MIDiA is currently fielding two separate surveys that will help us create the definitive view of the contribution from music creators and independent labels to the global music market. We are exploring what it means to be a label and a creator in today’s fast-changing and challenge-strewn music business. We are listening to what challenges they face and how they feel about the coming year.
We have already got some great responses, but we want more! Not only will these surveys give you the chance to have your voice heard, we will share a summary of the results with all respondents. This means you will be able to benchmark yourself against your peers to get a better sense of how you are doing and assess whether your concerns and aspirations are shared by others.
Crucially, we do not share ANY respondent-level data. What this means is that your responses only ever go into the total average responses. Nothing is ever attributable to you and we have a comprehensive privacy and data protection policy that you can read when you take the survey.
Independent label survey: if you are a record label or distributor of any size that is not a division of a major record label, then this is the survey for you. Click here to take the survey. (Note – the extra reason for independent labels and distributors to take this survey is that we use the data to help create the global market shares data, to create the most accurate reflection of the contribution of independents possible)
Non-DSP streaming was one of – arguably the – differences between steady growth and stellar growth for the music business in 2021. With three billion dollars of retail revenues in 2021, non-DSP has quickly become a key source of revenue, but not without bringing its own set of challenges. Music rightsholders have been criticised in the past, including by MIDiA, for being too prescriptive in their licensing approaches, often curtailing the potential of new ventures. The homogenised nature of Western DSP streaming being a case in point. But with non-DSP partners, rightsholder recognised that it was still too early to define exactly what the dominant use cases would be and opted for blanket type deals instead, thus monetising new partners while leaving room for innovation. Now though, creators and rightsholders alike are coming to the point of view that the time is right for greater clarity and definition, with calls for ad revenue share as a starting point. But even if these changes were to come into play, there is a much more fundamental issue at hand: the music business does not have a format to license to non-DSP partners.
Value gaps
Much has been made of the comparison between YouTube and TikTok, and their perceived ‘value gaps’ (YouTube’s former value gap, and TikTok’s current one). YouTube’s road to music industry partnership was a rocky one, but now the relationship is positively rosy, as is YouTube’s contribution to music industry revenues. In 2021, YouTube delivered around $3.4 billion in revenues to record labels alone, with ad supported accounting for around two thirds of that. YouTube has gone from pariah to the second largest contributor of label streaming revenue. But, regardless of all the infighting, negotiating and lobbying that happened in the intervening years, it would not have been able to become the success it has were it not for the fact it was already using a well-established music industry format: music videos. This contrasts with non-DSP partners, like TikTok, Meta and Snap, that are, instead, licensing music to soundtrack their formats. In many respects, this is 21st century sync, soundtracking the parts of digital entertainment where traditional sync does not reach. Indeed, the deals also tend to be classed as sync deals.
Sync’s strengths and weaknesses
Sync’s strength is being able to take music to places where music formats do not exist. Its problem, however, is that there has always been a massive value gap between its cultural impact (not least giving music exposure) versus its revenue contribution (less than 10% of 2021 retail revenues). But there is an even bigger challenge with this new ‘digital sync’: whereas traditional sync simply enhances traditional audio-visual formats (TV, games, ads, etc.), in many of digital sync’s use cases it is actually a central component of the experience. Duets, lip-syncs and other lean-through behaviour has music at its core. Without music, the behaviour does not exist. So a licensing structure that leans on monetising a soundtrack falls short of music’s defining role in many of these non-DSP experiences. On top of this, there is much that music creators do on non-DSP platforms (e.g., live chats, non-music posts) that delivers value to the platforms (by generating ad impressions) but do not generate income for those creators nor their rightsholders (if they have them).
A new format for non-DSP
So, how can this circle be squared? The solution is simple in concept but complex in practice: the music industry needs a new format for non-DSP environments, one that will ideally pave the way for metaverse monetisation also. Non-DSP music behaviours rarely revolve around the full-length song, nor full-length music videos. Instead, they revolve around components and snippets of songs, as well as the music creator’s non-music activity. The music industry needs a licensable format that reflects this new usage, not least because everything points to ‘lean through’ and the consumerisation of creation growing, not shrinking. A 15-30 second music format would be one solution, but that would likely be too static, as the more that creator culture grows, the more cultural value will reside in the music being modified by users – as illustrated by TikTok’s new partnership with Stemdrop – which could also form part of a new format structure. And, of course, it would miss the non-music activity. Last year, MIDiA published a report with Utopia (free to download here) that proposed a creator right that would ensure that value accrues to the creator for all their activity, not just musical. It may sound far-fetched, but it is not much different than an actor getting paid for appearing on a TV show.
The solution likely lies in a combination of short-form music formats and new licensable rights – which does not necessarily need to have legislation, there are other widely licensed ‘rights’ that do not legislative underpinnings. As I have already said, the concept is simple, the implementation is difficult. But things worth doing are often difficult to do. Over to you, music industry!
The Covid pandemic created a unique catalyst for the music creator economy. More time on hands and more cash in pockets gave novices and veterans alike the opportunity to spend both more time and money making music. Though the pandemic was a peak, it also marked the start of a new era for the music creator economy across every one of its aspects, from revenue to creation to remuneration. In MIDiA’s new landmark report ‘State of the music creator economy’ we provide the definitive assessment of this exciting marketplace, covering everything from creator behaviours, creator personas, all the way through to workflows, market sizes, and growth forecasts. The full report and datasets are available to MIDiA clients here. Here is an overview of some of the key themes explored in the report.
A new generation of music makers
The music creator tools space is being transformed by the increasing availability of simple, affordable music-making tools, plus a new generation of consumers that is steeped in creator culture. We are entering a new era for the music creator economy. Yet, despite all the dramatic changes, underpinning this new era of creator behaviour are suites of complex software that arose over two decades ago and, at their core, have seen little substantial change. The digital audio workstation (DAW) is the foundation of modern music making, but was not designed for the modern music maker. This presents fertile soils for seeds of disruption as more casual music making, centred around mobile devices and sharing music online, becomes the new top of funnel for the music creation space, and the music industry as a whole.
Having grown up as social media mainstreamed creativity, the new generation of music makers expects to achieve professional results quickly. However, as their aspirations clash with the harsh reality of streaming economics, more creators are seeking out a diversity of income streams — from selling beats to mixing and engineering — underscoring the need for creator tools companies to help drive creator remuneration. Combined with the growth of casual creators, catalysed by embedded tools on social platforms, like TikTok and BandLab, the result is a newfound fluidity in defining what it means to be a music creator.
Though much of that generational shift will take time to permeate through to the current market, seismic change is already manifesting. Nowhere is this better seen than in the that hardware music creators use. As recently as five years ago, music creators would have invested in hardware mixing desks, synthesisers, and outboard effects. But today, the most widely owned hardware is devices that plug into computers, such as controller keyboards and audio interfaces. These affordable devices free up creators to spend on the software and sounds on their computers, relying on the hardware to control sound making, rather than actually making the sound.
And it is the spending on software, sounds and services that is currently propelling the market. With an average creator spending more than $600 a year on music creation, promotion, distribution, and commercial tools. For beginners this can mean spending three and half times more than they earn from music, while for advanced creators it is a little over one tenth. In total, the music creator tools market was worth $4.1 billion in 2022, across learning, collaboration, production software, sounds, funding, commerce, distribution, marketing and commercial, with distribution and production software being the two largest segments.
In 2021, the cumulative number of creators paying for software, sounds, skills sharing, and learning was under 30 million – by 2030 there will be nearly 100 million with learning and skills sharing becoming the largest single group of buyers. Learning and skill sharing were among the fastest growing components of the music creator economy in 2021, with strong rise in both formal and informal learning as well as in skills sharing. Just under half of the learning revenue was from companies that were largely or entirely focused on music production learning. With 83% of creators feeling that they still have much to learn and improve upon, the opportunity for learning is pronounced and will become even more so because of the fast-changing nature of the sector.
However, much of all this may seem like a separate and parallel industry to those in the traditional music business (labels, publishers, streaming services, etc.), the creator tools market that commands much of the attention, time and spend of artists and songwriters. Streaming is only around a fifth of the income of the average creator, with many aspects of the creator tools marketplace representing new ways that they can earn meaningful income, whether that is selling singing sessions on skills marketplaces, writing soundpacks for sounds platforms or producing tracks for other creators. Furthermore, clear connections are being made across the two industries, such as Avid and LANDR both offering distribution, Sony Music Publishing striking a partnership with BeatStars and Spotify launching a bundle subscription for its Cloud DAW Soundtrap. The most impactful synergies, however, will come from audience platforms, like TikTok and Shorts, that are already home to music creators and already provide their own creator tools. But what they have that rightsholders and most creator tools companies do not, is audience. As the culture of creation spreads towards audiences themselves, it is these sorts of companies that have the ability to play the most transformative role in the future of music creation.
If you are interested in learning more about MIDiA’s state of the music creator economy report, email stephen@midiaresearch.com
Everyone is a creator! Or so goes the dismissive put down of many a traditional media executive when talking about the creator economy. But regardless of what your perspective on the creator economy might be, there is no denying its meteoric rise. Perhaps what stokes the ire of some elements of traditional media is that the creator economy is evolving from being simply a talent funnel for traditional entertainment companies, into something self-contained and self-sustaining. But, for all of the positive change, there is much that is also problematic about the space.
Harnessing aspiration at scale
First and foremost, the creator economy is a business model for the platforms and adjacent services, one that is built upon harnessing the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of large-scale creator audiences. While each of those creators individually craves success – however they might measure it – the platforms do not need the creators to find success for their respective business models to work. This is because, they monetise creators by harnessing aspiration at scale. If there are enough creators – and the pool is growing fast – a multitude of small-scale audiences are enough to drive the platforms’ strategic objectives of driving audience engagement, which, in turn, drives revenue. What complicates matters further is the fact that creators are developing platform dependence – merely renting space on the platforms they depend upon, rarely with tenancy rights and often slave to the algorithm. It might be the creator economy, but creators fuel it rather than drive it.
Platforms are using audience as the new form of distribution
What has enabled this conflicted set of priorities to become established is the rise of platforms that use audience as the new form of distribution. Whereas traditional entertainment services, like Netflix and Spotify, license and create content to distribute to audiences, audience platforms, like TikTok and Twitch, pull their content from the audiences themselves. Even though most users consume rather than create, the creators come from their ranks. The old paradigm of license / create-distribute-audience has been replaced by audience-create-audience. If the traditional entertainment business depends on cannon balls, the creator economy trades in bullets.
Audiences are becoming creators, too, with 18% doing some form of content creation and 10% using creation tools in social platforms. Only 33% of consumers only ever purely consume content. Audiences went from lean back in the analogue era, lean in during the streaming era, and now lean through in the creator era. A growing body of creators is learning to harness this growing demand for creation, as evidenced by music creators, like Pink Panthress, Sadie Jean and Russ, canvassing input from their fanbases on TikTok.
The current surge in the creator economy is opening more doors for more creators than ever before while also bringing audiences ever closer to creation, too. But, as the number of creators grows, fandom and consumption fragment. The longer the tail, the harder it is for creators to cut through, find audiences, and build careers. Creators find themselves locked in a perpetual cycle of create / produce / perform / engage, with their host platforms demanding ever higher levels of frequency and volume of output.
With creators’ constant fear that jumping out of the creator hamster wheel will see them disappear from the algorithm, there is a growing awareness that owning their audiences and having direct communication with them has never been more important. Yet today’s creator economy is not built this way. The rise of companies like Pico, Disciple Media and India’s ChargeBee point to the growing recognition of the ‘off-platform’ opportunity. But the majority of creators have the majority of their audiences on platforms where they are slave to the algorithm.
Owning audience is just one item on a long list of structural challenges (e.g., remuneration, discovery) that the creator economy must address if it is to transition from its current phase of undoubted opportunity, into something that can genuinely reshape and redefine the future of entertainment itself. There is both a duty of care and a window of opportunity that creator-economy companies must seize with both hands, but the second cannot be achieved without the first. That is why it is time to re-create the creator economy.
Whether you are in music, video, games, sports, or even comics, the creator economy is reshaping your business, your audience, your content, and, of course, your creators. Building upon MIDiA’s years of work in the creator economy, we have just published a landmark new report: Re-creating the creator economy. In this report, we present data, analysis and case studies of the creator economy across music, video, social, games, podcasts, sports and more, covering topics such as creator remuneration, women creators, business strategy, distribution and what independence really means.
If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to find out how to access this report then email stephen@midiaresearch.com
The streaming revolution has been built upon audience choice and control, replacing linear with on-demand and in turn opening whole new consumption paradigms. No user behaviour better encapsulates this shift than binge watching, which is done by 60% of video subscribers. But there is an inherent tension with giving the audience so much control: content is consumed much more quickly. If you are a video service, an entire season can be watched in one or two evenings, whereas in the old world, those millions spent on making the show would deliver a return over a period of months, not two nights. Little wonder Disney+ has gone for weekly episodes of its shows.
As big as the problem is for media companies, however, it is the creator economy that is most exposed. In order to keep up with insatiable audience demand, music, podcast and video creators (and more) are often pushing themselves to their creative limits. Creators are risking burnout in order to meet their audiences’ demand for binging.
When Daniel Ek suggested that artists should be releasing music monthly, he was simply reflecting the realities of streaming-era music consumption. With just 16% of consumers listening to full albums, music audiences are beginning to replicate wider digital audiences: they expect a steady stream of (mostly) new content. The creator economy first met this audience shift with the rise of YouTubers, signing up millions of followers and delivering ‘content’ every day or so. YouTube subscriptions acted as talent feeds, setting the blueprint for content consumption that now dominates social, from TikTok to Instagram. In this world, the creator is locked in a constant battle for attention with every other content provider, big or small. Creators thus end up in a perpetual cycle of content creation to ensure they can remain present in their audiences’ content feeds.
The harsh reality of this environment is that it creates a vicious circle of influence. The more that creators create in order to try to cut through, the more content there is, which means it is even harder to cut through. This is the exact same challenge that record labels and artists currently face on streaming, forced into the volume and velocity game of releasing more music and doing so more frequently. Creators are forced to focus on volume of output rather than quality, and most often feel that however much they create, it is never enough. The net result is a growing number of creators dealing with burnout and mental health issues.
Audiences and platforms both win in the binge economy, while creators become collateral damage. With content commodified, audiences en masse do not notice as individual creators fall by the wayside, because the platforms’ algorithms will seamlessly slot in another creator who is so close the one that went, that the change will be all but unnoticeable. Platforms may have created the environments in which content is commodified, but by playing the game, the creators themselves have played a central role in commodifying content to the degree that it is content, not the creator, that matters most.
Yet, whatever the role of platforms and creators might be, it is perhaps us, the audience, that is most to blame. It is our ravenous appetite for more that creates the market. Just like Western consumers’ demand for fast fashion underpins Asian sweat shops, binging is creating a digital supply chain which favours production-line output. Some creators are beginning to create work arounds by staggering projects, dropping teasers, or even engaging fans in the creation process and having fan input points become the content they crave. But even these tactics most often require significant creator effort and maintaining a constant dialogue with the audience.
Despite the best efforts of the creator community, the dominant direction of travel is that there is little room for careful craft. Spend three months making a song or a video, and the algorithms will already consider you history.
2021 was another year in which capital continued to flow into the music business at pace. Two deals that got over the line before year end have shone an interesting light on the differing strategies that are underpinning this investment: Bruce Springsteen sold his catalogue to Sony Music for between $500-550 million, while BandLab raised $53 million against a valuation of $303 million. These two deals represent the opposite ends of music industry investment in 2021.
The Bruce Springsteen catalogue deal reflects the continuing surge in music catalogues as an asset class, with the total value of deals set to far exceed the $4.7 billion that was invested in 2019. The bulk of this investment has been driven by large, institutional investors, such as Private Equity (PE) and pension funds, as well as publishers and labels – many of whom have raised capital specifically to acquire catalogues. Big institutional money is rarely focused on high-risk opportunities, but, instead, often on low-risk, predictable revenue drivers. Music catalogue falls into this category. So, a bet on catalogues is a safe(ish) bet on today’s music business.
In contrast, the investment in creator tools company, Bandlab, reflects a bet on tomorrow’s music business – including investment from venture firm K3 Ventures. Today’s music business is dominated by music rights and by music rightsholders. A growing trend among investors (both venture and later stage) is making a bet that the future of the music business will increasingly be shaped by creators.
So, we have a situation where big, safer bets are being made on rights, and riskier, bolder bets are being made on creators. There is little irony in the fact that if the riskier bets pay off then they could reduce the value of the safer bets, thus increasing the risk profile of those safe bets. Still with me?
BandLab’s $53 million investment reflected a 17% stake (based on the $303 million valuation). To acquire 17% of the $500 million Bruce Springsteen catalogue, it would cost $83 million (if it was available for purchase, of course). This means that there is effectively a 60% premium on investing in yesterday’s (proven) music business, versus tomorrow’s (unproven) music business.
Such is the nature of venture vs later-stage investments – and there are good arguments as to why this is not an apples-to-apples comparison – but it is nonetheless a useful lens through which to reflect on the music business at the end of 2021: the big money is banking on things staying the same, the riskier money is banking on things changing. Draw your own conclusions…
The music business is approaching a monetization / remuneration tipping point. Long- and mid-tail creators are fast realising that, even with the most revolutionary of changes to royalty structures, streaming is never going to deliver enough income. Streaming is a highly effective monetization tool for larger rights holders and creators but has a remuneration problem for the long- and mid-tail. Such is always the case of platform businesses (which harvest micro activity to deliver macro platform-level revenue). What is different in music is that creators are sold the dream that a) they can ‘make it’ (however they may interpret that), and b) the platforms are designed to democratise the means of distribution, and thus level the playing field. With the number of releasing artists growing by a third in 2020 alone, the remuneration problem is getting worse, not better, due to the simple arithmetic of the royalty pot growing more slowly than artists. The solution? Models that let artists build fanbases and remuneration, not audiences and monetization. Audiomack just took a step down this road. Here’s how, and why it is a smart move.
Fans fund artists directly by purchasing ‘support badges’ for individual song and album releases. Once a fan buys a badge, Audiomack says that their contribution “is forever memorialised” on their Audiomack profile and the artist’s individual song or album page.
This does three things simultaneously:
Drives artist remuneration
Monetizes fandom
Empowers fan identity
Audiomack is small, but when small can also be beautiful
With 3% US weekly active user (WAU) penetration compared to Spotify’s 27%, Audiomack is a small but important player in the streaming world. Yet scale is beginning to look less important to many creators. Streaming services are fantastic at building audiences, but they are far less able to build fanbases, and even worse at letting artists engage with those fanbases (YouTube and Soundcloud notably excepted). Big streaming numbers might look good, but risk being little more than vanity metrics unless they are huge – especially when they do not give enough value directly back to the creator.
In many respects this is just like the old radio days. An artist might feel good about getting radio spins and that exposure may in turn have led to other things, but the actual spins themselves delivered little or nothing in terms of actual income. So, creators are compelled by inference to think of streaming as cool marketing that drives everything else. Yet, if it is just marketing, then a) what if there are other less stressful marketing alternatives, and b) should they not be putting more effort into feeding the places that drive meaningful income? If streaming drives audiences and marketing, long- and mid-tail creators need to focus their efforts on places that drive fanbases and remuneration instead. As we have previously argued, ‘middle class’ creators need niche, not scale.
Audiomack hits the middle ground by combining the benefit of streaming’s scale with a focused and super-engaged user base (Audiomack usage spikes among many important music segments, such as playlist curators, karaoke users and hip hop fans). The likely conversion rate for fans rather than just listeners will likely be higher for Audiomack WAUs than, for example, Spotify WAUs.
You do not need NFTs to do digital collectibles
But remuneration is just half of what Audiomack is doing here. It is the fandom and fan identity play that is particularly interesting. By allowing fans to collect badges on their profiles, they become a way for those consumers to demonstrate their fandom and express their identity. This also comes at the time when the digital sphere is electrified by NFT buzz. Support badges are an illustration of how NFTs do not even need to be NFTs. Even though Audiomack WAUs are far more likely to know what NFTs and Blockchain actually are, crucially they are much more likely than average consumers to want to buy digital collectibles from their favourite artists, regardless of what the tech might be.
Audiomack’s support buttons are not about to fix the entirety of music creator remuneration, but they do represent an important step on the journey and set a standard others should follow.
Spotify’s music creator strategy was both bold and sound. It was making a bet that the music companies of the future would not simply be on the business of recording and releasing signed artists, but would instead participate in the creation of music further up the chain – just like they currently participate in distribution further up the chain. The assumption remains valid and, indeed, there is much to see in the market today to point to a future where the distinctions are blurring between what is a label, distribution platform, creator tool or streaming service. BandLab is most of those things (with 30 million people signed up to its platform), while AVID (maker of ProTools) launched distribution last year, as did Canadian creatortools company LANDR. The value chain shifts are happening. But not only that, 2020 started the unprecedented process of large institutional investment into creator tools companies, such as Native Instruments, Splice, Output and iZoptope. The creator tools space is white hot. So why is Spotify backing away?
Podcasts get the attention
The answer probably lies in focus. When the labels pushed back against Spotify’s artist ambitions, Spotify had to find a new big bet, which was – of course – podcasts. Since that point, Spotify has focused its investments, with a raft of acquisitions of both companies and talent. It even rebranded its creator strategy to encompass podcasters. The sale of SoundBetter is a clear implication that podcasters are now the centre piece of Spotify’s creator strategy.
A return could still be on the cards
Spotify can still be, and may yet be, a powerhouse for music creators. But, for now, podcasts are where the energies are focused. Besides, the sheer volume of creator tools M+A activity is such that Spotify may well feel that it would not be able to get good value for money if it was to go on an acquisition spree. Perhaps Spotify will return to the space 3-7 years from now. That will be when the current private equity owners have finished building up their acquisitions and start looking to sell them, enhanced and transformed for the new market dynamics. It will also be when Spotify may feel powerful enough to take on the labels again.
Whatever the longer-term future may hold, right now SoundBetter returns to the market as the sort of tool that encapsulates what the next wave of creation is all about, and it may feel that it can now finally deliver on its initial promise.
Kanye West knows how to stir things up, not least in making us rethink what music is and nudging us away from considering it as linear and static. First there was his announcement that Life of Pablo was a “living, breathing, changing creative expression”, and now there is his Donda Stem Player – which we wrote about here last week. Transformational change does not normally happen in one big wave, but instead is triggered by disruptive outliers, things that, at the time, might look like inconsequential edge cases, but act as the ice breakers for the paradigm shift that follows. Digital entertainment in its wider sense is entering its lean inphase, where audiences participate with content, whether that be simply commenting on a YouTube video or creating your own TikTok video. Given simple but powerful tools, it turns out that the consumers like to be creators too. First it was pictures and video, but now it is audio’s turn, and Kanye’s Donda Stem Player could prove to be a pivotal step in that journey.
Formats do not need to be how they have always been
The future always looks much more like the past. The Model T Ford looked more like a horseless cart than it did a 1950’s car. Change takes time. Digital entertainment business models have undergone dramatic change, but the content itself much less so. We think of TV shows, movies and music as being clearly defined things that have always been thus, but, in truth, they were defined by analogue technology in the 19th century. Now that linear TV schedules, radio and CD players are entering their final phases, there is no need for the traditional formats to continue to dominate. Creatives who argue that a 45-minute drama and 3.5-minute song are simply the best formats, do so because that is all that they have ever known. Yes, they work, but that does not mean that other formats cannot also work. Just look at the album. Many artists still like the creative construct, but just 21% of music streamers regularly listen to albums on streaming services. Music fans have already decided that this format is not part of their future.
Fluid audio erases the creative full stop
The Donda Stem Player, made for Kanye by Kano, takes this concept and runs with it. This, as my colleague, Kriss Thakrar, identifies, is fluid audio, and it fits into theAgile Music that we first identified back in 2011. Analog entertainment formats were inherently creative full stops. When an album was recorded, it was done – final. It did not matter if the artist’s creative vision had moved on, as the songs remained the same. This seems entirely natural, but until the recording era, this would have appeared as a creative anathema in popular music. Before recordings, a song was never the same twice. It only existed as a live performance that was played in the moment and survived in the listener’s memory. Songs evolved and changed. Whether that be centuries of evolution in European folk music or decades in American blues and jazz. Then recording came along and songs became petrified – the stuffed animals of creativity.
Kanye took his first swipe at the creative full stop with his continual updates of Life of Pablo. Not everyone got it. Many fans simply wanted it to sound the way it did when they first heard it. It takes time for people to get their heads around change – quite literal change in the case of Life of Pablo. Now, with the Donda Stem Player, Kanye has obliterated the creative full stop. Donda will never sound the same twice, and that is now literally in the hands of his fans.
In some respects, making a piece of physical kit looks to be quite a retro move in this digital era, but the subtle, yet crucial idea here is to make the Donda Stem Player an actual instrument. It is the ultimate form of creator culture, by turning songs made with instruments into an instrument itself. How very meta!
Back in 2015, I published my book ‘Awakening’, which was part history of the digital music business and part vision for the future. Some of my predictions did not age as well as I would have liked, but some of them are still looking good. One of them was the DISC concept. I proposed that future music formats needed to be:
Dynamic
Interactive
Social
Creative
I mainly aimed this at the digital realm, and we are already seeing it happen, whether that be TikTok lip sync videos, Facebook Audio Studio, Clean Bandit’s Splice sounds pack, or apps like Voisey and Trackd. But I also suggested that it could apply to physical formats in order to free music of its smartphone chains. One theoretical proposal was for pieces of art that would enable to the user to change the songs by walking between them, triggering a vocal part here, a drum beat there, etc. It is not a million miles away from the Donda Stem Player.
A lean in future
The entire music world is not suddenly going to go from static streams to interactive widgets, but change is a coming. In a year from now, we may look back on the Donda Stem Player as being a fun gimmick, but if we do, it will be because we have not yet found the Model T Ford, rather than the underlying principles being wrong. Of course, the majority of music listening will most likely remain lean back and static, but not all of it will. As audiences lean in ever further, more of them will want to create as much as they consume, just like they do with social video today. There is one thing we can be certain of – the future of music creativity and consumption is changing, and Kanye just played his part, again.
Regular readers will know that MIDiA has been analysing the creator tool space for some time now and building the case for why the changes that are taking place will be transformational not just for the creator tools space itself but for the music business as a whole. In fact, we believe that the coming creator tools revolution could be at least as impactful on the wider music business as streaming was. Firstly, it establishes a new top-of-funnel that sits above distribution companies, meaning that creator tools companies are now able to fish upstream of labels for the best new talent. Secondly, audio will become the next tool with which consumers identify themselves, following the lead of images (Instagram) and video (TikTok). But there is another factor too: the fast-growing volume of institutional investment is changing where the centrifugal forces of the music industry reside.
Outside of the currently crippled live business, the record labels used to be the undisputed central force of the music business. Then streaming services grew in scale and attracted the first wave of inward investment into the industry. Alongside labels, streaming services became the joint central force of the music business, around which all else orbited. Big investors started to make bets on either side of a binary equation: rights or distribution.
The publishing renaissance
Then music publishers and publishing catalogues started to attract investment. At the time, the only real place big institutional investors could place their bets on the rights side of the equation was Vivendi – and even then, it was an indirect bet as UMG was just one part of Vivendi. SME is just too small a part of Sony Corporation for the parent company to be a viable music industry bet. Since then, UMG divested 20% of its equity and is on path towards an IPO; WMG went public and Believe is on track to an IPO also.
Publishing catalogues by contrast look more predictable, with performance still largely shaped by non-recorded music market trends, including radio and public performance – though COVID-19 threw a lot of that stability down the toilet. Music publishers used the inward investment to diversify their businesses. Kobalt pushed into artist distribution (recently sold to Sony), neighbouring rights and a PRO; Downtown pushed hard into the independent creator sector (CD Baby, Songtrust); while Reservoir is going public with a Spac merger; and then of course there is Hipgnosis.
The creator tools gold rush
With music publishing catalogue valuations over-heating, big investors started looking for places where they could still play in the music market but get better value for money. Enter stage left creator tools. Key moves include Francisco Partners’ moves for Native Instruments and Izotope; Summit Partners’ investment in Output; and Goldman Sachs’ investment in Splice.
What this means is that the music industry now has an additional gravitational force at its core. Just as music publishers and streaming services used their newfound investment to push into other parts of the music and audio businesses, expect creator tools companies to do the same. With hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into creator tools (and lots more set to follow), investors are making big bets on audio in a broader sense, with bold ambitions that will not be sated by staying in the creator tools lane as it is currently defined. Avid’s recent move into distribution follows on from LANDR’s similar move, and of course Bandlab has 30 million ‘users’. Adding label-like services (e.g. marketing, debt financing) and streaming functionality are logical next steps for creator tools companies.
Streaming may be the change agent that has enabled all of these shifts – but streaming is the start of the story, not the end point. The process of music business diversification is only just beginning and the next chapter may be the most exciting yet.
Music Industry Blog 