Will the recession change Big Tech’s view on entertainment?

Music start up Utopia just announced a round of layoffs, fitting into a much bigger dynamic that may reshape the entertainment landscape. There are many reasons why the coming global recession will be unique, but the one that is most relevant to the digital entertainment sector is that it is going to be the first one since modern consumer tech has been truly mainstream. This matters, not just because of the unchartered territory this reflects, but also because tech companies (even the biggest) operate differently than traditional companies, placing much bigger bets on future growth. A strategy that works well in times of plenty, but that is undergoing rapid re-evaluation in the face of an onrushing recession. Big tech firms are reducing headcount, especially in the bets that plan to make profit in the future, but not yet. Most forms of digital entertainment fall in this bracket. Streaming music and video have long been loss leaders for the tech majors, but can that continue in a recession? 

2007 was the year the last recession started and the consumer tech world looked very, very different to today. The first iPhone was not sold until June 2007; Facebook started the year with 14 million users; Netflix launched its streaming service; but Spotify was still a year away from launch; Instagram would not be launched for another three years; and Snapchat for another five. So, when the next recession most likely hits in 2023, it will be the first one in which consumer tech has been mainstream.

All of those companies, and most of the rest that drove the consumer tech revolution, grew fast because they aggressively invested in future potential, rather than wait to fund it organically. It is a mindset that has its origins in the VC world view of: build product and customer base first, worry about profit later. Without that approach, it is probable that the consumer tech sector would not be anywhere near as big and developed as it is now. But the strategy requires the basic premise of next year bringing more growth, otherwise the model falls down. Which is why we are now seeing retractions across big tech. Meta laid off 11,000 employees, many from its VR Labs division; Stripe cut 1,000 jobs because it overexpanded during its lockdown-boom; Apple froze hiring outside of R+D; and 10,00 layoffs look on the cards for Amazon. 

Out of all this redundancy mayhem, one particularly interesting figure emerged: Amazon is on track to lose $10 billion a year from its ‘Worldwide Digital’ team, which includes Alexa, Echo, and its streaming businesses. Amazon makes its money from Cloud services and commerce, devices and content are growth categories that it is investing in, both for future growth and because they help its core business. Very similar arguments can be made for Apple’s streaming businesses (video and music) and, at the very least, for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.

Which raises the question, if the tech majors start reigning in their non-core expenditure, where does this leave streaming? Practically speaking, it is highly unlikely that the tech majors are going to face such difficulties that they will have to think about shuttering their streaming services, but they may well have to trim spending. And if that happens, it is video that is far more exposed than music, because streaming video requires large investments in original content, whereas music rights costs are fixed. All that said, any music rights deals that are up for negotiation with tech majors from this point on will almost certainly see the licensees pushing for reductions anywhere they can find them.

How iPod changed everything

Apple just announced that it is finally ending production of the iPod. At 21 years of age, it outlived many of the dramatic changes it witnessed and triggered. In this age dominated by streaming (and a vinyl resurgence) the iPod did not really have a place anymore, other than with its ever diminishing base of super fans. It should probably have ceased production long ago, but the iPod holds a special place in Apple’s heart and sentimentalism likely played a role in allowing it to reach its 21^st birthday before it was finally put out to pasture. And there is no doubt that the iPod earned that special place, because it was the change catalyst that transformed Apple into the mega corporation that it is today. But the iPod did even more than that, it was the trailblazer that created the environment in which today’s digital entertainment world could exist.

Back in my early days as an analyst I went to my first ever Apple analyst briefing, for the launch of the second generation. I felt like a fish out of water, with the room full of dry tech analysts asking Apple about its education strategy, its server products, its enterprise computing strategy. Then little me in the corner, asked about the iPod, and the entire room turned to me with bemused faces, just like the pub scene in American Werewolf in London.

Every successive briefing session I went to, the iPod became an ever bigger deal and the other analysts in the room started asking questions about it too. The iPod shuffled along at a steady pace until the launch of the iTunes Music Store, at which point it suddenly had a purposes it previously lacked, and sales lifted off. Apple has never looked back.

It is no coincidence that it was music that propelled the iPod to tech immortality. Steve Jobs was a massive music fan and it was his passion that helped ensure the iPod continued to receive the support it needed, even when it was not yet showing signs of fulfilling its huge potential. Apple has always been a company that is as obsessed with content as it is hardware and this is why the iPod and subsequent Apple devices have been so central to the growth of digital entertainment.

As the iPod evolved from scroll wheel to touch screen it became the launchpad for something even bigger for Apple: the iPhone (the first gen iPhone was a direct evolution of the iPod touch, at a time when smart phones were all keys). With the iPhone came apps. Just in the same way that the iPod was not the first digital music player, so Apple was not the first to make mobile apps nor of course the first to make a smartphone. But in all three cases, Apple took a promising but struggling format and made it ready for primetime. This early follower strategy underpinned Apple’s success in the 2000s and the early 2010s.

Pandora was an early beneficiary of Apple’s app strategy, being natively installed on US iPhones. The result was another lift off, with Pandora soon becoming he most widely used streaming app on the planet, even though it was only available in the US. Just as with the iTiunes / iPod combination, Apple understood the cruciality of an integrated content / device experience and its App Store became the launch pad for today’s digital entertainment economy. It did so by allowing app developers across the world to find a global audience which did not need to worry about clumsy installations and fragmented billing. Everything happened in one place, seamlessly and effortlessly. Google soon followed with its own take on the app store. Now you will struggle to find a games, music, video, news, podcast or book provider that does not use the Apple App Store, nor indeed a consumer that does not use apps to consumer content. 

Apple’s subsequent launch of the iPad and Apple TV further accelerated the adoption of digital content, giving audiences and content companies more choice about where they could benefit from the app economy. Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Books, Podcasts, News, Arcade and more followed, helping cement Apple not just as a catalyst for the digital entertainment economy, but also as a major content player in its own right.

None of this would have happened without the iPod. So even though many readers will be too young to have even owned an iPod, spare a thought for this now departed member of the digital ecosystem, because without it, the devices you use and the entertainment you consume would look very, very different.

Farewell iPod!

Hi-Res audio: It’s all about a maturing market

Apple and Amazon made a splash this week by integrating Hi-Res Dolby Atmos audio into the basic tiers of their streaming services. The timing, i.e. just after Spotify started increasing prices, is – how shall we put it, interesting. It also struck a blow against the music industry’s long-held hope that Hi-Res was going to be the key to increasing subscriber ARPU. While that might be true, for now at least, the move is an inevitable consequence of two streaming market dynamics: commodification and saturation.

Music streaming contrasts sharply with video streaming. While the video marketplace is characterised by unique catalogues, a variety of pricing and diverse value propositions (including a host of niche services) music streaming services are all at their core fundamentally the same product. When the market was in its hyper-growth phase and there were enough new users to go around, it did not matter too much that the streaming services only had branding, curation and interface to differentiate themselves from each other. Now that we are approaching a slowdown in the high-revenue developed markets, more is needed. Which is where Hi-Res comes in.

Now that streaming is, as Will Page puts it, in the ‘fracking stage’ in developed markets, success becomes defined by how well you retain subscribers rather than how well you acquire them. As all the key DSPs operate on the same basic model, they need to innovate around the core proposition in order to improve stickiness and reduce churn. Spotify started the ball rolling with its podcasts pivot, but the fact that its podcasts can be consumed by free users means it is not (yet) a tool for reducing subscriber churn.

On top of this, when podcasts are mapped with other positioning pillars, Spotify’s competitive differentiation spread is relatively narrow. Because Apple and Amazon now both have Hi-Res as standard, they not only boost audio quality but value for money (VFM) as well. Bearing in mind, both companies already scored well on VFM because they have Prime Music and Apple One in their respective armouries. 

It is Amazon, though, that looks best positioned of the four leading Western streaming services. In addition to audio quality and VFM, it is building out its podcasts play (as compared to the Wondery acquisition) and it has the potential to bundle in the world’s leading audiobook company, Audible. Given that spoken-word audio consumption grew at nearly twice the rate music did during 2020, being able to play in all lanes of audio will be crucial to competing in what will become saturated streaming markets. 

Immersive audio storytelling 

Finally, Dolby Atmos is more than simply Hi-Res audio; it is an immersive format that enables the creation of spatial audio experiences. If we are truly on the verge of a spoken-word audio revolution, then immersive audio may have a central role to play. Surround sound has been a slow burner for home video, but that may be because the video experience itself has improved so much (bigger screens, HD, more shows than ever) that the audio component has been less important (though the growing soundbar market suggests that may be beginning to change). However, in audio formats there is only the audio to do the storytelling. This could mean that tools like immersive audio become central to audio storytelling, which means, you guessed it, Amazon and Apple would then have a competitive advantage in podcasts and audiobooks that Spotify would not.

HomePod Mini: Apple’s pandemic-era product

Apple’s Tuesday product announcement showcased its 5G iPhones, but also included the launch of the new $99 HomePod Mini. Though it might have looked like a supporting act for the launch, its strategic importance should not be underestimated – especially in the context of how Apple competes with Amazon, the company that is arguably becoming Apple’s most important competitor among the Western Tech Majors (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook). Amazon is emerging as a global scale hardware competitor, focused on the home rather than on personal devices.

HomePod Mini is a product for the era of pandemic

The home is becoming the new battleground for the tech majors and Amazon has a comfortable lead with more than 50% of the installed base of smart speakers, significantly ahead of Google and far ahead of Apple which currently sits at less than 10% market share. HomePod Mini is an affordable device that gives Apple the opportunity to quickly expand its role across the homes of iPhone owners, a beachhead for future content and services. HomePod Mini is also very much a pandemic-era product move; with more of us spending more time working and studying from home, we are more inclined to use specialised home devices such as smart speakers, rather than the convenient but not specialised phone. As the HomePod was always a premium, Apple afficionado device, HomePod Mini gives Apple a tool with which it can extend its footprint in the average day of its increasingly home-bound iPhone owners.

An enabler for audio strategy

Though Apple has much bigger ambitions for the home than music alone, music is the use case that is spearheading the product strategy. Apple TV continues to grow in importance for Apple, but as a screen plug-in, it lacks the capabilities of a standalone smart speaker. As Amazon has shown, smart speakers can become the digital hub around which smart home strategies can be built. HomePod Mini may also be the tool for a bolder, joined-up audio strategy for Apple. Alongside Apple Music, Apple continues to back its radio bet Apple Music 1 (previously Beats 1) and of course it is one of the leading destinations for podcasts. Apple can pull these three disparate strands together by creating in-home use cases via HomePod Mini. In this respect, Apple will need to, once again, do all of that and more – as not only has Amazon recently added podcasts to Amazon Music, but it also the home of Audible, an asset both Apple and Spotify lack.

Finally, what Apple did not announce on Tuesday was content bundles for its hardware. An Apple One / iPhone device lifetime bundle feels like an obvious move – competition authorities permitting, perhaps sometime over the coming 12 months. A $3.99 Apple Music Home Pod tier would make sense also.

The device may be mini, but the strategy is anything but.

Quick Take: Apple One – Recession Buster

Apple officially announced its long anticipated all-in-one content bundle: Apple One. $14.99 gets you Apple Music, Arcade, Apple TV+ and 50GB of iCloud storage. A family plan retails at $19.95 and a premier plan includes 1TB storage, News and Apple’s new Fitness+ service. While the announcement was expected (and you may recall that MIDiA called this back in our December 2019 predictions report) it is important nonetheless. 

As we enter a global recession, the subscriptions market is going to be stressed far more than it was during lockdown. With job losses mounting, and many of those among Millennials – the beating heart of streaming subscriptions – increased subscriber churn is going to be a case of ‘how much’ not ‘if’. In MIDiA’s latest recession research report, we revealed that a quarter of music subscribers would cancel if they had to reduce entertainment spend and a quarter of video subscribers would cancel at least one video subscription.

A $15.99 bundle giving you video, music, games and storage will have strong appeal to cost conscious consumers who are loathe to drop their streaming entertainment but need to cut costs. As with Amazon’s Prime bundle, Apple One is well placed to weather the recession. They may not be recession proof – after all, entertainment is a nice-to-have, however good the deal – but they are certainly recession resilient.

Which may explain why music rights holders have been willing to license the bundle which almost certainly included a royalty haircut for them, to accommodate the other components of the bundle. While rights holders will not have been exactly enthusiastic about further royalty deflation (one for artists and songwriters to keep an eye out for when Apple One starts to gain share) they are also keenly aware of the need to ensure they keep as many music consumers on subscriptions as possible. 

One key learning of the impact of lockdown has been that new behaviours learned during a unique moment in time (eg not commuting to an office, doing more video calls) can result in long term behaviour shifts. Lower music rightsholder ARPU may be a price worth paying for shoring up the long term future of the music subscriber base.

Who will own the virtual concert space?

2020 will go down as a rough year for many artists, largely because of the income they lost when live ground to a halt. Unfortunately, the live music sector is still going to be disrupted in 2021 and it may take even longer for the sector to return to ‘normal’. In fact, we could see the bottom of the live sector thinned out as the smaller venues, agencies and promoters do not have the access to bridging finance that the bigger players have. So, smaller artists may find the face of live permanently changed for them in a way that larger artists do not. Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: live music is not going to be the same again, and the innovations in virtual and streamed events are not simply a band-aid to get us through tough times. Instead, they are the foundations for permanent additions to the live music mix. The big unanswered question is, who is going own the live-streamed and virtual concert sector?

Bringing it all together

One of the most important things digital tech does is to bring things together. The smartphone is a perfect example. 20 years ago people switched between phones, calendars, diaries, computers, maps, phones, music players, DVD players etc. Now these are all in one device. Streaming did the same to music, taking radio, retail, music collections and music players and putting them together into one unified experience. Until now, live music was not subject to streaming’s great assimilation process. But COVID-19 changed all that. Live used to be separate because it required logistical assets like buildings, ticketing operations, relationships etc. The last few months have shown us that the virtual live sector can operate entirely independent of the traditional sector’s frameworks – which is one of the reasons so much innovation and experimentation has happened. Sure, lots of the early stuff was scrappy and of patchy quality, but is through mistakes that we learn the right way forward. Thus, we have new companies like Driift emerging to bring a more structured and professional approach to a fast-growing but nascent sector.

Disruption is coming

The big traditional live companies right now may be most concerned about whether the still-dormant venues are looking at the new ticketing models being deployed with the likes of Dice and wondering whether they can rethink their entire way of doing business when they reopen. While that may trigger what could prove to be the biggest-ever shift in the live business, the virtual part of the business is where the money is flowing right now: Melody VR bought pioneering but struggling streaming service Napster, Scooter Braun invested in virtual concert company Wave and Tidal bought seven million dollars’ worth of access into virtual concert ‘space’ Sensorium. Virtual reality (VR) spent much of the last couple of years in the trough of disillusionment but now COVID-19’s catalysing impact may see it starting to crawl onwards and upwards. Prior to COVID-19 VR was a technology searching for a purpose. COVID-19 has created one. This is not to say that all of VR’s prior failings no longer matter – they do – but it at least has a set of music use cases to build on. VR can now realistically aspire to be a meaningful component of the wider virtual event sector.

Streaming+

It is no coincidence that streaming is playing a key role. Nor is it just the smaller streaming services at play – Spotify has built the tech infrastructure for live events, while Apple is introducing artificial reality (AR) into Apple TV+, so it is not too big a leap to assume Apple Music AR experiences will follow. Live was the last major component of the music business that streaming could not reach, and that is all about to change. The value proposition for music fans is clear: why go to multiple different places for all your favourite music experiences when they can all be in one place? Think of it as Streaming+. Whatever the future of live is going to be, we can be certain about one thing: it will never be the same again.

Apple to launch subscription bundle – we called it!

In MIDiA’s 2020 Predictions report published in December 2019 we predicted that tech majors would start creating subscription bundles, with Apple leading the fray. Lo and behold, news has just come out that Apple is working on ‘Apple One’ – a multi-genre subscription bundle that will include Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and Apple News+.

This is what we said back in December:

“Expect Apple to experiment with paid bundles. Adding TV+ to its student Apple Music package is another test case and may soon see Arcade folded in also. With a global recession looming, Apple and Amazon will be well placed to grow market share.

We called it!

So why is Apple doing this, and why now?

With smartphone sales slowing, Apple needs another growth driver to maintain revenue growth. It is making this move now because, one, it needs the transition to start soon, and two, it is looking to profit from the recession. Standalone digital subscriptions are contract-free and so are vulnerable to cancellation. Additionally, they skew towards Millennials – the segment most likely to be hit hardest by any workforce reductions. Consumers who find themselves having to tighten their belts will not want to simply ditch their digital entertainment, however – it has become too important to them. So, a multi-subscription, value-for-money bundle will become particularly appealing during a recession. Apple is thus hoping to pick up price-sensitive subscribers during the economic downturn.

Apple also has an ace up its sleeve: device bundles. As we wrote in December:

“Currently, Apple’s mix of premium, standalone subscriptions are educating its user base that they have a clear monetary value. Apple will start to bundle these together with devices in order to maintain revenue growth in its otherwise slowing device sales segments. The initial bundling of Apple TV+ for free for one year may help acquire market share but it also lays the ground for a more comprehensive and structured bundling strategy. By tying subscriptions into long-term, need-to-have relationships – i.e. phones and shipping – […] tech majors could gain at the expense of standalone subscriptions.

Bundling used to be the sole domain of Telco’s but the tech majors are looking to get in on the act. Apple can use Apple One to increase device prices, e.g. pay $200 more to get an iPhone with a lifetime of unlimited music, video, games and extra cloud storage. By doing so it both increases device revenue (and after all, Apple is still a device company and is measured that way by investors) and taps into an entirely different purchase decision cycle. Devices are need-to-have and if you are in the market for a high-end device, adding on 15% for unlimited content is a much easier sell than trying to sell the subscription standalone.

In doing all of this, Apple is of course taking a leaf out of Amazon’s book. Amazon has built the core of its streaming businesses around the Prime bundle. In doing so, it has the additional benefit of creating a recession-proof bundle (everyone still needs to buy stuff) – one which is proving its worth already, if it’s incredibly successful Q2 is anything to go by. As we enter the recession, standalone subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix are vulnerable to increased churn. Apple and Amazon will be waiting to pick up the pieces.

The COVID Bounce: How COVID-19 is Reshaping Entertainment Demand

The economic disruption and social dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is not evenly distributed. Some business face catastrophe, while others thrive. Across the entertainment industries the same is true, ranging from a temporary collapse of the live business through to a surge in gaming activity. As we explain in our free-to-download COVID-19 Impact report, the extra time people have as a result of self-isolation has boosted some forms of entertainment more than others – with games, video and news the biggest winners so far.

To further illustrate these trends, MIDiA compiled selected Google search term data across the main entertainment categories. The chart below maps the change in popularity of these search terms between the start of January 2020 up to March 27^th. Google Trends data does not show the absolute number of searches but instead an index of popularity. These are the key findings:

• Video streaming: All leading video subscription services saw a strong COVID-19-driven spike, especially Disney+ which managed to coincide its UK launch with the first day of national home schooling.
• Music streaming: Little more than a modest uptick for the leading music services, following a long steady fall – reflecting a mature market sector unlike video, which has been catalysed by major new service launches.
• Video demand: With the mid- to long-term prospect of a lot more time on their hands, consumers have been strongly increasing searches for TV shows, movies and games to watch and play. The fact that ‘shows for kids to watch’ is following a later but steeper curve reflects the growing realisation by locked-down families that they have to stop the kids going stir crazy while they try to work from home.
• Music demand: Demand for music has been much more mixed, including a pronounced downturn in streams in Italy. Part of the reason is that music is something people can already do at any time in any place. So, the initial instinct of consumers was to fill their newfound time with entertainment they couldn’t otherwise do at work/school. As the abnormal normalises music streaming will pick up, as the recent increase in searches for music and playlist terms suggests. Podcasts, however, look like they will take longer to get a COVID bounce.
• Games: Games activity and revenues have already benefited strongly from the new behaviour patterns, as illustrated by the fast and strong increase in search terms. However, the recent slowdown in search growth suggests that the increase in gaming demand may slow.
• News: The increased searches correlate strongly with the growth of the pandemic, but the clear dip at the end provides the first evidence of crisis-fatigue.
• Sports: The closure of all major sports leagues and events has left a gaping hole in TV schedules and the lives of sports fans. The sudden drop in search terms shows that sports fans have quickly filled their lives with other entertainment and have little interest in keeping up with news of sports closures.
• Leaders: Finally, Boris Johnson has seen his search popularity grow steadily with the pandemic, while Donald Trump’s has dipped.

Spotify AND Apple Lead Podcasts – It’s All Down to How You Measure It

The podcast platform data from MIDiA’s Q4 tracker is in. These are the high-level findings:

• Apple still leads overall: A recent report showed that Spotify has become the leading podcast platform in the US. MIDiA’s Q4 Tracker data shows that among regular podcast users, Spotify is very nearly but not quite the leading platform in the US, just trailing Apple’s podcast app – though the difference is so small that it could be within margin of survey error. However, when Apple Music is factored into the equation, Apple remains the leading platform.
• Spotify the leading single platform: In terms of single platforms – i.e. considering Apple Music and Apple’s podcast apps separately – Spotify has quickly established a leading position across all markets surveyed except the US. Spotify is betting big on podcasts, but this bet is as defensive as it is offensive. Spotify knows that its users over index for podcasts – 28% use them weekly, compared to 15% of overall consumers. If it did not go big with podcasts it was always at risk of losing share of ear as podcasts grew, in the same way Amazon lost CD buyers to Apple’s iTunes. It has taken Amazon years to start winning back the spend of its music consumers, but it could tolerate that inconvenience as it makes most of its money elsewhere. Spotify has no such luxury.
• National broadcasters faring well: Radio broadcasters lost their younger music audiences to streaming. They were not going to sit back and let streaming services then go and steal their older, spoken word audiences without a fight. In many respects, radio broadcasters have a greater chance of being power players in podcasts because their decades of programming expertise will take time for streaming services to learn. With music, they were sitting on the shoulders of a decade of experience learned by Apple’s iTunes. The three national broadcaster apps we tracked (BBC Sounds, NPR One, CCBC Listen) had mixed fortunes, but all have solid adoption. None more so than BBC Sounds, which is the second-most widely used single platform in the UK – a testament to the BBC’s sometimes controversial Sounds strategy. However, one major factor is that broadcaster podcast app users are much older than streaming service podcast users, and indeed of dedicated apps like Acast and Stitcher. This shows that broadcasters are doing a good job of bringing their older audiences over to podcasts but are not yet making podcasts an entry point for younger users lost to streaming.

These findings come from MIDiA’s quarterly tracker survey and will be presented in much more detail in MIDiA’s forthcoming ‘Podcast Platforms’ report.

If you are not already a MIDiA client and would like to learn more about how to get access to MIDiA’s research, data and analysis, then email stephen@midiaresearch.com

Why Music Streaming Could Really Do with a Disney+

The music and video streaming markets have long been best understood by their differences rather than similarities, but the flurry of video subscription announcements in recent months have upped the ante even further. New services from the likes of Disney, Warner Bros, Apple and AMC Cinemas point to an explosion in consumer choice. These are bold moves considering how mature the video subscription business is, as well as Netflix’s leadership role in the space. Nevertheless, Netflix is going to have to seriously up its game to avoid being squeezed. The contrast with the music streaming market is depressingly stark.

Diverging paths

The diverging paths of the music and video subscription markets tell us much about the impact of rights fragmentation on innovation. In music, three major rights holder groups control the majority of rights and thus can control the rate at which innovation happens. As a consequence, we have a streaming market in which each leading service has the same catalogue, the same pricing and the same device support. If this was the automotive market, it would be equivalent of saying everyone has to buy a Lexus, but you get to choose the colour paint. Compare this to video, where global rights are fragmented across dozens of networks. This means that TV rights holders have not been able to dictate (i.e. slow) the rate of innovation, resulting in dozens of different niche services, a plethora of price points and an unprecedented apogee in TV content.

Now, Apple and major rights holders Disney and Warner Bros have deemed the streaming video market to be ready for prime time and are diving in with their own big streaming plays. Video audiences are going to have a volume of high budget, exclusive content delivered at a scale and trajectory not seen before. There has never been a better time to be a TV fan nor indeed a TV show maker.

The music streaming market could really do with a similar rocket up its proverbial behind right now. The ‘innovation’ that is taking place is narrow in scope and limited in ambition. Adding podcast content to playlists, integrating with smart speakers and introducing HD audio all are important – but they are tweaking the model, not reimagining it. Streaming music needs an external change agent to shake it from its lethargy.

Do first, ask forgiveness later

The nearest we have to that change agent right now is TikTok. TikTok has achieved what it has by not playing by the rules. It has followed that long-standing tech company approach of doing first and asking forgiveness later. Sure, it is now locked in some difficult conversations with rightsholders – but it is negotiating from a position of strength, with many millions of active users. TikTok brought a set of features to market that rightsholders simply would not have licensed in the same way if it had gone the traditional route of bringing a business plan, pleading for some rights, signing away minimum guarantees (MGs) and then taking the neutered proposition to market.

I recall advising a music messaging app client who was just getting going to do the right thing. I hooked him up with some of the best music lawyers, made connections at labels, and basically helped him play by the rules. Two years later he still hadn’t managed to get a deal in place with any rightsholders – though he had racked up serious legal fees in the process. Meanwhile, Flipagram had pushed on ahead without licensing deals, secured millions of users and tens of millions of dollars of investment and only then started negotiating deals – and the labels welcomed it with open arms. To this day, this is my single biggest professional regret: advising this person who was betting his life savings to play by the rules. He lost. The ‘cheats’ won.

We need insurgents with disruptive innovation

The moral of this story is that in the consumer music services space, innovation happens best and fastest when rights holders do not dictate terms. This is not necessarily a criticism. Rights holders need to protect their assets and their commercial value in the marketplace. They inherently skew towards sustaining innovations, i.e. incremental changes that sustain existing products. New tech companies looking to build market share, however, favour disruptive innovations that create new markets. Asking an incumbent to aggressively back disruptive innovation is a bit like asking someone to set fire to their own house. But most often it is the disruptive change that really drives markets forward.

Streaming subscription growth will slow before too long, and as a channel for building artist-fan relationships they are pretty much a dead end. There is no Plan B. Back in 1999 there was only one format; it was growing well, but there was no successor. Looks a lot like now.