Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

MIDiA’s annual music subscriber market shares report is now available here (see below for more details of the report). Here are some of the key findings.

The global base of music subscribers continues to grow strongly with 523.9 million music subscribers at the end of Q2 2021, which was up by 109.5 million (26.4%) from one year earlier. Crucially, this was faster growth than the prior year. There is a difference between revenue and subscribers – with ARPU deflators, such as the rise of multi-user plans and the growth of lower-spending emerging markets – but growth in monetised users represents the foundation stone of the digital service provider (DSP) streaming market. So, accelerating growth at this relatively late stage of the streaming market’s evolution is clearly positive.

Spotify remains the DSP with the highest market share (31%), but this was down from 33% in Q2 2020 and 34% in Q2 2019. With Apple Music being a distant second with 15% market share, and Spotify adding more subscribers in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021 than any other single DSP, there is no risk of Spotify losing its leading position anytime soon – but the erosion of its share is steady and persistent. Amazon Music once again out-performed Spotify in terms of growth (25% compared to 20%), but the standout success story among Western DSPs was YouTube Music, for the second successive year. Google was once the laggard of the space, but the launch of YouTube Music has transformed its fortunes, growing by more than 50% in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021. YouTube Music was the only Western DSP to increase global market share during this the period. YouTube Music particularly resonates among Gen Z and younger Millennials, which should have alarm bells ringing for Spotify, as their core base of Millennial subscribers from the 2010s in the West are now beginning to age.

But the biggest subscriber growth came from emerging markets. Between them, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music added 35.7 million subscribers in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021. Together, they accounted for 18% of global market shares, despite being available only in China. Yandex, in Russia, was the other big gainer, doubling its subscriber base to reach 2% of global market share.

Combined, Yandex, TME and NetEase account for 20% of subscriber market share, but they drive 37% of all subscriber growth in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021.

The strong growth in subscribers holds an extra meaning going into 2022. The surge in non-DSP streaming in 2021 means that the streaming market is no longer dependent on the revenue contribution of maturing Western subscriber markets (nor indeed ARPU-diluting emerging markets). With non-DSP streaming revenue looking set to have contributed between a quarter and a third of streaming revenue increase in 2021, streaming revenues look set for strong growth, even if subscriber growth lessens. That is what you call a diversified market.

A little more detail on the subscriber market shares report:

The report has 23 pages and 13 figures featuring country level subscriber numbers, revenues and demographics by DSP. The accompanying data set has quarterly subscriber numbers and annual revenue figures from Q4 2015 to Q2 2016 by DSP by country, with 33 markets and 27 DSPs. The report and dataset is available to MIDiA subscribers hereand also available for individual purchase via the same link.

Email stephen@midiaresearch.com for more details.

Global music subscriber market shares Q1 2021

The music industry’s growing obsession with declining ARPU will continue to colour the outlook for the global streaming market in revenue terms, but the positive driver of this equation is the rapid growth of music subscribers. There were 100 million new music subscribers in 2020, taking the total to 467 million. (In 2019 there were just 83 million net new subscribers). A further 19.5 million new subscribers in Q1 2021 pushed the number up to 487 million. While the failure of subscription revenues to keep up with the pace resulted in ARPU falling by 9% in 2020, this lens detracts from the huge momentum in paid user adoption. Subscription revenue might not be increasing as fast as some would like, but the global music subscriber base is not just growing – it is growing faster than ever.

Spotify continues its global dominance, adding 27 million net subscribers between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, more than any other single service. However, it lost two points of market share over the period because its percentage growth rate trailed that of its leading competitors. Google was the fastest-growing music streaming service in 2020, growing by 60%, with Tencent second on 40%. Amazon continued its steady trajectory, up 27%, while Apple grew by just 12%.

Google’s YouTube Music has been the standout story of the music subscriber market for the last couple of years, resonating both in many emerging markets and with younger audiences across the globe. The early signs are that YouTube Music is becoming to Gen Z what Spotify was to Millennials half a decade ago.

Emerging markets are now central to the music subscriber market, with Latin America, Asia Pacific and Rest of World accounting for 60% of all 2020 subscriber growth. This is of course, also a key reason why global ARPU declined. Nonetheless, a number of emerging markets services now boast large subscriber bases. Beyond Tencent’s 61 million, China’s NetEase hit 18 million subscribers in Q1 2020 and Russia’s Yandex hit 8 million. (For more on streaming in emerging markets check out MIDiA’s latest free report: Local Sounds, Global Cultures.)

MIDiA will be publishing its country-level music subscriber numbers as part of the global music forecast report and dataset which will be available to clients Monday 12^th July. If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to know how to get access to the data, email stephen@midiaresearch.com

We Are At a Turning Point for Social Music

In recent days we have seen three major developments that, collectively, are a potential pivot point for social music:

1. TikTok close to a US-entity buyout by Microsoft to avoid potential sanctions, following hot on the heels of an India blackout
2. Facebook launched a (US-only) YouTube competitor for music videos
3. Snap Inc signed a licensing deal with WMG and others, also for music videos

As cracks begin to appear in the audio streaming market, there is a growing sense in the music industry of the need for a plan B. This has been driven by growing discontent among the creator community, and a slowdown in revenue growth (UMG streaming revenues actually fell in Q2 as did Sony Music’s); the tail wagging the artist-and-revenue (A&R) dog. The search for new growth drivers is on, and social music – for so long a promise unfulfilled in the West – is one of the bets. TikTok was meant to be a major part of that bet. But with the US future of the app so at risk that a Microsoft US-entity buyout may be the only option, and the continued impact of COVID-19 on core revenue streams, the future is beginning to look a little more troublesome. Perhaps now more than ever, the music industry needs social music to start delivering.

There are three key issues at stake here:

1. How consumers discover music
2. How (particularly younger) consumers engage with music
3. Competing with YouTube

How consumers discover music

Among the under-aged 35 demographic, YouTube is the primary music discovery channel, followed by music streaming, then radio, and only then by social. Streaming discovery is heavily skewed towards tracks and playlists, and away from artists and release projects, which is fine for streaming platforms but impedes building sustainable artist careers. Radio is losing share of ear and YouTube… well, YouTube is YouTube (more on that below), so the music business needs a new discovery growth driver. Social has the potential to be just that. But spammy artist pages on Facebook and more-than-perfect Instagram photos are not it. TikTok, for all its amazing momentum, actually has a really uneven impact on discovery. Some tracks blow up out of nowhere while most do little, and rarely is it because of a smart label marketing strategy but instead because certain tracks just work on the platform and the community leaps on them. For now, TikTok is too unpredictable to plan around. Facebook (Instagram especially) and Snap Inc have a fantastic opportunity to do something special here. They have the audience and the social know-how. Whether they can deliver is a different matter entirely.

How (particularly younger) consumers engage with music

What TikTok lacks in consistent marketing contribution it makes up in consumption. Following on from Musical.ly’s start, TikTok has reimagined how music can be part of social experiences for young audiences. It has made music a highly relevant and integral part of self-expression, something that CD collections and music dress codes used to do in the pre-digital world but that soulless, ephemeral playlists wiped out. While labels pin hopes on TikTok successes to drive wider consumption, the discovery journey is also the destination for most TikTok users – they hear the track in a video and swipe onto the next one. That is no bad thing. This is a new form of consumption, and if TikTok were to disappear or fade then someone else needs to pick up the baton. Whether Facebook and Snap Inc can do so is, again, an open question.

Competing with YouTube

Now we get to the heart of the Facebook and Snap Inc deals. As important as the previous two points are, they were not the overriding priorities of the commercial teams driving these deals. Instead they were focused on expanding the revenue mix and part of that is creating more competition for the notoriously low-paying YouTube. Well, maybe not that low paying after all.

The internet is full of statements from trade associations, rightsholders and creators about how much less YouTube pays than Spotify. YouTube does pay less, because it manages to escape paying minimum per-stream rates for ad-supported videos – but it is a more nuanced picture than lobbyists would have you believe. Firstly, in terms of its Premium business, Google is entirely on par with Spotify. But then, that is the part that is licensed in the same way as the rest of the market.

Ad-supported is a mixed story. In North America, where there is a mature digital ad market, YouTube’s ad-supported average revenue per user (ARPU) is entirely on par with Spotify’s. However, on a global basis, ad-supported ARPU is dragged down by its large user base in emerging markets where digital ad markets are nascent. Spotify’s ARPU is 66% higher, in part because it has to pay minimum per-stream rates, i.e. it pays a fixed rate per stream regardless of whether it has sold any ad inventory against the track. This boosts ad-supported ARPU but it risks making the model unstainable, to the extent that Spotify reported -7% gross margin for ad-supported in Q1 2020 (and note, that’s gross margin, not net margin).

Rightsholders will be hoping for Facebook and Snap Inc to bring a similar level of competition to music video as exists in streaming audio, which in turn may give them a path to higher global ad-supported ARPU rates and a healthier marketplace. However, what will determine that objective is not business strategy but product strategy. The key question is what can they both do with music videos that YouTube cannot? YouTube has years of experience and user data around music videos, Snap Inc and Facebook do not. They will be playing catch-up with a weaker portfolio of content assets: Snap Inc is only partially licensed and both it and Facebook have only licensed official music videos. Unofficial videos (mash ups, covers, lyrics, TV show appearances etc.) account for 25% of the views of the top 30 biggest YouTube music videos. Those videos are crucial in that they provide the lean-forward element for viewers; they are crucial to making YouTube music social rather than just a viewing platform.

YouTube has dominated the music video globally for more than a decade. This might just be the time that this position starts to be challenged. But if Facebook and Snap Inc are going to do that, they will have to bring their product strategy A-game to the field. If they can, then the we may indeed witness a social music turnaround in the West.

Music Subscriber Market Shares Q1 2020

WWDC would have been a perfect opportunity for Apple to announce another streaming milestone for Apple Music. It didn’t but the good news is that MIDiA already have a figure for Apple Music, as part of our latest music subscriber market shares. Whether Apple’s lack of announcement was because it didn’t have a good news story to tell or because it is waiting for a bigger number to pull out of the hat at a later date, well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Overall there were 400 million music subscribers in Q1 2020, up 30% from Q1 2019, with 93 million net new subscribers added. This compares to the 77 million added one year earlier. The eagle eyed of you may be struggling to rationalise why streaming revenue growth slowed in 2019 while subscriber growth accelerated. The simple answer is ARPU. The combination of family plans, promotional trials and progressively more global growth coming from lower ARPU, emerging markets means that the long-term outlook for streaming is that subscriber growth will increasingly outpace revenue growth.

Spotify remains the standout leader in terms of subscribers with 32% market share. Spotify’s market share has remained between 32% and 34% every quarter since 2015. This is some achievement given how much more competitive the market has become in that time, and the stellar growth of Amazon. Spotify’s growth is both an extension of the wider market and a driver of it.

Despite Apple Music’s strong showing in second with 18%, this market share is down from 21% in Q1 2019 and contrasts with Amazon Music which finished Q1 2020 with 14% share, up from 13% one year earlier. Apple Music is making ground in absolute terms, Amazon is making ground in both absolute and relative terms.

Tencent Music Entertainment takes fourth spot with 11%, all the more impressive given that this number almost entirely refers to China and that it is accelerating growth, adding 14 million subscribers by Q2 2020 compared to 6 million on the year earlier.

Google is fifth with a more modest 6% but this represents a turnaround, with YouTube Music finally making Google a genuine contender in the subscription space. In Q1 2018, Google’s market share was just 3%. Google is outperforming the overall market.

What is particularly interesting about the state of the global market now compared to a couple of years ago is that we are starting to see some genuine segmentation taking place, which is a real achievement given that most of the services have to operate with the same catalogue and pricing:

• YouTube Music is resonating with Gen Z and younger Millennials
• Amazon Music is bringing older audiences to subscriptions
• Spotify and Apple Music are the mainstream options
• Deezer is enjoying success in emerging markets – Brazil especially – with pre-pay mobile bundles

The global subscriber market is in rude health in Q1 2020, significantly more so than the revenue and ARPU side of the equation.

These figures are the very top level findings from MIDiA’s Subscriber Market Shares model which includes quarterly data for 25 music services across 36 markets. This year we have added splits for MENA, Russia and Ireland. As well as a whole new dataset: Ad supported market shares, with splits for Sub-Saharan Africa. This data will be available for MIDiA clients in the coming weeks. If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to learn more about this dataset, email stephen@midiaresearch.com

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.

Music Subscriber Market Shares H1 2019

The global streaming market continues to grow at pace. At the end of June 2019 there were 304.9 million music subscribers globally. That was up 34 million on the end of 2018, while the June 2018 to June 2019 growth was 69 million – exactly the same rate of additions as one year earlier.

Spotify remained the clear market leader with 108 million subscribers, giving it a global market share of 35.6%, EXACTLY the same share it had at the end of 2018 AND at the end of 2017. In what is becoming an increasingly competitive market, Spotify has continued to grow at the same rate as the overall market.

Meanwhile both Apple and Amazon have grown market share, though Apple is showing signs of slowing. At the end of 2017 Amazon (across all of its subscription tiers) had 11.4% global market share, pushing that up to 12.6% by end June 2019 with 38.3 million subscribers. Apple went from 17.3% to 18% over the same period – hitting 54.7 million subscribers, but while Amazon added share every quarter, Apple peaked at 18.2% in Q1 2019 before dropping slightly back to 18% in Q2 2019. Though at the same time, Apple increased market share in its priority market – the US, going from 31% in Q4 2018 to 31.7% in Q2 2019 with 28.9 million subscribers.

Google has been another big gainer, particularly in recent quarters following the launch of YouTube Music, going from just 3% in Q4 2017 to 5.3% in Q2 2019. Google had a well-earned reputation for being an under-performer in the music subscriptions market, a company that did not appear to actually want to succeed. Now, however, Google appears to be far more committed to subscriptions, pushing both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music hard, with a total of 16.9 music subscriptions in Q2 2019, compared to just 5.9 million at the end of 2017.

With the big four all gaining market share, the simple arithmetic is that smaller players have lost it. The share accounted for by all other services fell from 32.8% end-2017 to 28.4% mid-2019. This of course does not mean that all of these services lost subscribers; indeed, most grew, just not by as much as the bigger players. Of the other services, most are large single-market players such as Tencent (31 million – China), Pandora (7.1 million – US) MelOn (5.3 million – South Korea) with Deezer now the only other global player of scale (8.5 million).

In summary, 2019 was a year of growth and consolidation, with the global picture dominated by the big four players and Spotify retaining market share despite all three of its main competitors making up ground. 2020 is likely to be a similar year, though with a few key differences:

• Key western markets like the US and UK will likely slow from Q4 2019 through to 2020. Meanwhile, emerging markets will pick up pace
• This could shift market share to some regional players. For example, in Q3 Tencent’s subscriber growth accelerated at an unprecedented rate to hit 35.4 million subscribers. Tencent could be entering the hockey stick growth phase, and at just 2.6% paid penetration there is a LOT of potential growth ahead of it
• Bytedance could create a new emerging market dynamic with its forthcoming streaming service. Currently constrained to India and Indonesia, Western rights holders may remain cautious about licensing it into Western markets. The unintended consequence is that the staid western streaming market could by end 2020 be looking enviously upon a more diverse and innovative Asian streaming market

These figures and findings are taken from MIDiA’s forthcoming Music Subscriber Market Shares, which includes quarterly data from Q4 2015 to Q2 2019 for 23 streaming services across 30 different markets. The data will be available on MIDiA’s Fuse platform later this week and the report will follow shortly thereafter.

If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to know how to get access to this report and dataset, email stephen@midiaresearch.com

The Meta Trends that Will Shape 2019

MIDiA has just published its annual predictions report. Here are a few highlights.

2018 was another year of change, disruption and transformation across media and technology. Although hyped technologies – VR, blockchain, AI music – failed to meet inflated expectations, concepts such as privacy, voice, emerging markets and peak in the attention economy shaped the evolution of digital content businesses, in a year that was one to remember for subscriptions across all content types. These are some of the meta trends that we think will shape media, brands and tech in 2019 (see the rest of the report for industry specific predictions):

• Privacy as a product: Apple has set out its stall as the defender of consumer privacy as a counter weight to Facebook and Google, whose businesses depend upon selling their consumers’ data to advertisers. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the start rather than the end. Companies that can – i.e. those that do not depend upon ad revenue – will start to position user privacy as a product differentiator.
• Green as a product: Alphabet could potentially position around environmental issues as it does not depend as centrally on physical distribution or hardware manufacture for its revenue. For all of Apple’s genuinely good green intentions, it fundamentally makes products that require lots of energy to produce, uses often scarce and toxic materials and consumes a lot of energy in everyday use. Meanwhile, Amazon uses excessive packaging and single delivery infrastructure, creating a large carbon footprint. So, we could see fault lines emerge with Alphabet and Facebook positioning around the environment as a counter to Apple and potentially Amazon positioning around privacy.
• The politicisation of brands: Nike’s Colin Kaepernick advert might have been down to cold calculation of its customer base as much as ideology, but what it illustrated was that in today’s increasingly bipartisan world, not taking a position is in itself taking a position. Expect 2019 to see more brands take the step to align themselves with issues that resonate with their user bases.
• The validation of collective experience: The second decade of the millennium has seen the growing success of mobile-centric experiences across social, music, video, games and more. But this has inherently created a world of siloed, personal experiences, of which being locked away in VR headsets was but a natural conclusion. The continued success of live music alongside the rise of esports, pop-up events and meet ups hints at the emotional vacuum that digital experiences can create. Expect 2019 to see the rise of both offline and digital events (e.g. live streaming) that explicitly look to connect people in shared experiences, and to give them the validation of the collective experience – the knowledge that what they experienced truly was something special but equally fleeting.
• Tech major content portfolios: All of the tech majors have been building their content portfolios, each with a different focus. 2019 will be another year of content revenue growth for all four tech majors, but Apple may be the first to take the next step and start productising multi-content subscriptions, even if it starts doing so in baby steps by making Apple original TV shows available as part of an Apple Music subscription.
• Rights disruption: Across all content genres, 2019 will see digital-first companies stretch the boundaries and challenge accepted wisdoms. Whether that be Spotify signing music artists, DAZN securing top tier sports rights, or Facebook acquiring a TV network. These are all very different moves, but they reflect a changing of the guard, with technology companies being able to bring global reach and big budgets to the negotiating table. Expect also more transparency, better reporting and more agile business terms.
• GDPR sacrificial lamb: In 2018 companies thought they got their houses in order for GDPR compliance. Most consumers certainly thought they had, given how many opt in notifications they received in their inboxes.
  However, many companies skirted around the edges of compliance, especially US companies. In 2019 we will see European authorities start to police compliance more sternly. Expect some big sacrificial lambs in 2019 to scare the rest of the marketplace into compliance. They will also aim to educate the world that this is not a European problem, so expect some of those companies to be American. Watch your back Facebook.
• Big data backlash: By now companies have more data, data scientists and data dashboards than they know what to do with. 2019 will see some of the smarter companies start to realise that just because you can track it does not mean that you need to track it. Many companies are beginning to experience data paralysis, confounded by the deluge of data, with management teams unable to decipher the relevance of the analysis put together by their data scientists and BI teams. A simplified, streamlined approach is needed and 2019 will see the start of this.
• Voice, AI, machine learning (and maybe AR) all continue on their path: These otherwise disparate trends are pulled together for the simple reason that they are long-term structural trends that helped shape the digital economy in 2018 and will continue to do so in 2019. Rather than try to over simplify into some single event, we instead back each of these four trends to continue to accelerate in importance and influence. 

For music, video, media, brands and games specific predictions, MIDiA clients can check out our report here. If you are not a client and would like to get access to the report please email arevinth@midiaresearch.com.

Mid-Year 2018 Streaming Market Shares

Music subscribers grew by 16% in the first half of 2018 to reach 229.5 million, up from 198.6 million at the end of 2017. Year-on-year the global subscriber base increased by 38%, adding 62.8 million subscribers. This represents strong but sustained, rather than strongly accelerating, growth: 60.8 million net new subscribers were added between H1 2016 and H1 2017. This indicates that subscriber growth remains on the faster-growth midpoint of the S-curve. MIDiA maintains its viewpoint that this growth phase will last through the remainder of 2018 and likely until mid-2019.

This will be the stage at which the early-follower segments will be tapped out in developed markets. Thereafter, growth will be driven by mid-tier streaming markets such as Japan, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia. These markets have the potential to drive strong subscriber growth, but, in the case of the latter three, will require aggressive pursuit of mid- tier products – including cut-price prepay telco bundles, as seen in Brazil. Without this approach, the opportunity will be constrained to the affluent, urban elites that have post-pay data plans and credit cards. These sorts of products though, will of course deliver lower ARPU in already lower ARPU markets. All of this means: expect revenue to grow more slowly than subscribers from mid 2019.

The key service-level trends were:

• Spotify:Spotify once again maintained global market share of 36%, the same as in Q4 2017, with 83 million subscribers. Spotify has either gained or maintained market share every six months since Q4 2016. Spotify added more subscribers than any other service in H1 2018 – 11.9, which was 39% of all net new subscribers across the globe in the period.
• Apple Music:Apple added two points of market share, up to 19%, and up three points year-on-year, with 43.5 million subscribers. Apple Music added the second highest number of subscribers – 9.2 million, with the US being the key growth market.
• Amazon:Across Prime Music and Music Unlimited Amazon added just under half a point of market share, stable at 12%. Amazon experienced the most growth within its Unlimited tier, adding 3.3 million to reach 9.5 million in H2 2018. In total Amazon had 27.9 million subscribers at the end of the period.
• Others:There were mixed fortunes among the rest of the pack. In Japan, Line Music experienced solid quarterly growth to reach one million subscribers, while in South Korea MelOn had a dip in Q1 but recovered in Q2 to finish slightly above its Q4 2017 figure. Elsewhere, Pandora had a solid six months, adding 0.5 million subscribers, while Google performed strongly on a global basis

The mid-term report card for the music subscriptions market in 2018 is strong, sustained growth with a similar second half of the year to come.

State of the YouTube Music Economy 2.0: A Turning Point for All Parties

YouTube is the most widely used streaming music app globally but it is also the most controversial one, locked in a perpetual struggle with music rights holders, with neither side quite trusting the intent of the other. 2018 has already seen YouTube’s renewed focus on subscriptions as well as a European Parliament vote that could potentially remove YouTube’s safe harbour protection. Meanwhile, oblivious to these struggles, and despite the rise of audio streaming services, consumers are flocking to YouTube in ever greater numbers and, crucially, using it for music more than ever before. Back in 2016, at the height of the value gap / grab debate, MIDiA published its inaugural State of the YouTube Music Economy report. Now two years on we have just released the second edition of this landmark report. MIDiA clients have immediate access to the ‘State of the YouTube Music Economy’ report, which is also available for purchase on our report store. Here are some of the highlights from the report.

2016 proved to be a pivot point for YouTube. Rights holder relationships were at an all-time low with value gap / value grab lobbying reaching fever pitch. Meanwhile, vlogger hype was also peaking and longer-form gaming videos were beginning to get real traction. If there was ever a point at which YouTube could have walked away from music, this could have been it. The picture though, has transformed, with YouTube doubling down on music and in doing so, making itself an even more important partner for record labels.

With young consumers abandoning radio in favour of streaming, YouTube is the biggest winner among Gen Z and Millennials; penetration for YouTube music viewing peaks at 73% among 16–19 year olds in Brazil. But its reach is even wider: YouTube is the main way that all consumers aged 16 to 44 discover music.

Doubling down on music

YouTube has responded by improving its discovery and recommendation algorithms and gearing them more closely to music. The combined impact of demographic shifts and tech innovation is that YouTube is making hits bigger, faster. Billion-views music videos used to be an exceptional achievement, now they are becoming common place. By end July 2018, Vevo reported that there were already ten 1 billion views music videos for tracks released that year, accounting for 17.2 billion views between them. One billion view music videos that were released in 2010 took an average of 1,841 days to reach the milestone. Videos released five years later took an average of just 462 days, while those from 2017 took an average of just 121 days to get to one billion views. Over the course of eight years, YouTube has become more than ten times faster at creating billion-view hits.

Under indexing

The impact on revenue is less even. Music videos are the single most popular video category on YouTube, accounting for 32% of views but a smaller 21% of revenue. Music is still the leading YouTube revenue driver with $3.0 billion in 2017 but many other genres, gaming especially, over index for revenue. (Many YouTube gamers have multiple video ads placed at chapter markers throughout their videos. Because music videos are shorter they get a smaller share of video ads.) Emerging market audiences are also pulling down ad revenues. The surge in Latin American markets has pushed artists like Louis Fonsi to the fore, but the less-developed nature of the digital ad markets there means less revenue per video. This trend is accentuated with the rise of emerging markets music channels like India’s T-Series becoming some of the most viewed YouTube channels globally.

The net result is that effective per stream rates are going down on a global basis, but are going up in developed markets like the US, where the digital ad market is robust. This brings us to one of the existential challenges for YouTube. What does the music industry want YouTube to be? After years of nudging by labels, YouTube is now embarking on a serious premium strategy, but is that really what YouTube is best at? What YouTube does better than anyone else in the market is monetise free audiences at scale on a truly global basis (China excepted).

A turning point

2018 is a turning point for YouTube. The accelerated success it and Vevo have enjoyed since 2016 over indexes compared to YouTube as a whole, which means that music is a more central component of the YouTube experience than it has ever been. However, driving impressive viewing metrics was never YouTube’s problem, convincing music rights holders that it is a good partner is. The value gap war of words may have died down a little but that is as much a reflection of the rise of audio streaming and a return to growth for record labels than anything else, as the European Parliament’s Article 13 vote highlighted. Safe harbour was never designed to be used the way YouTube does for music, and the fact it does so creates a commercial disincentive for other streaming services to play by music rights holders’ rules. The fact that YouTube can get a greater volume of rights and more cheaply than other services andbe the largest global streaming service unbalances the streaming market. Though against this must be set the fact that YouTube has been able to create a more rounded value proposition without operating within the same confines as other streaming services.

The music industry needs the YouTube-Vevo combination, especially while Spotify scales its global free audience. The road ahead will be rocky, especially if Article 13 is eventually passed and also if rights holders continue to be disappointed by engagement growth out accelerating revenue growth due to the growing role of emerging markets. But it is in the interests of all parties to make the relationship work because neither side wants a YouTube shaped hole in the streaming marketplace, even if a Facebook / Vevo partnership was to try to fill some of it.

Click here to see more details of the 29-page, 6,000 word, 11 chart reporton which this blog post is based. The report is based upon months of extensive research, industry conversations, MIDiA data and proprietary company data and represents the definitive assessment of the YouTube Music Economy.

Tech Majors Market Shares Q2 2018

The tech world has no shortage of acronyms for the big tech companies (GAFA, GAAF, Fang, the four horsemen…). At MIDiA we like to keep things simple, just like the major record labels and major TV studios we call the big four tech companies the Tech Majors. Each quarter the MIDiA team deep dives into the financial filings of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to create our quarterly Tech Majors Market Shares reports. (The Q2 edition is available to clients here.). In these reports we focus on the metrics that are most important for media and content companies. Here are some highlights of our latest report.

Tech major Q2 2018 revenue totalled $152.1 billion, down from Q1 2018 – $155.3 billion –  but up 28% from Q2 2017 and 51% from Q2 2016. These growth rates mirror the year-on-year Q1 growths for 2016, 2017 and 2018. The tech majors are thus as a group growing at a consistent rate, despite seasonality and differences as a company level.

Q2 2018 was a quarter of winners and losers for the tech majors. All four companies reported strong revenue growth but Facebook missed some Wall Street estimates and saw $119 billion wiped of its stock value, the single biggest one day loss in US stock market history. Meanwhile Apple beat analyst estimates, in part due to booming services revenues, and ended up becoming the first ever company to have a market capitalization $1 trillion. Amazon and Alphabet both had solid quarters but it is the extremes of Apple and Facebook that provide salutary evidence of the risks that lie ahead for the tech majors. All four companies continue to grow at highly impressive rates despite already being of vast global scale and the dominant player in each of their respective core markets. But the potential of the consumer tech marketplace is finite and growth will slow. Even though Silicon Valley eagerly awaits the next billion digital consumers, these consumers will be lower spending and predominately in markets where most tech majors are not strong, such as India and sub-Saharan Africa.

Services revenue on the up

Tech major advertising and services revenue – the two revenue streams that most directly impact the businesses of media and content companies – totalled $60.7 billion in Q2 2018, up 32% YoY. Tech major advertising and services revenue growth is accelerating and becoming a progressively larger share of total tech major revenue, growing five points, up to 40% in Q2 18.

Services is still the junior partner by some distance, representing 29% of combined advertising and services revenue in Q2 18, but growing one point a year. Nonetheless, tech major services revenue for the 12 months up to Q2 18 was $64.8 billion which was 3.7 times more than global recorded music revenue in 2017 and 19% of global TV revenues in 2017.

Read the full report hereor email stephen@midiaresearch.comto find out how to get access.