do not represent Ye have called for people to stop working with him. Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of Endeavor, the parent company of the agency WME, wrote an opinion article for The Financial Times calling on entertainment companies — including Spotify, Apple and “whoever organizes West’s tours” — to cease working with Ye.Jeremy Zimmer, the chief executive of United Talent Agency, wrote in an internal email that “we’re seeing a surge in antisemitism in our communities, fueled by Kanye’s comments” and urged a boycott.Representatives of Spotify and Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Universal Music Group, the parent of Def Jam, and AEG Presents, the global concert company that puts on Coachella, declined to comment.Some of the industry’s silence may be strategic, as key players wait to see if Ye — still widely considered an immensely talented musician with a gift for seizing attention — will express contrition and begin a comeback cycle. A successful one could be lucrative for any partner.Melissa Eddy More

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      Netflix Adds 2.4 Million Subscribers, Reversing a Decline

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      Netflix, which has about 223 million subscribers worldwide, will soon introduce a lower-priced service with ads in a bid to attract more customers.Netflix said Tuesday that it added more than 2.4 million subscribers in the third quarter — mainly from outside the United States — snapping a streak of customer losses this year that spurred unease among investors and questions about how much more the streaming business could grow.The streaming giant said it now has 223 million subscribers worldwide, after beating its earlier forecast of about one million additions for the quarter. Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, and nearly one million in the second.“After a challenging first half, we believe we’re on a path to re-accelerate growth,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. “The key is pleasing members.”Netflix is preparing to introduce advertising on its service on Nov. 3, part of a bid to attract more customers with a lower-cost subscription. The advertising-supported tier, priced at $6.99 a month in the United States, will show subscribers four to five minutes of ads per hour of content they watch.Netflix generated about $7.9 billion in revenue in the third quarter, a nearly 6 percent increase from the same period last year. The company generated about $1.4 billion in profit, a 3 percent decrease from a year earlier.The Race to Rule Streaming TVNetflix Ads: The streaming company said it will soon offer a cheaper ad-supported subscription, which will show people four to five minutes of ads per hour of content they watch.Late-Night Talk Shows: TV executives are mulling the future of the genre, which is struggling to make the leap to the streaming world.Apple’s Will Smith Movie: After a long discussion, Apple said it will release the film “Emancipation” — the actor’s first since his infamous slap at the Oscars — in December.Cable Cowboy: The media mogul John Malone opened up about the streaming wars, the fast-changing news business and his own future.Netflix shares were up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.Netflix said in its letter to shareholders that it expected to add 4.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, a 46 percent decrease from the 8.3 million subscribers it added during the same period last year. Netflix also said it would stop providing guidance to investors on its projected subscriber count beginning next quarter.Rich Greenfield, an analyst for Lightshed Partners, said the results indicated that Netflix would flourish as competitors continue to lag behind.“I think the reports of streaming’s death or maturity have been greatly exaggerated,” Mr. Greenfield said.The decision to introduce an advertising option on Netflix was an about-face for the company, which for years had highlighted its ad-free experience as a selling point for customers. But this year, after announcing subscriber losses on the company’s first-quarter earnings call, the co-chief executive Reed Hastings reversed course, saying that an advertising-supported plan would allow customers to choose their experience.Streaming has become an increasingly competitive industry in recent years. Disney, for instance, reported in August that it had about 221 million subscriptions across its bundle of services. It will start offering a lower-priced advertising tier for Disney+ in December.Mr. Hastings expressed relief about the company’s financial results during a video interview conducted by an analyst that was posted by Netflix on Tuesday evening.“Well, thank God we’re done with shrinking quarters,” Mr. Hastings said, laughing.Netflix is breaking with convention in other ways this fall. The company plans to release “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 600 theaters across the United States for one week beginning on Nov. 23 ahead of its streaming debut, the first time the company has struck a deal with the nation’s largest theater chains at once. The movie, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is the anticipated follow-up to the 2019 hit starring Daniel Craig as the Delphic detective Benoit Blanc.Netflix told employees this year that it was also planning to crack down on password sharing, which allows users to watch content without paying for a subscription. The research firm MoffettNathanson estimates that 16 percent of Netflix users share passwords, more than any other major U.S. streaming service. Netflix said in April that passwords were being shared with an additional 100 million households, according to its estimate.The company has also cracked down on costs. In May, Netflix laid off about 150 workers across the company, primarily in the United States, or about 2 percent of its total work force. Netflix said in a statement that the cuts had been spurred by the company’s slower revenue growth.Despite the changes, Netflix hasn’t yet been able to reverse a precipitous decline in its share price. The company’s stock has tumbled more than 60 percent over the last year amid a broader market slump, as investors and analysts grapple with the economics of streaming video.During the third quarter, Netflix released a mix of films and TV shows, including “The Gray Man,” a big-budget action film starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the sibling filmmakers behind “Avengers: Infinity War.” Other popular titles included the serial killer show “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”; the romantic drama “Purple Hearts”; and “Stranger Things,” which released the second half of Season 4 near the end of last quarter. More