YOUDINI-MEDINI-WEDINI ...HOUDINI.

With a current estimated valuation of circa $10 trillion we decided it was time to ride our Triumph Trophy up to the barbed-wire fence and take a look at the great ‘Escape Economy.’

According to McCann’s ‘Truth Central’ (sic) team, “No less than 91%* of people worldwide feel the need to escape occasionally.”  And while the Agency are naturally focused on the implications for Ads and Brands, we in The Business of Pleasure are more concerned with the actual nuts and bolts (wire-cutters and tunnels?) of 21st Century escapology.

The McCann report references ‘Travel’ as one of the most obvious forms of cutting loose from everyday life, which makes their total estimate look odd…

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council:

‘In 2024, Travel and Tourism contributed $10.9 trillion (including direct, indirect, and induced impacts of the sector). As a share, Travel & Tourism represented 10% of the global economy.’

And that’s before we consider some of the other escape routes:

In 2024, revenue from Gaming hit an estimated total global revenue of $184.3 billion, of which, astonishingly $1 billion was generated by the commuters’ favourite travel companion Candy Crush Saga.

2024 global video streaming revenue was estimated at $116 billion in subscriptions according to PWC’s ‘Perspectives from the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2024-2028’

And Variety figures that annual global cinema receipts will hit $33 billion by 2025.

Which is slightly above 2024 global recorded music revenues of $29.6 billion quoted in the latest International Federation of the Phonographic Industry report, 19.3.25

For those of us braving crush-hour rail travel without the consolation of Candy Crush, UK Fiction sales are believed to have totalled £552.7 million in 2024, and looking further afield, escapism runs through the top-selling genres like a stick of Graham Greene Brighton Rock:

‘Among the fiction genres seeing the most growth are crime and thriller novels, whose sales are up in three-quarters of the surveyed countries. Revenue gains in the crime and thriller sector range from +3% in Wallonia to +56% in Portugal. Science fiction and fantasy books are performing even better, showing double-digit growth rates across the board. Romance novels are also trending.’ NIQ report 15 Oct 2024

For those of us who prefer to read with our ears, not our eyes (and enjoy the additional benefit of muting noise from babies, bores and City-Boys on the train/bus/plane) the number of UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% from 2022-2023 (50-59m) with revenue increasing 24%  (total £206m) according to the Publishers Association.

And of course, not all fiction is (hopefully) engaged with in transit…

Some estimates claim that porn ‘accounts for one third of all internet traffic. Pornhub, the leading distributor of free ad-supported porn ranks in the top 20 websites globally; 10 of its competitors rank in the top 100.*

 For the more gregarious escapist, estimated total attendance for UK sports events 77.7 million according to Two Circles, with West End Theatre audiences totalling 17.1 million according to the Society of London Theatre.

But when did the Great Escape Story kick off?  What marked the first circuit around the perimeter fence for our earliest ancestors, themselves just newly-escaped from apehood?

Here’s one possible take on it:

For a long time it was believed that stories emerged as an early technology to encapsulate important information that could then be shared socially, geographically and across time; first orally, and then recorded in pictures or words. Which made sense to me. Until I heard the remarkable story of a young Anthropologist who’d spent several months living with, and studying, a remote tribe whose way of life had not changed since the Stone Age.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the tribe spent a huge amount of time making stone tools (the clues in the title, I guess) but when the Anthropologist attempted to video one of tribe elders actually flint-knapping he hit upon a problem. And here I paraphrase (wildly!).

“I can’t do it on my own,” the elder replied, “We all have to do it together.”

The Anthropologist was intrigued. Did this mean that there was some kind of primitive production line with each tribesman contributing to the finished product, a whopping 50,000 years before Henry Ford? Far from it.

“It takes blooming ages to hone each tool,” the elder explained.  “And it is really boring chipping away for months and months on end. So the only way we can keep at it, work through the monotony, is by telling stories to each other.”

 Spot the difference:

When I announced to a small group of seriously engaged arts and culture exponents (yesterday) that the Escape Economy would be the subject of my next three minute read (today) it occurred to me that maybe truly great art and great literature (ditto theatre, cinema, music, dance, etc.)  actually perform the opposite role to escapism.  By taking us closer to ourselves, and our worlds, rather than further away.  But perhaps that is also a kind of flight, as we rev the engine of our motorcycle and hurtle towards the wire …desperately trying to escape from the escapes?

DT

26 April

*Who the heck are the 9% who don’t feel this??? I really want to meet them.

**The brilliant Scott Galloway, ‘NO MERCY/NO MALICE’ blog