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On the heals of a successful UK band tour, Rufus Wainwright announces a European tour that brings him and his band to Scandinavia, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain from March 16th through April 3rd 2022.

The tour is in support of his 2020 BMG released Grammy-nominted pop album UNFOLLOW THE RULES. Since then Rufus has released another album with BMG and a second is slated to be released later this year. “Unfollow the Rules – Paramour Session” released in September 2021 is a live recording of a stripped down version of Unfollow the Rules plus some new tracks recorded and filmed in Los Angeles prior to the studio album’s release and “Rufus Wainwright and Amsterdam Sinfonietta” is a live recording of a 2017 tour with the famed Amsterdam based 21 piece string orchestra featuring covers of Jacques Brel, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen plus Wainwright classics and previously unreleased songs in lush new arrangements. Known for his incredibly engaging live performances, Rufus returns to Europe with a brand new band for the tour: LA musician Brian Green (John Legend, Michael Bublé, Pomplamoose) as music director, guitar and backing vocals; Jacob Mann on keyboard, piano and backing vocals; and Alan Hampton on bass, guitar, ukulele and backing vocals. Playing a set list of classics and new cuts from his highly anticipated new album, the dates are sure to be one of the highlights of the year. General tickets will be on-sale at 10am CET on Friday. Speaking of the tour Rufus said ‘I am excited to tour Europe with Unfollow the Rules. I have always felt very much at home artistically there and my husband and I actually have a home in Berlin so I get to spend some time there and even play his home town. A lot of my musical references have European roots. I consider Unfollow the Rules my first fully mature album; it is like a bookend to the beginning of my career.” He continues ‘For me with every concert that is happening, mine or others we are returning a bit more towards our normal lives. Experiencing music together gives me hope and confidence that we will rise above the isolating and heartbreaking experience of the past two years collectively’.

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Rufus Wainwright (born July 22, 1973) is an American-Canadian Grammy nominated singer, songwriter and composer from Rhineneck, New York, U.S.

Born to parents Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwirght III, Rufus’ parents divorced when he was three and the toddler lived with his mother in Montreal, Canada for most of his childhood. Rufus began playing piano at age six and started touring with the family band The McGarrigle Sisters and Family” aged 13 which included his mother Kate, his sister Martha and aunt Anna.

At age 14 Wainwright earned a 1989 Genie Nomination for his performance of “I’m a-Runnin” in the film “Tommy Ticker and the Stamp Traveller, and a year later nominated for the 1990 Juno Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist. After this time Rufus began his life-long adoration for the opera which would strongly influence his future musical excursions.

Through weekly shows on Montreal’s club circuit, Rufus created a series of demo tapes, which eventually secured him record deal with DreamWorks. 1998’s self-titled debut took the best part of 1996 and 1997 to record a total of 56 songs, using 62 rolls of tape, costing an estimate of $700,000. The album received huge critical acclaim, topped many best-of lists, and won a series of awards, however the commercial success was limited.

Wainwright’s follow-up album “Poses” released June 5, 2001, continued the same vein of critical acclaim without commercial success for Rufus. After a stint of using crystal meth where the singer temporarily lost his eye sight, and a surreal week which included a cameo appearance on the BBC program “Absolutely Fabulous”, partying with George W. Bush’s daughter Barbara and singing with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, Rufus decided he needed a change.

In 2003 Wainwirght released the full-length “Want One” and a year later “Want Two”. Both albums would be combined and released under the name “Want” in 2005, the same year Rufus made vocal contributions to Mercury Prize winning album Antony and the Johnsons’ “I am a Bird Now" and Burt Bacharach’s “At This Time”.

In 2006 Wainwright performed a pair of sold-out shows at New York's, U.S., Carnegie Hall where he performed the entire Judy Garland concert album, and did the same at the London, UK’s Palladium.

Rufus’ follow album “Release the Stars” achieved much greater commercial success peaking at No. 2 in the UK Albums chart and No. 23 on the Billboard 200, and featured mother Kate, sister Martha, Neil Tennant and Joan Wasser.

Wainwright’s subsequent albums, 2010’s “All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu” and 2012’s “Out of the Game” both performed well in the charts and received much the same acclaim Rufus has come to expect.

Being at a Rufus Wainwright concert is a bit like spending a couple of hours talking to one of your closest friends. The conversation is easy and flowing, even if you haven’t seen each other in a while. The topics range from serious: death, for example--to mundane: getting a massage or haircut, and everything in between. Sometimes the conversation goes off on weird tangents, and you forget where you were going with that. Sometimes you talk about old friends (“California,” “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk”). Sometimes you throw out new ideas (“Sword of Damocles”). You laugh, you cry. You realize how lucky you are to have a friend like this.

Rufus’s shows cover a lot of ground. He sang from his debut album (“Beauty Mark”, “Millbrook”) through his latest album of Shakespeare’s sonnets (“A Woman’s Face”). He sang a dark, dark cover song about dying (“Going In” by Lhasa). In fact, he sang and talked a lot about dying--as topics go according to him, “one of my faves.” This was, after all, his late beloved mother’s birthday. And there is a great deal of darkness about just now. But minutes later he’d have us all laughing with a story about trying to convince Lorna Luft to allow 50 drag queens dressed like Judy Garland be part of his show at Carnegie Hall (Lorna said no), or the Spanish masseuse who softly encouraged him to “perspire, respire, perspire, respire.”

Of course, Rufus is really not my friend. But his music and manner make me feel as if he is. He connects. He touches. He even invited some of his actual friends to be part of the show: The von Trapps sang a beautiful acapella song (“Storm”), then they and Thomas Lauderdale joined Rufus on Anna McGarrigle’s “Kitty Come Home.” When Rufus and Thomas collaborated on “Blue Moon,” it felt like listening in on two old friends jamming in the living room.

Rufus is an energetic and dynamic performer, without flamboyant outfits or crazy dance moves or anything electronic or flashy. (Wearing skinny jeans and a plaid shirt, he quipped that he was dressed “as a lumberjack.”) It’s amazing how he commands the stage with his voice and presence, yet maintains this friendly, self-effacing manner at the same time. Maybe that’s artifice, but it sure feels genuine. He is so low-key that you almost forget at times what an accomplished, talented, and musically diverse artist he is. From opera to ragtime, from classical to pop, from Carnegie Hall to the little Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon, he’s at home. And makes us feel at home, too.

Also sang: Gay Messiah, The Art Teacher, Going to a Town, Jericho, Out of the Game, Hallelujah, 11:11, Candles

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Oh dear Rufus, have you made my life complete. Not only because your first gig in Paris back in 1999 was where I fell in love with my dear wife. But ever since then none of your gigs has been disappointing.

Be it the last minute solo piano gigs, or the extremely theatrical appearances with costumes, never-ending bands with horns and flutes, you have it all. In Berlin you already rocked: - the Passionskirche, with Joan as a Police Woman as Guest, and a final a la Passions Christi - the Akademie des Künste with a more American and electrified show - newly another church, the Apostel Kirche, with your half sister as guest.

Always pitch perfect, always witty and bonding with each city's crowd (though it might be easier with Berlin having your husband from here). But it's your songs and repertoire that make it possible, within a decade you've delivered albums that make you one of the most respected living songwriters by your peers, and many of the collaboration you've picked up also enrich the songs: Antony, Mark Ronson, to name a few. Please come back (and stay for good this time).

Often described as one of the most intelligent men in music, Rufus Wainwright has enjoyed a long, celebrated career which has naturally amassed a global following giving him the opportunity to travel with his music which in turns has gone on to inspire other parts of his music.

By having such intelligent composure, his music has quite a heavy presence when performed live and the emotional intensity of 'Jericho' and 'Little Sister' clearly moves the audience. Wainwright talks about the reason behind writing certain tracks and the affect that songwriting has on him as a person. He performs 'Gay Messiah' after expressing his strong views for same sex marriage, he is campaigning on a personal level so he can in fact wed his partner Jörn Weisbrodt which makes the performance all more heartfelt.

By the final encore of 'Going to a Town' and a spine chilling cover version of 'Hallelujah' the audience have well and truly been emotionally drained by Wainwright's discography and captivating stage persona yet they would not have it any other way.

Rufus Wainwright is an inspiring singer songwriter and performer. His accoustic concert in Perth showcased his breadth of talent, his incredible voice and piano playing, with his capability to bring people along with him on his personal journey.

Being able to show us his new works was obviously important while giving a good mix of audience favourites spanning his previous decades.It's simply not possible to perform all his works on one occasion and I believe Rufus made the right selections.

Not as enamored by his guitar work, I did most enjoy his movement between performing at the piano and standing to sing especially while accompanied by his incredible guest pianist, Thomas Lauderdale.

Would definitely return to see Rufus again...next time would love strings to accompany his heavenly voice.

We love Rufus! At our first concert, we met people who had seen him eight times! I thought it was crazy but by the end of the show, I understood.

Last night, a group of 12 of us went to Mercyhurst University to see Rufus. It was our fourth time! (What can I say? We're hooked!) It was the first time for our friends. The venue is world-class. Ticket purchases were easy. Parking was convenient and free. Now to the show...

Rufus was once again amazing! He played his classics and some new music. His voice was clear and strong. His stories were fun and entertaining.

He's a master at his craft. That's not just my opinion. The group of friends we attended with, all were wowed! If you have a chance to see Rufus Wainwright, do it. You'll be glad that you did.

A 10 out of 10! His voice is amazing, the vocal range, the depth, the control, the creativity was again amazing. It was one of the best concerts i have been to. I hope he comes back to northern California each year so I can enjoy his voice in person. He introduces most of his songs or gives some backstory after he has sung it. He's very jovial, funny and upbeat. He ended with Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk and encored with Hallelujah and second encored with Poses. Incredible show, I could not have been more captivated or impressed. I'm a deeper Rufus fan.

I would like if they would sell vinyl at the concerts too. It'd be great to have it autographed.

This was my third Rufus concert, an artist I absolutely admire as a 20 year fan from the early days of his career. Saw him in Brooklyn and L.A., and this time in Portland, OR. Musically this was probably the best one of them all, and Rufus remains for me the top of the line musician through and through. Needless to say, I was saddened by the political stain he forced on the experience with his lame not-my-president remark, and even more by the childish reaction of the audience, but what was I expecting from the Portland crowd... If only we lived in a world where artists appreciated their fans as much as their fans appreciated them.

Just perfect...

It was my sixth time (my second time in London) I see Rufus and always a happiness.

Splendid tribute to Shakespeare between recitals, songs and humor with four extraordinary artists.

Rufus offered us his most beautiful songs about his solo careers.

Looking forward to see him again in Cardiff, Dublin and Naples. He shows again he's the best artist of his generation and we still stay loyal with him.

I love you, Rufus, thank you for all.

Rufus has a way of making you feel,Ike you are friends and he is speaking with you in your apartment.

Intertwined with the fabulous talent he possesses are family anecdotes and just life in general.

His multi talents of vocalizing and piano playing are above superb.

Every song he sang was amazing.

A secondary highlight was the appearance of Jake Gyllenhall as guest.

Can that boy sing.

I did not want the concert to end.

Rufus is even better live - his talent is unbelievable, his voice is angelic. He performed three encores and I couldn't have been more pleased when he ended the show with hallelujah. I waited 20 years to see him and this show didn't disappoint. He sang his pop songs, songs from his Shakespeare album, and arias from his opera. My favorite was getting to hear him acapella - you could HEAR the music, without any at all.

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South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC)

Sacred Heart University Community Theatre

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Rufus Wainwright n'a pas annoncé un concert près de chez toi mais va jouer 24 concerts dans 7 pays en 2024-2025. Voir tous les concerts.

Ses 3 prochain concerts :

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• Martha Wainwright (72)
• Lucy Wainwright Roche (46)
• Teddy Thompson (30)
• Ben Folds (24)

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KIMMEL CULTURAL CAMPUS PRESENTS GRAMMY® NOMINATED SINGER-SONGWRITER RUFUS WAINWRIGHT AND HIS "FOLKOCRACY" TOUR, JUNE 23, 2023

For a PDF version of this press release, click here .

No one, and we mean no one, is quite like @rufuswainwright – coming to #Philly to perform his newest album “Folkocracy” @KimmelCC (Twitter)/@KimmelCulturalCampus (Facebook and Instagram) on 6/23, in partnership with @wxpnfm. For more info, visit kimmelculturalcampus.org.

Press Contacts: Lauren A. Woodard Hall                      Hannah Palermo 484-832-1963                                   267-765-3724 [email protected]           [email protected]

KIMMEL CULTURAL CAMPUS PRESENTS  GRAMMY ® NOMINATED SINGER-SONGWRITER  RUFUS WAINWRIGHT AND HIS FOLKOCRACY TOUR ,  JUNE 23, 2023

ENGAGEMENT HELD IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WXPN WELCOMES

“Nobody sings quite like Rufus Wainwright.  Nobody gives live shows quite like Rufus either.”  - The New Yorker

“Rufus Wainwright has always existed in a world unto himself, the sort of place where Cole Porter, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, and Ian Anderson could all share a sherry and muse on love and literature.”   - Rolling Stone

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (April 27, 2023) –– The Kimmel Cultural Campus, in partnership with WXPN Welcomes, presents Rufus Wainwright: Folkocracy Tour at the Miller Theater (formerly the Merriam Theater) on June 23, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. Praised by The New York Times for his “genuine originality,” Wainwright has established himself as one of the great male vocalists, songwriters, and composers of his generation.

The Folkocracy Tour will feature songs off his most recent album (scheduled for release on June 2, 2023). Some are bona fide folk songs like Peggy Seeger's "Heading for Home" or Ewan MacColl's "Alone" but others are Wainwright's interpretation of what constitutes a folk song today like The Mama's and Papa's "Twelve-Thirty", his own "Going To a Town", or Moondog's "High on a Rocky Ledge." He is backed by a four-piece band of amazing musicians, including two incredible backup singers, his sister Lucy Wainwright Roche alongside Petra Haden.

Wainwright’s remarkable album revisits his roots of childhood summers spent at folk festivals and watching his family perform on stages across the country. After shying away from folk music for years, Wainwright is going back to where it all began.

“We are honored to present the Philadelphia premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s newest album, created with contributions from renowned artists like John Legend, Sheryl Crow, and Chaka Khan, and performed on tour with help from his own talented family,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, President and CEO of The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc. “We look forward to showcasing his extraordinary versatility, ranging from pop to classical, opera to folk, and even showtunes.”

The New York-born and Montreal-raised singer and songwriter began playing the piano at six years old, starting to tour at 13 with his family’s folk group, “The McGarrigle Sisters and Family”, featuring Wainwright’s sister, mother, and aunt. Since starting his music career at such a young age, Wainwright has released ten studio albums, three DVDs, and three live albums, including Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall , a tribute performance to the talented Judy Garland at the London Palladium in 2007; and Release The Stars , which went Gold in Canada and the United Kingdom. 

Wainwright has collaborated alongside artists such as Elton John, Miley Cyrus, Pet Shop Boys, Sting, and Billy Joel, and has written two operas, numerous songs for TV and movies, and is currently focusing on his first musical for the West End and a Requiem . In the 1990s, Wainwright was nominated for a JUNO Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist of the Year, as well as receiving critical acclaim over his self-titled debut, which the Rolling Stones recognized as one of the best albums of the year, naming him “Best New Artist” in 1998.

In addition to being a beloved contemporary pop singer, Wainwright has made a name for himself in the classical world; his much acclaimed first opera titled Prima Donna premiered at the 2009 Manchester International Festival. Since then, Wainwright has been commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company to create a second opera, based on the story of Roman Emperor Hadrian and Antinous, as well as the San Francisco Symphony to compose “Five Shakespeare Sonnets.” Premiering in the United States in 2010 and the UK in 2012 with BBC Symphony Orchestra, this five-movement suite sets the texts from selected Shakespearian sonnets to orchestra and vocals.

Other featured upcoming performances on the Kimmel Cultural Campus include Samantha Bee: Your Favorite Woman (April 29, 2023, Miller Theater), Girls Gotta Eat: Snack City Tour (May 11, 2023, Miller Theater), Sasha Velour: The Big Reveal Live Show (May 18, 2023, Perelman Theater), The Capitol Fools (May 20, 2023, Perelman Theater), John Mellencamp: Live and In Person (June 3, 2023, Miller Theater) and Kevin James: The Irregardless Tour (June 16, 2023, Academy of Music).

Tickets can be purchased by calling 215-893-1999 or online at www.kimmelculturalcampus.org. In-person ticket sales can be conducted daily from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. at the Academy of Music Box Office, located at 240 S. Broad Street. See www.kimmelculturalcampus.org for more information.

WXPN Welcomes Rufus Wainwright: The Folkocracy Tour Miller Theater (formerly the Merriam Theater) on the Kimmel Cultural Campus June 23, 2023, at 8:00 p.m.  

KIMMEL CULTURAL CAMPUS

Located in the heart of Center City, Philadelphia, our mission is to engage the region's diverse communities with art through performance and education. Our Cultural Campus serves more than 1-million guests per year and includes Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Verizon Hall, Perelman Theater, and SEI Innovation Studio), the Academy of Music, and the Miller Theater (formerly the Merriam Theater) – representing more than 160 years of rich history for the performing arts along Philadelphia's Avenue of the Arts. We are home to The Philadelphia Orchestra and six esteemed Resident Companies: Opera Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Ballet, PHILADANCO, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and Curtis Institute of Music. With nearly 9,000 seats per night, we are the region's most impactful performing arts center, and the second largest in the country. Our Cultural Campus serves as a preeminent and inclusive place to enjoy exceptional experiences that reflect the spirit of our region by cultivating a creative and socially responsible environment where our community shares experiences that are delivered with pride, integrity, and respect. As a 501 c 3 nonprofit organization, we collaborate on, present, and produce a broad range of relevant and meaningful events, we serve as an active gathering space for social and community events, we educate the region's young people through access to quality arts experiences, and we provide support to artists in the creation of new work. Read Kimmel Cultural Campus' vision statement, world view, and mission statement here. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and how it encompasses our mission, coworkers, and programs here.

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Rufus Wainwright Announces Folkocracy Tour

Folkocracy is Rufus Wainwright revisiting his roots, of childhood summers spent at folk festivals and watching his famous family on stage. But it’s also the sound of an artist in the present using all he has learnt from conquering pop to opera and showtunes. 

“I’ve shied away from folk in the past, preferring the worlds of opera and pop. But the fact is I’m from a bona fide folkocracy who mixed extensively with other folkocracies such as the Seegers and the Thompsons. As I hurtle towards 50, I’m back where it all began.” 

The album, Rufus’ 12th studio album released on June 2nd, features and all-star cast of guests including Brandi Carlile, Chaka Khan, David Byrne, Anohni, Sheryl Crow, John Legend, Nicole Scherzinger and his family of course among others. The album is a bit of a 50th birthday present to himself, invite the singers you have always admired to come and join you in the process. “Getting lots of guests was a given from the start,” says Rufus. “The key to folk is community and sharing a stage. But I didn’t want to make a duets record. We rode a fine line – guests, not duets.”

For the tour he has assembled a four piece band of amazing musicians and two incredible back-up singers, his sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and Petra Haden who will sing the parts of most of the guests from the album. 

The set list will contain almost all songs from the album. He chose those 15 songs with producer Mitchell Froom, some are bona fide folk songs like Peggy Seeger’s “Heading for Home” or Ewan MacColl’s “Alone” but others are Wainwright’s interpretation of what constitutes a folk song today like The Mama’s and The Papa’s “Twelve-Thirty”, his own “Going to a Town”, or Moondog’s “High on a Rocky Ledge” which he first heard on a sultry Hawaiian New Year’s Eve. 

The concept of cover songs will continue for the rest of the set list, picking songs Rufus recorded for his audible original “Roadtrip Elegies” at LA’s legendary folk venue McCabe’s Guitar Store. Those songs accompanied a car ride that he took frequently as a child from his mother’s home in Montreal to his dad’s of New York. This time in his car was his shrink and the entire conversation was recorded with the songs illuminating important stops on memory lane. 

This additional material will contain some new songs by Rufus along with covers of among others Bob Dylan, Mina, and the late Burt Bacharach who Wainwright described on his January 2023 tour with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta as the “greatest living American songwriter”.

Not many musicians have the vocal range and depth of interpretation that Wainwright possesses or as The New Yorker simply put it “Nobody sings quite like Rufus Wainwright”. Nobody gives live shows quite like Rufus either. Expect Folkocracy!

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Rufus Wainwright: Folkocracy Tour

Opening Act: Lucy Wainwright Roche

One of the great male vocalists and songwriters of his generation, Rufus Wainwright performs music from his new release Folkocracy, in which he revisits his roots of childhood summers spent at folk festivals and watching his famous family on stage. Featuring Lucy Wainwright Roche and Petra Haden on back-up vocals and a four-piece band, the Folkocracy tour showcases Wainwright’s extraordinary vocal range and depth of interpretation. “Nobody sings quite like Rufus Wainwright” – The New Yorker

Folkocracy is Rufus Wainwright revisiting his roots, of childhood summers spent at folk festivals and watching his famous family on stage. But it’s also the sound of an artist in the present using all he has learnt from conquering pop to opera and showtunes.

“I’ve shied away from folk in the past, preferring the worlds of opera and pop. But the fact is I’m from a bona fide folkocracy who mixed extensively with other folkocracies such as the Seegers and the Thompsons. As I hurtle towards 50, I’m back where it all began.”

The album, Rufus’ 12th studio album released on June 2nd, features and all-star cast of guests including Brandi Carlile, Chaka Khan, David Byrne, Anohni, Sheryl Crow, John Legend, Nicole Scherzinger and his family of course among others. The album is a bit of a 50th birthday present to himself, invite the singers you have always admired to come and join you in the process. “Getting lots of guests was a given from the start,” says Rufus. “The key to folk is community and sharing a stage. But I didn’t want to make a duets record. We rode a fine line – guests, not duets.”

For the tour he has assembled a four piece band of amazing musicians and two incredible back-up singers, his sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and Petra Haden who will sing the parts of most of the guests from the album.

The set list will contain almost all songs from the album. He chose those 15 songs with producer Mitchell Froom, some are bona fide folk songs like Peggy Seeger’s “Heading for Home” or Ewan MacColl’s “Alone” but others are Wainwright’s interpretation of what constitutes a folk song today like The Mama’s and The Papa’s “Twelve-Thirty”, his own “Going to a Town”, or Moondog’s “High on a Rocky Ledge” which he first heard on a sultry Hawaiian New Year’s Eve.

The concept of cover songs will continue for the rest of the set list, picking songs Rufus recorded for his audible original “Roadtrip Elegies” at LA’s legendary folk venue McCabe’s Guitar Store. Those songs accompanied a car ride that he took frequently as a child from his mother’s home in Montreal to his dad’s of New York. This time in his car was his shrink and the entire conversation was recorded with the songs illuminating important stops on memory lane.

This additional material will contain some new songs by Rufus along with covers of among others Bob Dylan, Mina, and the late Burt Bacharach who Wainwright described on his January 2023 tour with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta as the “greatest living American songwriter”.

Not many musicians have the vocal range and depth of interpretation that Wainwright possesses or as The New Yorker simply put it “Nobody sings quite like Rufus Wainwright”. Nobody gives live shows quite like Rufus either. Expect Folkocracy!

About Rufus Wainwright: Praised by the New York Times for his “genuine originality,” Rufus Wainwright has established himself as one of the great male vocalists, songwriters, and composers of his generation. The New York-born, Montreal-raised singer-songwriter has released ten studio albums to date, three DVDs, and three live albums including the Grammy-nominated Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall. He has collaborated with artists such as Elton John, Burt Bacharach, Robert Wilson, David Byrne, Boy George, Joni Mitchell, Pet Shop Boys, Heart, Robbie Williams, Jessye Norman, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Sting, and producer Mark Ronson, among many others. He has written two operas, numerous songs for movies and TV, and is currently working on his first musical. His latest GRAMMY® and JUNO nominated album, Unfollow the Rules , finds Wainwright at the peak of his powers, entering artistic maturity with passion, honesty, and a new-found fearlessness.

Join us for a Pride Night reception prior to the show! Ticket buyers in the LGBTQ+ community and allies are invited to come together for this special pre-show social event, featuring light hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. Use code MPACPRIDE when purchasing to secure your tickets to the party – space is limited!

Ticket buyer and members of the ticket buyer’s party agree to observe and obey all instructions, warnings, or other requirements provided in advance of the event and on site. Please note that current conditions/regulations/guidelines are subject to change based on the status/situation known at the time, and that individual artists may impose their own restrictions.

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Rufus Wainwright: Want One and Want Two review – double-Prom epic is magnificently opulent

Royal Albert Hall, London As Wainwright hops from grand piano to acoustic guitar, the BBC Concert Orchestra knows when to roar and when to whisper

R ufus Wainwright says that he’s been rehearsing these back-to-back orchestral presentations of Want One and Want Two for three days, “and I feel like I’m on a different planet” – the Canadian singer-songwriter may well have been dreaming about them for 20 years.

Rock artists who enlist an orchestra can sometimes resemble that meme of Winnie the Pooh in a bow tie and monocle – a clumsy grab at classiness – but then the Want albums aren’t really rock. Drawing on chamber-pop, cabaret, opera and the Great American Songbook, with knowing quotations from Ravel and Wagner, these songs were built for opulence. The BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Sarah Hicks and joined by original drummer Matt Johnson, performs the work of several arrangers, each one a sensitive translation. As Wainwright hops between grand piano and acoustic guitar, they know when to roar and when to whisper.

“I’m 50! Jesus!” Wainwright exclaims at one point, conscious that he is reinhabiting the turbulence of his late 20s. Dressed as if for a travelling circus, or a scene-stealing turn in The Last Waltz, he looks splendid and sounds better, notwithstanding a couple of ragged false starts, charmingly handled. Like many cult artists, he makes a virtue of his fallibility. “Please stay to see if I make it or not,” he says at the end of Want One. “It’s kind of like a sporting event.”

For Want Two, the hour is later, the hall a little emptier, the songs a little patchier. Guest vocalist Jake Shears gives it everything he’s got but Old Whore’s Diet – nine minutes long and you feel every one – is a rare duffer. The magnificent encore of Bush-era protest song Going to a Town (which closes both shows) is a welcome corrective.

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That aside, these albums are Wainwright’s twin peaks as a songwriter, praised at the time by David Bowie and Elton John. The range is extraordinary: the quietly patricidal Dinner at Eight, Memphis Skyline’s shimmering tribute to Jeff Buckley, the wracked immensity of Go or Go Ahead. For all its musical grandeur, one of the night’s biggest ovations goes to The Art Teacher: just Wainwright, a piano and a perfect song.

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Twenty years after his self-titled debut album was released, Rufus Wainwright has announced a new tour to commemorate the success of the record and his sophomore album Poses . The Rufus Wainwright ‘All These Poses Anniversary Tour’ will feature the singer backed up by a full band — something audiences haven’t seen Wainwright do in years.

“A lot of the questions I was asking 20 years ago still haunt me today, though I may seem much more confident and experienced,” the singer said told Billboard . “Listening to this old material I’m reminded of how curious and affected I was by the mysteries of life back then. Funny how one totally changes and totally doesn’t at the same time.”

Once referred to as “the greatest songwriter on the planet” by Elton John, Rufus Wainwright is currently performing in Northern Stars, a live concert series in which the singer covers legendary Canadian artists like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The artist will then premiere his second opera, Hadrian , in Toronto in October, followed by his this new US tour starting in November.

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Speaking to Billboard about the forthcoming tour , Wainwright said: “[I’m] looking forward to singing the longing melodies of a boy with the voice of a grown man.”

Rufus Wainwright plays the following US tour dates:

November 9: Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Theatre November 10: San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic November 12: Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theater November 13: Eugene, OR @ John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts November 17: Boulder, CO @ Boulder Theater November 20: Chicago, IL @ Vic Theatre November 22: Toronto, ON @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre December 4: New York, NY @ Beacon Theater December 5: Boston, MA @ Venue TBA December 7: Glenside, PA @ Keswick Theatre December 8: Bethesda, MD @ Music Center at Strathmore December 10: Charlottesville, VA @ The Paramount Theater December 11: Nashville, TN @ Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum December 12: Atlanta, GA @ Symphony Hall.

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• November 16, 2023 Setlist

Rufus Wainwright Setlist at The Birchmere, Alexandria, VA, USA

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• Grey Gardens Play Video
• Vibrate Play Video
• This Love Affair Play Video
• Matinee Idol Play Video
• Gay Messiah Play Video
• 11:11 Play Video
• He Loved Play Video
• The Art Teacher Play Video
• Old Song Play Video
• Early Morning Madness Play Video
• Out of the Game Play Video
• So Long, Marianne ( Leonard Cohen  cover) Play Video
• Want Play Video
• Montauk Play Video
• Poses Play Video
• Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk Play Video
• Going to a Town Play Video
• Hallelujah ( Leonard Cohen  cover) Play Video

Edits and Comments

3 activities (last edit by porthole , 31 Dec 2023, 04:55 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
• Grey Gardens
• Gay Messiah
• The Art Teacher
• This Love Affair
• Out of the Game
• Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
• So Long, Marianne by Leonard Cohen
• Going to a Town
• Matinee Idol
• Early Morning Madness

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Rufus Wainwright

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Rufus Wainwright Gig Timeline

• Oct 11 2023 Cité de la musique (Salle des concerts) Paris, France Start time: 8:05 PM 8:05 PM
• Nov 15 2023 Shaftman Performance Hall - Jefferson Center Roanoke, VA, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 16 2023 The Birchmere This Setlist Alexandria, VA, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 17 2023 City Winery Pittsburgh, PA, USA Add time Add time
• Dec 14 2023 Macky Auditorium Boulder, CO, USA Start time: 7:15 PM 7:15 PM

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CEO Andy Jassy’s 2023 Letter to Shareholders

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Dear Shareholders:

Last year at this time, I shared my enthusiasm and optimism for Amazon’s future. Today, I have even more. The reasons are many, but start with the progress we’ve made in our financial results and customer experiences, and extend to our continued innovation and the remarkable opportunities in front of us.

In 2023, Amazon’s total revenue grew 12% year-over-year (“YoY”) from $514B to $575B. By segment, North America revenue increased 12% YoY from $316B to $353B, International revenue grew 11% YoY from $118B to $131B, and AWS revenue increased 13% YoY from $80B to $91B.

Further, Amazon’s operating income and Free Cash Flow (“FCF”) dramatically improved. Operating income in 2023 improved 201% YoY from $12.2B (an operating margin of 2.4%) to $36.9B (an operating margin of 6.4%). Trailing Twelve Month FCF adjusted for equipment finance leases improved from -$12.8B in 2022 to $35.5B (up $48.3B).

While we’ve made meaningful progress on our financial measures, what we’re most pleased about is the continued customer experience improvements across our businesses.

In our Stores business, customers have enthusiastically responded to our relentless focus on selection, price, and convenience. We continue to have the broadest retail selection , with hundreds of millions of products available, tens of millions added last year alone, and several premium brands starting to list on Amazon (e.g. Coach, Victoria’s Secret, Pit Viper, Martha Stewart, Clinique, Lancôme, and Urban Decay).

Being sharp on price is always important , but particularly in an uncertain economy, where customers are careful about how much they’re spending. As a result, in Q4 2023, we kicked off the holiday season with Prime Big Deal Days, an exclusive event for Prime members to provide an early start on holiday shopping. This was followed by our extended Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event, open to all customers, that became our largest revenue event ever. For all of 2023, customers saved nearly $24B across millions of deals and coupons, almost 70% more than the prior year.

We also continue to improve delivery speeds, breaking multiple company records . In 2023, Amazon delivered at the fastest speeds ever to Prime members, with more than 7 billion items arriving same or next day, including more than 4 billion in the U.S. and more than 2 billion in Europe. In the U.S., this result is the combination of two things. One is the benefit of regionalization, where we re-architected the network to store items closer to customers. The other is the expansion of same-day facilities, where in 2023, we increased the number of items delivered same day or overnight by nearly 70% YoY. As we get items to customers this fast, customers choose Amazon to fulfill their shopping needs more frequently, and we can see the results in various areas including how fast our everyday essentials business is growing (over 20% YoY in Q4 2023).

Our regionalization efforts have also trimmed transportation distances, helping lower our cost to serve . In 2023, for the first time since 2018, we reduced our cost to serve on a per unit basis globally. In the U.S. alone, cost to serve was down by more than $0.45 per unit YoY. Decreasing cost to serve allows us both to invest in speed improvements and afford adding more selection at lower Average Selling Prices (“ASPs”). More selection at lower prices puts us in consideration for more purchases.

As we look toward 2024 (and beyond), we’re not done lowering our cost to serve . We’ve challenged every closely held belief in our fulfillment network, and reevaluated every part of it, and found several areas where we believe we can lower costs even further while also delivering faster for customers. Our inbound fulfillment architecture and resulting inventory placement are areas of focus in 2024, and we have optimism there’s more upside for us.

Internationally , we like the trajectory of our established countries, and see meaningful progress in our emerging geographies (e.g. India, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Middle East, Africa, etc.) as they continue to expand selection and features, and move toward profitability (in Q4 2023, Mexico became our latest international Stores locale to turn profitable). We have high conviction that these new geographies will continue to grow and be profitable in the long run.

Alongside our Stores business, Amazon’s Advertising progress remains strong , growing 24% YoY from $38B in 2022 to $47B in 2023, primarily driven by our sponsored ads. We’ve added Sponsored TV to this offering, a self-service solution for brands to create campaigns that can appear on up to 30+ streaming TV services, including Amazon Freevee and Twitch, and have no minimum spend. Recently, we’ve expanded our streaming TV advertising by introducing ads into Prime Video shows and movies, where brands can reach over 200 million monthly viewers in our most popular entertainment offerings, across hit movies and shows, award-winning Amazon MGM Originals, and live sports like Thursday Night Football . Streaming TV advertising is growing quickly and off to a strong start.

Shifting to AWS , we started 2023 seeing substantial cost optimization, with most companies trying to save money in an uncertain economy. Much of this optimization was catalyzed by AWS helping customers use the cloud more efficiently and leverage more powerful, price-performant AWS capabilities like Graviton chips (our generalized CPU chips that provide ~40% better price-performance than other leading x86 processors), S3 Intelligent Tiering (a storage class that uses AI to detect objects accessed less frequently and store them in less expensive storage layers), and Savings Plans (which give customers lower prices in exchange for longer commitments). This work diminished short-term revenue, but was best for customers, much appreciated, and should bode well for customers and AWS longer-term. By the end of 2023, we saw cost optimization attenuating, new deals accelerating, customers renewing at larger commitments over longer time periods, and migrations growing again.

The past year was also a significant delivery year for AWS. We announced our next generation of generalized CPU chips (Graviton4), which provides up to 30% better compute performance and 75% more memory bandwidth than its already-leading predecessor (Graviton3). We also announced AWS Trainium2 chips, which will deliver up to four times faster machine learning training for generative AI applications and three times more memory capacity than Trainium1. We continued expanding our AWS infrastructure footprint, now offering 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic Regions globally, with six new Regions coming (Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and a second German region in Berlin). In Generative AI (“GenAI”), we added dozens of features to Amazon SageMaker to make it easier for developers to build new Foundation Models (“FMs”). We invented and delivered a new service (Amazon Bedrock) that lets companies leverage existing FMs to build GenAI applications. And, we launched the most capable coding assistant around in Amazon Q. Customers are excited about these capabilities, and we’re seeing significant traction in our GenAI offerings. (More on how we’re approaching GenAI and why we believe we’ll be successful later in the letter.)

We’re also making progress on many of our newer business investments that have the potential to be important to customers and Amazon long-term. Touching on two of them:

We have increasing conviction that Prime Video can be a large and profitable business on its own. This confidence is buoyed by the continued development of compelling, exclusive content (e.g. Thursday Night Football, Lord of the Rings, Reacher, The Boys, Citadel , Road House , etc.), Prime Video customers’ engagement with this content, growth in our marketplace programs (through our third-party Channels program, as well as the broad selection of shows and movies customers rent or buy), and the addition of advertising in Prime Video.

In October, we hit a major milestone in our journey to commercialize Project Kuiper when we launched two end-to-end prototype satellites into space, and successfully validated all key systems and sub-systems—rare in an initial launch like this. Kuiper is our low Earth orbit satellite initiative that aims to provide broadband connectivity to the 400-500 million households who don’t have it today (as well as governments and enterprises seeking better connectivity and performance in more remote areas), and is a very large revenue opportunity for Amazon. We’re on track to launch our first production satellites in 2024. We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress.

Overall, 2023 was a strong year, and I’m grateful to our collective teams who delivered on behalf of customers. These results represent a lot of invention, collaboration, discipline, execution, and reimagination across Amazon. Yet, I think every one of us at Amazon believes that we have a long way to go, in every one of our businesses, before we exhaust how we can make customers’ lives better and easier, and there is considerable upside in each of the businesses in which we’re investing.

In my annual letter over the last three years, I’ve tried to give shareholders more insight into how we’re thinking about the company, the businesses we’re pursuing, our future opportunities, and what makes us tick. We operate in a diverse number of market segments, but what ties Amazon together is our joint mission to make customers’ lives better and easier every day. This is true across every customer segment we serve (consumers, sellers, brands, developers, enterprises, and creators). At our best, we’re not just customer obsessed, but also inventive, thinking several years out, learning like crazy, scrappy, delivering quickly, and operating like the world’s biggest start-up.

We spend enormous energy thinking about how to empower builders, inside and outside of our company. We characterize builders as people who like to invent. They like to dissect a customer experience, assess what’s wrong with it, and reinvent it. Builders tend not to be satisfied until the customer experience is perfect. This doesn’t hinder them from delivering improvements along the way, but it drives them to keep tinkering and iterating continually. While unafraid to invent from scratch, they have no hesitation about using high-quality, scalable, cost-effective components from others. What matters to builders is having the right tools to keep rapidly improving customer experiences.

The best way we know how to do this is by building primitive services . Think of them as discrete, foundational building blocks that builders can weave together in whatever combination they desire. Here’s how we described primitives in our 2003 AWS Vision document:

“Primitives are the raw parts or the most foundational-level building blocks for software developers. They’re indivisible (if they can be functionally split into two they must) and they do one thing really well. They’re meant to be used together rather than as solutions in and of themselves. And, we’ll build them for maximum developer flexibility. We won’t put a bunch of constraints on primitives to guard against developers hurting themselves.  Rather, we’ll optimize for developer freedom and innovation.”

Of course, this concept of primitives can be applied to more than software development, but they’re especially relevant in technology. And, over the last 20 years, primitives have been at the heart of how we’ve innovated quickly.

One of the many advantages to thinking in primitives is speed . Let me give you two counter examples that illustrate this point. First, we built a successful owned-inventory retail business in the early years at Amazon where we bought all our products from publishers, manufacturers, and distributors, stored them in our warehouses, and shipped them ourselves. Over time, we realized we could add broader selection and lower prices by allowing third-party sellers to list their offerings next to our own on our highly trafficked search and product detail pages. We’d built several core retail services (e.g. payments, search, ordering, browse, item management) that made trying different marketplace concepts simpler than if we didn’t have those components. A good set of primitives? Not really.

It turns out that these core components were too jumbled together and not partitioned right. We learned this the hard way when we partnered with companies like Target in our Merchant.com business in the early 2000s. The concept was that target.com would use Amazon’s ecommerce components as the backbone of its website, and then customize however they wished. To enable this arrangement, we had to deliver those components as separable capabilities through application programming interfaces (“APIs”). This decoupling was far more difficult than anticipated because we’d built so many dependencies between these services as Amazon grew so quickly the first few years.

This coupling was further highlighted by a heavyweight mechanism we used to operate called “NPI.” Any new initiative requiring work from multiple internal teams had to be reviewed by this NPI cabal where each team would communicate how many people-weeks their work would take. This bottleneck constrained what we accomplished, frustrated the heck out of us, and inspired us to eradicate it by refactoring these ecommerce components into true primitive services with well-documented, stable APIs that enabled our builders to use each other’s services without any coordination tax.

In the middle of the Target and NPI challenges, we were contemplating building a new set of infrastructure technology services that would allow both Amazon to move more quickly and external developers to build anything they imagined. This set of services became known as AWS, and the above experiences convinced us that we should build a set of primitive services that could be composed together how anybody saw fit. At that time, most technology offerings were very feature-rich, and tried to solve multiple jobs simultaneously. As a result, they often didn’t do any one job that well.

Our AWS primitive services were designed from the start to be different. They offered important, highly flexible, but focused functionality. For instance, our first major primitive was Amazon Simple Storage Service (“S3”) in March 2006 that aimed to provide highly secure object storage, at very high durability and availability, at Internet scale, and very low cost. In other words, be stellar at object storage. When we launched S3, developers were excited, and a bit mystified. It was a very useful primitive service, but they wondered, why just object storage? When we launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”) in August 2006 and Amazon SimpleDB in 2007, people realized we were building a set of primitive infrastructure services that would allow them to build anything they could imagine, much faster, more cost-effectively, and without having to manage or lay out capital upfront for the datacenter or hardware. As AWS unveiled these building blocks over time (we now have over 240 at builders’ disposal—meaningfully more than any other provider), whole companies sprang up quickly on top of AWS (e.g. Airbnb, Dropbox, Instagram, Pinterest, Stripe, etc.), industries reinvented themselves on AWS (e.g. streaming with Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Fox, Paramount), and even critical government agencies switched to AWS (e.g. CIA, along with several other U.S. Intelligence agencies). But, one of the lesser-recognized beneficiaries was Amazon’s own consumer businesses, which innovated at dramatic speed across retail, advertising, devices (e.g. Alexa and FireTV), Prime Video and Music, Amazon Go, Drones, and many other endeavors by leveraging the speed with which AWS let them build. Primitives, done well, rapidly accelerate builders’ ability to innovate .

So, how do you build the right set of primitives?

Pursuing primitives is not a guarantee of success. There are many you could build, and even more ways to combine them. But, a good compass is to pick real customer problems you’re trying to solve .

Our logistics primitives are an instructive example. In Amazon’s early years, we built core capabilities around warehousing items, and then picking, packing, and shipping them quickly and reliably to customers. As we added third-party sellers to our marketplace, they frequently requested being able to use these same logistics capabilities. Because we’d built this initial set of logistics primitives, we were able to introduce Fulfillment by Amazon (“FBA”) in 2006, allowing sellers to use Amazon’s Fulfillment Network to store items, and then have us pick, pack, and ship them to customers, with the bonus of these products being available for fast, Prime delivery. This service has saved sellers substantial time and money (typically about 70% less expensive than doing themselves), and remains one of our most popular services. As more merchants began to operate their own direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) websites, many yearned to still use our fulfillment capabilities, while also accessing our payments and identity primitives to drive higher order conversion on their own websites (as Prime members have already shared this payment and identity information with Amazon). A couple years ago, we launched Buy with Prime to address this customer need. Prime members can check out quickly on DTC websites like they do on Amazon, and receive fast Prime shipping speeds on Buy with Prime items—increasing order conversion for merchants by ~25% vs. their default experience.

As our Stores business has grown substantially, and our supply chain become more complex, we’ve had to develop a slew of capabilities in order to offer customers unmatched selection, at low prices, and with very fast delivery times. We’ve become adept at getting products from other countries to the U.S., clearing customs, and then shipping to storage facilities. Because we don’t have enough space in our shipping fulfillment centers to store all the inventory needed to maintain our desired in-stock levels, we’ve built a set of lower-cost, upstream warehouses solely optimized for storage (without sophisticated end-user, pick, pack, and ship functions). Having these two pools of inventory has prompted us to build algorithms predicting when we’ll run out of inventory in our shipping fulfillment centers and automatically replenishing from these upstream warehouses. And, in the last few years, our scale and available alternatives have forced us to build our own last mile delivery capability (roughly the size of UPS) to affordably serve the number of consumers and sellers wanting to use Amazon.

We’ve solved these customer needs by building additional fulfillment primitives that both serve Amazon consumers better and address external sellers’ increasingly complex ecommerce activities. For instance, for sellers needing help importing products, we offer a Global Mile service that leverages our expertise here. To ship inventory from the border (or anywhere domestically) to our storage facilities, we enable sellers to use either our first-party Amazon Freight service or third-party freight partners via our Partnered Carrier Program. To store more inventory at lower cost to ensure higher in-stock rates and shorter delivery times, we’ve opened our upstream Amazon Warehousing and Distribution facilities to sellers (along with automated replenishment to our shipping fulfillment centers when needed). For those wanting to manage their own shipping, we’ve started allowing customers to use our last mile delivery network to deliver packages to their end-customers in a service called Amazon Shipping. And, for sellers who wish to use our fulfillment network as a central place to store inventory and ship items to customers regardless of where they ordered, we have a Multi-Channel Fulfillment service. These are all primitives that we’ve exposed to sellers.

Building in primitives meaningfully expands your degrees of freedom . You can keep your primitives to yourself and build compelling features and capabilities on top of them to allow your customers and business to reap the benefits of rapid innovation. You can offer primitives to external customers as paid services (as we have with AWS and our more recent logistics offerings). Or, you can compose these primitives into external, paid applications as we have with FBA, Buy with Prime, or Supply Chain by Amazon (a recently released logistics service that integrates several of our logistics primitives). But, you’ve got options. You’re only constrained by the primitives you’ve built and your imagination.

Take the new, same-day fulfillment facilities in our Stores business. They’re located in the largest metro areas around the U.S. (we currently have 58), house our top-moving 100,000 SKUs (but also cover millions of other SKUs that can be injected from nearby fulfillment centers into these same-day facilities), and streamline the time required to go from picking a customer’s order to being ready to ship to as little as 11 minutes. These facilities also constitute our lowest cost to serve in the network. The experience has been so positive for customers that we’re planning to double the number of these facilities.

But, how else might we use this capability if we think of it as a core building block? We have a very large and growing grocery business in organic grocery (with Whole Foods Market) and non-perishable goods (e.g. consumables, canned goods, health and beauty products, etc.). We’ve been working hard on building a mass, physical store offering (Amazon Fresh) that offers a great perishable experience; however, what if we used our same-day facilities to enable customers to easily add milk, eggs, or other perishable items to any Amazon order and get same day? It might change how people think of splitting up their weekly grocery shopping, and make perishable shopping as convenient as non-perishable shopping already is.

Or, take a service that some people have questioned, but that’s making substantial progress and we think of as a very valuable future primitive capability—our delivery drones (called Prime Air). Drones will eventually allow us to deliver packages to customers in less than an hour. It won’t start off being available for all sizes of packages and in all locations, but we believe it’ll be pervasive over time. Think about how the experience of ordering perishable items changes with sub-one-hour delivery?

The same is true for Amazon Pharmacy. Need throat lozenges, Advil, an antibiotic, or some other medication? Same-day facilities already deliver many of these items within hours, and that will only get shorter as we launch Prime Air more expansively. Highly flexible building blocks can be composed across businesses and in new combinations that change what’s possible for customers.

Being intentional about building primitives requires patience . Releasing the first couple primitive services can sometimes feel random to customers (or the public at large) before we’ve unveiled how these building blocks come together. I’ve mentioned AWS and S3 as an example, but our Health offering is another. In the last 10 years, we’ve tried several Health experiments across various teams—but they were not driven by our primitives approach. This changed in 2022 when we applied our primitives thinking to the enormous global healthcare problem and opportunity. We’ve now created several important building blocks to help transform the customer health experience: Acute Care (via Amazon Clinic), Primary Care (via One Medical), and a Pharmacy service to buy whatever medication a patient may need. Because of our growing success, Amazon customers are now asking us to help them with all kinds of wellness and nutrition opportunities—which can be partially unlocked with some of our existing grocery building blocks, including Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh.

As a builder, it’s hard to wait for these building blocks to be built versus just combining a bunch of components together to solve a specific problem. The latter can be faster, but almost always slows you down in the future. We’ve seen this temptation in our robotics efforts in our fulfillment network. There are dozens of processes we seek to automate to improve safety, productivity, and cost. Some of the biggest opportunities require invention in domains such as storage automation, manipulation, sortation, mobility of large cages across long distances, and automatic identification of items. Many teams would skip right to the complex solution, baking in “just enough” of these disciplines to make a concerted solution work, but which doesn’t solve much more, can’t easily be evolved as new requirements emerge, and that can’t be reused for other initiatives needing many of the same components. However, when you think in primitives, like our Robotics team does, you prioritize the building blocks, picking important initiatives that can benefit from each of these primitives, but which build the tool chest to compose more freely (and quickly) for future and complex needs. Our Robotics team has built primitives in each of the above domains that will be lynchpins in our next set of automation, which includes multi-floor storage, trailer loading and unloading, large pallet mobility, and more flexible sortation across our outbound processes (including in vehicles). The team is also building a set of foundation AI models to better identify products in complex environments, optimize the movement of our growing robotic fleet, and better manage the bottlenecks in our facilities.

Sometimes, people ask us “what’s your next pillar? You have Marketplace, Prime, and AWS, what’s next?” This, of course, is a thought-provoking question. However, a question people never ask, and might be even more interesting is what’s the next set of primitives you’re building that enables breakthrough customer experiences? If you asked me today, I’d lead with Generative AI (“GenAI”).

Much of the early public attention has focused on GenAI applications , with the remarkable 2022 launch of ChatGPT. But, to our “primitive” way of thinking, there are three distinct layers in the GenAI stack, each of which is gigantic, and each of which we’re deeply investing.

The bottom layer is for developers and companies wanting to build foundation models (“FMs”). The primary primitives are the compute required to train models and generate inferences (or predictions), and the software that makes it easier to build these models. Starting with compute, the key is the chip inside it. To date, virtually all the leading FMs have been trained on Nvidia chips, and we continue to offer the broadest collection of Nvidia instances of any provider. That said, supply has been scarce and cost remains an issue as customers scale their models and applications. Customers have asked us to push the envelope on price-performance for AI chips, just as we have with Graviton for generalized CPU chips. As a result, we’ve built custom AI training chips (named Trainium) and inference chips (named Inferentia). In 2023, we announced second versions of our Trainium and Inferentia chips, which are both meaningfully more price-performant than their first versions and other alternatives. This past fall, leading FM-maker, Anthropic, announced it would use Trainium and Inferentia to build, train, and deploy its future FMs. We already have several customers using our AI chips, including Anthropic, Airbnb, Hugging Face, Qualtrics, Ricoh, and Snap.

Customers building their own FM must tackle several challenges in getting a model into production. Getting data organized and fine-tuned, building scalable and efficient training infrastructure, and then deploying models at scale in a low latency, cost-efficient manner is hard. It’s why we’ve built Amazon SageMaker, a managed, end-to-end service that’s been a game changer for developers in preparing their data for AI, managing experiments, training models faster (e.g. Perplexity AI trains models 40% faster in SageMaker), lowering inference latency (e.g. Workday has reduced inference latency by 80% with SageMaker), and improving developer productivity (e.g. NatWest reduced its time-to-value for AI from 12-18 months to under seven months using SageMaker).

The middle layer is for customers seeking to leverage an existing FM, customize it with their own data, and leverage a leading cloud provider’s security and features to build a GenAI application—all as a managed service. Amazon Bedrock invented this layer and provides customers with the easiest way to build and scale GenAI applications with the broadest selection of first- and third-party FMs, as well as leading ease-of-use capabilities that allow GenAI builders to get higher quality model outputs more quickly. Bedrock is off to a very strong start with tens of thousands of active customers after just a few months. The team continues to iterate rapidly on Bedrock, recently delivering Guardrails (to safeguard what questions applications will answer), Knowledge Bases (to expand models’ knowledge base with Retrieval Augmented Generation—or RAG—and real-time queries), Agents (to complete multi-step tasks), and Fine-Tuning (to keep teaching and refining models), all of which improve customers’ application quality. We also just added new models from Anthropic (their newly-released Claude 3 is the best performing large language model in the world), Meta (with Llama 2), Mistral, Stability AI, Cohere, and our own Amazon Titan family of FMs. What customers have learned at this early stage of GenAI is that there’s meaningful iteration required to build a production GenAI application with the requisite enterprise quality at the cost and latency needed. Customers don’t want only one model. They want access to various models and model sizes for different types of applications. Customers want a service that makes this experimenting and iterating simple, and this is what Bedrock does, which is why customers are so excited about it. Customers using Bedrock already include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, Clariant, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Delta Air Lines, Druva, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Intuit, KT, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis, Netsmart, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, PGA TOUR, Ricoh, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

The top layer of this stack is the application layer. We’re building a substantial number of GenAI applications across every Amazon consumer business. These range from Rufus (our new, AI-powered shopping assistant), to an even more intelligent and capable Alexa, to advertising capabilities (making it simple with natural language prompts to generate, customize, and edit high-quality images, advertising copy, and videos), to customer and seller service productivity apps, to dozens of others. We’re also building several apps in AWS, including arguably the most compelling early GenAI use case—a coding companion. We recently launched Amazon Q, an expert on AWS that writes, debugs, tests, and implements code, while also doing transformations (like moving from an old version of Java to a new one), and querying customers’ various data repositories (e.g. Intranets, wikis, Salesforce, Amazon S3, ServiceNow, Slack, Atlassian, etc.) to answer questions, summarize data, carry on coherent conversation, and take action. Q is the most capable work assistant available today and evolving fast.

While we’re building a substantial number of GenAI applications ourselves, the vast majority will ultimately be built by other companies. However, what we’re building in AWS is not just a compelling app or foundation model. These AWS services, at all three layers of the stack, comprise a set of primitives that democratize this next seminal phase of AI, and will empower internal and external builders to transform virtually every customer experience that we know (and invent altogether new ones as well). We’re optimistic that much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS.

(By the way, don’t underestimate the importance of security in GenAI. Customers’ AI models contain some of their most sensitive data. AWS and its partners offer the strongest security capabilities and track record in the world; and as a result, more and more customers want to run their GenAI on AWS.)

Recently, I was asked a provocative question—how does Amazon remain resilient? While simple in its wording, it’s profound because it gets to the heart of our success to date as well as for the future. The answer lies in our discipline around deeply held principles: 1/ hiring builders who are motivated to continually improve and expand what’s possible; 2/ solving real customer challenges, rather than what we think may be interesting technology; 3/ building in primitives so that we can innovate and experiment at the highest rate; 4/ not wasting time trying to fight gravity (spoiler alert: you always lose)—when we discover technology that enables better customer experiences, we embrace it; 5/ accepting and learning from failed experiments—actually becoming more energized to try again, with new knowledge to employ.

Today, we continue to operate in times of unprecedented change that come with unusual opportunities for growth across the areas in which we operate. For instance, while we have a nearly $500B consumer business, about 80% of the worldwide retail market segment still resides in physical stores. Similarly, with a cloud computing business at nearly a $100B revenue run rate, more than 85% of the global IT spend is still on-premises. These businesses will keep shifting online and into the cloud. In Media and Advertising, content will continue to migrate from linear formats to streaming. Globally, hundreds of millions of people who don’t have adequate broadband access will gain that connectivity in the next few years. Last but certainly not least, Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet. Unlike the mass modernization of on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, where there’s work required to migrate, this GenAI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all.

There has never been a time in Amazon’s history where we’ve felt there is so much opportunity to make our customers’ lives better and easier. We’re incredibly excited about what’s possible, focused on inventing the future, and look forward to working together to make it so.

Andy Jassy President and Chief Executive Officer Amazon.com, Inc.

P.S. As we have always done, our original 1997 Shareholder Letter follows. What’s written there is as true today as it was in 1997.

To our shareholders:

Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997: by year-end, we had served more than 1.5 million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to $147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite aggressive competitive entry.

But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.

We have a window of opportunity as larger players marshal the resources to pursue the online opportunity and as customers, new to purchasing online, are receptive to forming new relationships. The competitive landscape has continued to evolve at a fast pace. Many large players have moved online with credible offerings and have devoted substantial energy and resources to building awareness, traffic, and sales. Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas. We see substantial opportunity in the large markets we are targeting. This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders.

It’s All About the Long Term

We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term . This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.

Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy:

• We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.
• We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
• We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.
• We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.
• When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.
• We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments.
• We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses.
• We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.
• We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.

We aren’t so bold as to claim that the above is the “right” investment philosophy, but it’s ours, and we would be remiss if we weren’t clear in the approach we have taken and will continue to take.

With this foundation, we would like to turn to a review of our business focus, our progress in 1997, and our outlook for the future.

Obsess Over Customers

From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy- to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click shopping℠, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling.

By many measures, Amazon.com came a long way in 1997:

• Sales grew from $15.7 million in 1996 to $147.8 million – an 838% increase.
• Cumulative customer accounts grew from 180,000 to 1,510,000 – a 738% increase.
• The percentage of orders from repeat customers grew from over 46% in the fourth quarter of 1996 to over 58% in the same period in 1997.
• In terms of audience reach, per Media Metrix, our Web site went from a rank of 90th to within the top 20.
• We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.

Infrastructure

During 1997, we worked hard to expand our business infrastructure to support these greatly increased traffic, sales, and service levels:

• Amazon.com’s employee base grew from 158 to 614, and we significantly strengthened our management team.
• Distribution center capacity grew from 50,000 to 285,000 square feet, including a 70% expansion of our Seattle facilities and the launch of our second distribution center in Delaware in November.
• Inventories rose to over 200,000 titles at year-end, enabling us to improve availability for our customers.
• Our cash and investment balances at year-end were $125 million, thanks to our initial public offering in May 1997 and our $75 million loan, affording us substantial strategic flexibility.

Our Employees

The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.

It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.

Goals for 1998

We are still in the early stages of learning how to bring new value to our customers through Internet commerce and merchandising. Our goal remains to continue to solidify and extend our brand and customer base. This requires sustained investment in systems and infrastructure to support outstanding customer convenience, selection, and service while we grow. We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments. We also believe there are significant opportunities to better serve our customers overseas, such as reducing delivery times and better tailoring the customer experience. To be certain, a big part of the challenge for us will lie not in finding new ways to expand our business, but in prioritizing our investments.

We now know vastly more about online commerce than when Amazon.com was founded, but we still have so much to learn. Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. The challenges and hurdles we will face to make our long-term vision for Amazon.com a reality are several: aggressive, capable, well-funded competition; considerable growth challenges and execution risk; the risks of product and geographic expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity. However, as we’ve long said, online bookselling, and online commerce in general, should prove to be a very large market, and it’s likely that a number of companies will see significant benefit. We feel good about what we’ve done, and even more excited about what we want to do.

1997 was indeed an incredible year. We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement.

Jeffrey P. Bezos Founder and Chief Executive Officer Amazon.com, Inc.

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