Gambling becomes America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined
In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events. That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.Recommended Video The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion.
- ▪In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events.
- ▪That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.Recommended Video The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels.
- ▪Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion.
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| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/07/26/gambling-america-pastime-spend-sports-bets-movies-arts-museums-music/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:22:53.640Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:22:53.640Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | q9goJmFixHt4 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events. That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.Recommended Video The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion. Live music like concerts and festivals brought in $18.51 billion. Meanwhile, book publishers tracked by the Association of American Publishers reported $14.6 billion for the year. And the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Add it up and the total comes to roughly $70 billion, which is less than half what Americans wagered on sports.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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