Umm Kulthum is the only Arab in Rolling Stone’s 200 Greatest Singers list + Chinese companies are jumping on virtual employees
Where are you most likely to find Umm Kulthum nestled between George Michael and Kate Bush? Rolling Stone’s 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. Coming in at number 61, the Egyptian chanteuse is the only Arab listed in the global Who’s Who of vocalists that ranges from smooth operators to raw shouters, from gospel to punk. Rolling Stone praises Umm Kulthum’s “breathtaking emotional range in complex songs that, across theme and wildly-ornamented variations, could easily last an hour, as she worked crowds like a fiery preacher” and counts the likes of Beyonce and Bob Dylan amongst her admirers — not to mention the “incalculable” number of Arab singers.
Kawkab Al Sharq is in good company: Sitting at the top of the list are women singers Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston.
Virtual people — not employees working virtually — are the new thing in the business world: Companies in China are investing heavily in recruiting virtual employees — “a combination of animation, sound tech and machine learning that create digitized human beings — for various jobs, CNBC reports. These companies are paying as much as USD 14.3k per year for a 3D person, and USD 2.8k for a 2D digitized individual, but incorporating virtual employees is becoming increasingly economical, with costs dropping some 80% y-o-y.
This company-level push towards virtual labor comes as China’s virtual industry is booming: Beijing is looking to grow the virtual industry to become worth more than CNY 50 bn (c.USD 7.3 bn) by 2025, while some industry players speaking to CNBC expect to see the industry growing at a 50% clip over the next three years. According to Bilibili, one of the first video and game streaming applications to adopt virtual employees, “230k virtual anchors started broadcasting on its platform in 2019, and the virtual anchors’ broadcasting time this year surged by about 200% from last year.” Other companies such as Tencent are turning to chatbots to replace human customer support, with positive feedback.
It wasn’t the best year for some of the Arab’s richest: Economic hurdles hitting the region on the back of the global financial crisis has taken its toll on the wealth of the Arab region’s richest families, Forbes Middle East writes. The Sawiris family, which is the region’s wealthiest with a combined net worth of USD 11.2 bn, saw their wealth shed some USD 800 mn from 11 March to 29 December. Lebanon’s Mikati family, which came in second with a combined net worth of USD 5.6 bn, also lost USD 800 mn in the same period. The Mansour family in Egypt was able to maintain its wealth of USD 5.1 bn throughout the challenging year, while Algeria’s Issad Rebrab and family tied for third place with the Mansour family. Lebanon’s Hariri family came in fifth in the region with a combined net worth of USD 4.7 bn. The list of the region’s wealthiest families do not include those in Saudi Arabia after Forbes stopped tracking Saudi bns since 2018.