About This Blog

Mark Mulligan

This is the blog of Mark Mulligan, where you will find opinion and insight on the music industry’s often painful journey towards creating a new business around music. Mark’s been analyzing the digital music market for over a decade, right from the days when there wasn’t much of one to talk of, and when DRM was ‘Rights Management’ not ‘Rights Protection’.

Mark endeavours to strike a balanced approach that is sensitive to the needs and concerns of the music labels but equally understands the realities of consumer behaviour and the business needs of technology companies and telcos.  But this blog is a conversation, not a soap box (well ok it’s a bit of one) but nonetheless your feedback is not just welcome, it’s essential. So please leave comments.

It’s taken the industry a long time and a lot of pain to get from the fear-dominated days of the original Naptser to where we are now, but there’s still plenty of distance to go. In fact we’re on the precipice of an impasse as the industry slowly wakes up to the fact that so many current music products are out of step with consumer demand.

About Mark

For 11 years Mark was a Vice President and Research Director at Jupiter Research (later acquired by Forrester Research). In his role as a music analyst and senior research manager, Mark worked right across the digital music value chain, with all the leading digital music services and technology companies, the major record labels, rights bodies, retailers, hardware companies and telcos.

Mark is routinely quoted and interviewed by top tier media (TV, radio, print and online) and speaks at leading music events such as Midem, Popkom, Canadian Music Week, London Calling, In The City.

In addition to following the music industry professionally, Mark lives and breathes music. He is a classically trained musician and is in the third generation of guitar players in his family (currently working on gently prodding his children to becoming the fourth) and his grandparents and father have all been music teachers and have all played in bands.  Mark also has a small, fully digital, recording studio which he uses to make lots of not so subtle bleeps, beats and squeeks.  ‘Back in the day’ he had a three single record deal and had his music played on BBC Radio 1.

To contact me please email musicindustryblog AT gmail DOT COM

Here are some of my recent press quotes (for more click here)

• The Guardian: The Third Generation iPad
• BBC: Pirate Bay Vows to Go Underground
• Paid Content: When Will The Celestial Jukebox Go Mainstream?
• Financial Times: Music Industry Warms to Streaming
• Fast Company: Rhapsody, Spotify, Netflix and the 28 Day Waiting Game
• CNN: What to expect from Apple’s iCloud
• Music Week: Adele’s 21 Sells 1m on iTunes in Europe
• New York Times: Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable
• Digital Music Insider: Is Mark Mulligan Dr. House?
• Financial Times: App developers caught in iCloud storm

These are videos of some of my conference keynotes and interviews: