TikTok Music could change the game

There has been talk for some time now of TikTok parent ByteDance launching a music streaming service in Western markets. It already has Resso in Indonesia, India, and Brazil, but has spiked interest recently with trademark registrations, new Twitter accounts, and reports that ‘more than a dozen’ new markets are being prepped. TikTok has become one of the central forces in the digital music market ecosystem, eroding the cultural capital of traditional streaming services. It is a logical leap to assume that if TikTok becomes a key force in music discovery, it could do the same for consumption. While this is certainly the case, ByteDance’s streaming opportunity is a whole lot bigger and more disruptive than Resso:

TikTok Music: Resso is a perfectly decent streaming service, but similarly to YouTube Music, it only scratches the surface of what it could be. Both TikTok and YouTube have unique content, behaviour, features, and culture that stand in stark contrast to standard streaming. It is difficult to translate much of this because of licensing constraints but doing so should be the priority for both TikTok and YouTube. This will drive differentiation and help the industry carve out genuine new growth pockets rather than just unearthing the remnants of the addressable base for standard streaming. Of even more relevance to the music business, unless rightsholders can empower ByteDance’s streaming offering with something truly different, is the risk that its growth will largely comprise of switching Spotify subscribers. The music business needs the maturing streaming market to be about growth, not substitution. Perhaps TikTok Music Twitter profiles point to something bigger and bolder than Resso.

Discovery is consumption: People used to discover music on the radio and then go and buy it. That model has been turned upside down. Now, people (younger audiences in particular) discover most of their new music on TikTok or YouTube before going to radio-like streaming services to consume it. What is more, much of the ‘discovery’ that happens on TikTok is consumption. It is not just consumption either, it is consumption that streaming cannot replicate. This is before even considering the importance of ‘lean through’ creative behaviour, such as doing a duet or a dance challenge to your favourite artist’s new track. Music is the soundtrack and often the catalyst to this ‘consumption’, but when that music is listened to on streaming, it is stripped of all that creative and cultural context – It is like only listening to the soundtrack of a movie. Movie soundtracks do well as formats, but they only exist because of the movies as that is where the real value lies. All of this is why a TikTok Music service could be so exciting as it could provide both the creative and cultural context, not just the stripped-down audio file.

Ecosystem: The single most important factor of all though is TikTok’s ecosystem play. In the traditional streaming value chain, you have creators, rights, distribution, promotion, and consumption. TikTok achieves these with its superpower: its audience. Creation comes from the audience, who then distribute and market the content (via the user-centric algorithm framework, user shares, recreation, and other means), and then, of course, the audience consumes. It is a self-contained, virtuous cycle – An ecosystem. Right now, artists are pumped into the system by label marketing teams, and independent artists can push out of the system into traditional streaming with SoundOn. Yet, over time, TikTok’s creation, distribution, and consumption will become ever more self-contained, making TikTok part of what MIDiA identified as the music industry counter-culture. TikTok Music could be a major step on that journey.

Time to jump off the algorithm highway

Life is perpetual change, so it is perhaps overdoing it to suggest that the music business is at a cultural pivot point. Yet, what comes next has the potential to be looked at, years from now, as a dividing line between before and after. For more than half a decade, the music business has been hurtling down the algorithm highway, repurposing artist development, marketing, fan engagement, and even the structure of the song itself in order to stay the path. Everything is splintering, from attention to remuneration, with creators and rightsholders alike finding themselves feeding a beast whose hunger is never sated. Much like an addict who wants to quit but cannot, the music business understands the problem and the costs it incurs them, yet they dare not jump off the algorithm highway for fear of being left behind by those who do not. And yet, jumping is exactly what is needed, to halt the perpetual commodification of both music and creators. It is a leap of faith, but onto a welcoming crash mat: scenes.

At Future Music Forum this week, myself and fellow MIDiA analysts Tatiana Cirisano and Kriss Thakrar talked a lot about MIDiA’s new research into scenes and identity (MIDiA clients can read our latest report on the topic here). Regular readers will be familiar with our work on fragmented fandom and how the splintering of consumption has created a parallel splintering of culture, with new hits becoming smaller and more short-lived. In this song economy environment, it is the song, not the artist, that is the central currency, thus making nurturing smaller fandoms mission critical. But fandom itself is the symptom, the cause is identity, and this, along with the scenes in which it manifests, is where the future of music marketing lies.

Algorithms have assumed a central role in the success of artists in today’s music business, with marketers forever trying to improve their understanding of their inner workings in order to gain advantage for their artist. It is, in many respects, a fool’s errand, as it is in the platforms’ interest to continually evolve the algorithms in order to ensure it is themselves that determine success, not third parties. Nonetheless, there are ways to succeed in the song economy: you may not be able to beat the algorithm, but you can join it. This means thinking and behaving like an algorithm, to hold virality by the hand. Just like an algorithm, this means real-time multivariate testing within target segments, and progressively expanding only to next-level associated segment, resisting the ability to go big as soon as something fires. But using the algorithm as a marketing discipline truly effectively entails a degree of ruthlessness that many artists and labels would find unpalatable. Algorithms find success by casting out failure instantly, instead only amplifying that which resonates within target segments. So a label pursuing this approach would need to be willing to ditch a campaign incredibly early if it does not, however much the label might believe in the release or however big a priority the artist might be. Artist rosters would become a production line of bets, as quickly discarded as signed. Failing fast is as important as succeeding fast in the song economy. 

This ruthlessness does not sit well with the traditional model of building an artist but, as dystopian a vision as it might be, is the exact path that labels already find themselves on. Scenes represent an alternative way forward.

Scenes and identity

Scenes have always existed, but now there is a growing proliferation of online scenes that allow a degree of specificity that was simply not possible previously. As Tatiana puts it:

“Not only can people find people across the globe with the exact same interests and values, algorithms actually push those people closer together”.

Though scenes can be transitory and ephemeral, subject to fast-shifting cultural trends, the really valuable ones are those that are rooted in identity, that speak to who people are about. The eBoy scene, with Young Blud as an icon, is a case in point, reflecting the values of a tribe that does not identify with the Instagram-perfect archetype of appearance. 

These scenes sometimes revolve around music, but most often, music is simply the soundtrack, with a number of artists emerging as icons, not because they have cynically targeted them but because they come from those communities and reflect their values. Fandom is an output of this shaping of identity. It is simultaneously a way of showing how much identity matters to you and of reinforcing that identity. In fact, fandom is identity’s virtuous circle of influence, with people’s fandom reinforcing their identity and communicating it to their scene community, thus reinforcing their bonds within it.

Identity is fandom’s ground zero. Music marketers that are able to identify and nurture it (rather than simply attempt to harvest it) have an opportunity to forge a depth of artist-fan relationship that will endure far beyond the whim of any algorithm, survive both hit and miss singles, and will not disappear into the black hole of lean-back consumption. 

Streaming put fandom on hiatus. Scenes represent an opportunity to reforge fandom for the modern era, an incubator for artist careers. In short, an antidote to the song economy.

The COVID Bounce and the coming Attention Recession

2020 was by any measure a unique year in modern times. While the societal impact of the pandemic was, and continues to be, horrific, for the entertainment industries it was a year of plenty. At the start of the pandemic, MIDiA Research estimated that there would be an extra 15% of consumption time for the average working consumer. Well, now that the end of year data is in, we can confirm that this ‘COVID bounce’ did in fact happen, with overall consumption time up by 12%. When you consider that the working population is only a subset of the overall population, that 12% means that we were pretty much on the money with our prediction. But while this uplift was seen right across entertainment, some formats did better than others and, crucially, some of that extra time will diminish whenever it is that the population starts returning to work and going out again. Which means that for the first time ever in the Attention Economy, there will be an Attention Recession, with very obvious potential ramifications for all entertainment companies.

The full results of MIDiA’s highly detailed COVID media consumption study is now available to MIDiA clients in the report ‘Media consumption: Lockdown’s attention boom’ and the accompanying dataset. Here are a few of the high-level findings.

• Everything was up: 2020 was a case of a high tide rises all boats, with all forms of entertainment increasing average consumption time. Video consolidated its position as the leading format in terms of hours spent, but the largest percentage gains were in games (30%) and non-music audio (24%). Consumers even increased their time doing nothing / chilling, illustrating that despite the unsettling chaos of the pandemic, consumers found more time to relax and also to contemplate. Interestingly, doing nothing increased by a greater rate than listening to music.
  
• Audiobooks were audio’s big winner: While podcast listening was up by an impressive 35%, audiobooks were lockdown’s biggest winner, increasing average time by nearly 50%. The radio and music businesses’ obsession with podcasts is understandable given how much focus the likes of Spotify, Amazon and Apple have placed on them, but the audiobooks category has emerged as the dark horse of the piece. When all audio time is considered together (radio, music, streaming, podcasts, audiobooks), audiobooks now account for a similar share of total time as podcasts do. Though music streaming was up too during lockdown, it grew more slowly than podcasts and audiobooks so was flat in terms of total share. Radio lost share. The shift is reflected in Spotify’s numbers: its average content hours per monthly active user (MAU) fell by 1% in 2020. Given that this figure includes podcasts, the inferences are: a) Spotify lost share of audio time, and b) music hours fell. It wasn’t just Spotify that did not keep pace with the audio boom. Even apps like the BBC’s Sounds saw a fall in the ratio of weekly to daily users. 
  
• Casual gamers boosted games: Games’ growth was driven both by core gamers using the former commute time to get in some extra time on their consoles and gaming PCS. But the biggest growth was driven by mobile casual games. In previous years, mainstream consumers had driven a games surge, adopting titles like Candy Crush, but then shifted much of this time to the likes of Netflix and Spotify as the Attention Economy saturated. With more time on their hands in lockdown, mainstream consumers flocked to casual games once again. This will be a likely casualty of the coming Attention Recession.
  
• Music is just one lane in audio: COVID-19 catalysed many pre-existing trends; the audio shift was one of those. Just as Netflix took TV out of the TV, podcasts took radio out of radio and contributed to a wider trend of consumers taking an increasingly format-agnostic view of audio. Breaking long-held habits in lockdown, audiences were able to try out new things and, given that we are nearly a year into the lockdown era, establish new behaviours that will remain to some degree post-pandemic (if that is ever a phrase that will really ring true). Traditional habits like the commute and exercise will now see audiobooks and podcasts competing for music time like never before. For music companies, this means that they need to understand they are now in the audio business and they are predominately just competing in one lane. This does not mean that they inherently need to become ’audio businesses’, but it does mean that they need to build strategies that account for this shift. Meanwhile, Amazon once again emerges as the dark horse with music, podcasts and – via Audible – audiobooks. Amazon looks set to be a big beneficiary of the lockdown legacy.

If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to learn how to get access to the ‘Media consumption: Lockdown’s attention boom’ report and data then please email stephen@midiaresearch.com.

Three trends that will shape the rest of 2021, and beyond

Late last year, MIDiA published its latest predictions report (clients can read the entire report here). The central theme was the Immersive Web, which we summarised as follows:

“The immersive web is characterised by environments in which we do not simply conduct extensions of in-real-life activity (e-commerce, video calls) but ones that create behaviours and relationships that only, and can only, exist within these environments. Apps and platforms like Roblox, TikTok and Discord are early iterations of the immersive web, but merely hint at what will come.”

Our analyst team has been developing this theme and thinking about how its impact will shape digital entertainment in 2021 and beyond. These are our three identified disruptive themes that will flow from the Immersive Web:

1. Lean in: One of the dominant discussions concerning on-demand entertainment is the balance between lean forward and lean back experiences, i.e. the degree to which audiences actively choose what they are engaging with versus what they sit back and consume. But that framework does not capture the emerging shift towards audience participation, of consumers actively engaging with and modifying the content. We term this behavioural paradigm as lean in. Whether that be a teen creating a TikTok video, a consumer creating a meme or a gamer making music on Splash in Roblox, digital audiences increasingly expect to be a part of the content itself. We think audio will be the next frontier for lean in. MIDiA’s Cultural Insights analyst Hanna Kahlert will be developing this theme.
   
2. The insurgent opportunity: The competitive marketplace of digital entertainment companies is becoming static. Though there is still lots of growth and in many cases – e.g. podcasts, video – accelerating investment, innovations in user experience have slowed. The likes of Apple, Warner Media and ViacomCBS are shaking up the video subscriptions marketplace, yet they are differentiating around content, not features. Incumbent Netflix has done relatively little to innovate its user experience. The same story plays out in music (with the exception of layering podcasts into the mix, which is of course not innovating the music experience but instead the wider audio experience). Across all of digital entertainment, big incumbent players (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify etc.) are becoming so mainstream they are having to slow their innovation so as not to alienate their newer, mainstream audiences. This is exactly what happened to Apple once the iPod and iPhone thrust it into the mainstream. This creates a huge opportunity for disruptive insurgents who do not have to cater for older, mainstream audiences and can focus on disruptive innovation rather than sustaining innovation. Asian-origin apps like TikTok and Weverse are beginning to chip away at incumbent stasis. This trend will aggressively accelerate, driving the next major chapter in digital entertainment.
   
   
3. Entertainment internets: A number of the biggest platforms on the planet have become so dominant and so exhaustive that they are effectively creating mini-internets. YouTube is the internet of video, Amazon the internet of commerce, Facebook the internet of social. Each has succeeded in this all-encompassing impact by delivering so much to diverse audience segments and use cases. They have then used this audience to pull the majority of the partner and creator value chain into their orbit because those parties simply cannot afford not to be there. The internet itself has continued to prove largely immune from wholesale regulation, but these entertainment internets may prove easier targets for regulators as they are owned by single corporate parents and thus risk falling foul of anti-competitive behaviour oversight. Other than regulation, in the near to mid-term, these entertainment internets will face relatively little disruptive threat other than their own hubris. The rise of insurgents will hit the incumbent pure plays harder and first, though over time even the entertainment internets will also find themselves under fire.

2021 Predictions: The year of the immersive web

As we approach the end of 2020 it is time to look forward to what 2021 may bring. MIDiA has published the fifth edition of our Annual Predictions report which clients can read here. There are 27 predictions in the report, but I am sharing a few of them here. MIDiA has a pretty good track record with its predictions; 79% of our predictions for 2020 were correct.

These are the seven meta and cultural trends that we believe will shape 2021: 

1. The immersive web
2. Recessionary impact
3. The great reaggregation
4. The return of synchronous experiences
5. Social consumption and micro communities
6. Video streaming as a cultural catalyst 
7. The end of influencers

The immersive web

Web 1.0 was an information dump; web 2.0 added multimedia and social. Now we are entering the third phase, which MIDiA terms the immersive web. As is usually the case with big epoch shifts, this will not be a clear and sudden change but instead a steady change – a change that is, in fact, already happening. The immersive web is characterised by environments in which we do not simply conduct extensions of IRL activity (e-commerce, video calls) but ones that create behaviours and relationships that only, and can only, exist within these environments. Apps and platforms like Roblox, TikTok and Discord are early iterations of the immersive web, but merely hint at what will come. The trend will be driven by Gen Z, who have grown up with social apps from the playground onwards. Gen Z relies more than any previous generation on such apps for social interaction and expression, forming muscle memory for digital-first relationships. The COVID-19 lockdown measures have accentuated this shift, further solidifying Gen Z’s receptivity to future immersive web experiences.

Music

Here is a short version of some of the trends we expect to shape music in 2021:

• The start of an artist economy: Streaming is a song economy of which the scale benefits rights holders far more than creators. The industry needs to work towards a collection of models that work for artists. Components could be micro-communities (see below), sounds platforms, ticketed live streams, skills marketplaces, and virtual merch. 
  
• The rise of micro-communities: Niche is the new mainstream. The next phase of this market dynamic is the emergence of micro-communities; small audiences of dedicated fans who almost consider it an honour-bound duty to support their artists. 
  
• The creator tools revolution: Creator tools, particularly music production and collaboration, will be one of the most important market shifts in 2021. Companies like Splice, LANDR and Output will continue to build scale in 2021, changing both the culture and business of music. 
  
• Live streaming professionalises: With live unlikely to be anything close to full capacity until the latter part of 2021, live streaming will be used by a growing body of artists as a genuine revenue driver, rather than the audience engagement role it played in much of 2020, driven by increased professionalisation, better distribution and more sophisticated monetisation.
  
• Music continues to deliver as an asset class: Although the pandemic dented music publishing’s long-term growth story, music catalogues retain strong appeal as an asset class, not least because they are performing better in relation to many asset classes that have been hit hard by the pandemic and that look vulnerable to the coming recession. The imbalance between supply and demand remains, so expect prices paid to continue to accelerate. 
  
• UGC continues to accelerate: User-generated content (UGC) music revenues reached $4 billion in 2020 and will push up to $4.9 billion in 2021. The crucial difference between UGC music now compared to five years ago, is that the focus is on genuine user creativity rather than users simply uploading others’ music.

2020 was a year like no other in modern times, with the impact on digital entertainment both pronounced and creating the foundations for accelerated innovation in 2021. Whatever may happen to the global economic and health outlook, digital entertainment will go through further dramatic change in 2021.

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.

Streaming Services Are Going to Have to Change Their MO

New music is the fuel in the streaming engine, creating a virtuous circle of increased label and artist output to meet DSP-stimulated user demand. Now though, with COVID-19 disrupting the production of music, everything is set to change. The streaming services haven’t realised it yet, but their underlying modus operandi (MO) is going to need to change, too.

When new music is all you have to position around

Disney launched Disney+ into a crowded video subscription marketplace and hit 50 million subscribers after just five months. This could not have happened in the music streaming market for the simple reason that all music services carry pretty much the same catalogue. There is no Mandalorian effect possible for music. Content differentiation is a non-starter. Worse still, music streaming services all look the same, so differentiating on user experience is out of the picture too. They also all cost the same and largely work on the same devices. Consequently, they have to differentiate on how they deliver music via algorithms and curation. This in turn has led to the weaponisation of new music discovery. The MO is simple: our value to you, the user, is delivering relevant new music at high volume and velocity. Record labels fed the beast, increasing the amount of new releases. Then came COVID-19. Suddenly studios closed down, releases got pushed back, projects put on hold. How do you continue to position and differentiate around the quantity of new music you deliver if that quantity is going to lessen?

Music’s lockdown ‘feelgood’ factor

Streaming services – and labels – are going to be able to offset some of the impact of reduced output by promoting older music. In fact, this is exactly what consumers want right now. In MIDiA’s latest COVID-19 Impact survey, more than a third of consumers stated that they are listening to music that makes them feel more positive. Meanwhile they are listening less to new music and instead more to songs the already know. Although new releases have every chance of making you feel positive, familiar music with positive memories guarantees the feelgood factor in a way that unfamiliar music cannot. Consumers are turning to radio because they value the connection with the presenters during lockdown. In these troubled, isolated times, music plays an invaluable role and in turn streaming services do also.

Preparing for a recession

The problem is not with streaming services per se. Instead it is the question of what streaming services stand for in a mini-era of catalogue renaissance after years of expensively building brand values centred on new music. Fixing the curation and the programming is the (relatively) easy part. But if lockdown measures persist into the latter part of the year – which could easily happen, despite the hopes of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro – then new music will be an ever-smaller part of the streaming offering. And if lockdown measures do persist for that long, then we will likely be feeling the impacts of a recession by then. MIDiA’s March Recession Impact report revealed that around a fifth of consumers would consider cancelling their music subscription if they had to cut entertainment spending. This may seem like a subtle nuance, but if by then streaming users have become accustomed to listening to old, familiar tunes then as they are faced with the difficult decision of where to cut spending, they will know that streaming is not delivering on its original new music promise. Add into the mix that being able to listen to music on the go is a crucial subscription value add, but in lockdown phone listening is losing ground to smart device listening as mobility is discouraged.

Communicating new brand values

Streaming music, and recorded music more generally, is in a really good place right now. It is bringing much-needed light into the locked-down homes of hundreds of millions. Moreover, it is actually better placed to deal with the disruption to content production than the streaming video space because listening to older music is central to music consumption, while watching reruns of old TV shows is something you do when there is nothing better to watch. So, the coming catalogue shift is not an existential challenge for streaming. Rather than a product or programming problem, it is about brand positioning and communicating core values. Nonetheless, these soft tools are crucial and unless the groundwork is laid now, a serious problem could manifest in six months or so if the economy enters a recession. Time for those marketing and branding teams to earn their crust.

Note: If you were wondering why I haven’t discussed how all this might affect independent artists – that’s next week’s post!

Ellie Goulding and Billie Eilish Are Streaming’s New Normal

Less than a week into the new decade and we already have the first indications that the streaming rulebook continues to be rewritten faster than the ink can dry on its last entry. Three separate articles, on the surface unrelated, when stitched together create the outline of a new streaming narrative that while firmly rooted in recent developments represents an entirely new chapter for the music industry:

1. Ellie Goulding’s ‘River’ was the UK Christmas number one despite being an Amazon exclusive
2. Jimmy Iovine claims Drake and Billie Eilish each have more streams than the entirety of the 1980s
3. UK streaming revenue growth slowed, adding £191 million in 2019 compared to £210 million in 2019

Fusing consumption and retail

Streaming’s impact is both commercial and cultural, in large part because it fuses what used to be retail and radio. Like some kind of musical nuclear fusion, it smashes discovery and consumption together to create a chain reaction with explosive implications. In the old world, repeated radio spins drove awareness and then sales. In streaming environments, lean-back streams are simultaneously radio-like listens and sales. The distinction does not matter for streaming services – they are focused on user acquisition, engagement and retention, but for labels it challenges the very premise of what marketing campaigns are meant to achieve. It is in this environment that today’s streaming stars are made.

‘More of more’

With streaming services lacking any meaningful way to differentiate, they are forced to compete on who can deliver their users’ the most new music to drive the most listening. This strategic imperative of ‘more of more’ is at direct odds with the objective of any label campaign, which is inherently about ‘more of less’, i.e. listen to this song more instead of more songs. The net result is vast amounts of streams spread widely, but also an environment in which hits become megahits. The songs that get traction experience a domino effect of successive algorithmic decisions, rapidly pushing songs with buzz to a progressively wider number of playlists and users. In the old world this would have been radio airplay success; now it is just volume of streams.

Catalogue Darwinism

Because of the focus on new, streaming-era artists end up with far bigger streaming volumes than older artists that were ‘bigger’ in their respective eras, but an afterthought in the streaming era. Hence, Drake and Billie Eilish being bigger than the entirety of the 1980s. Back in mid-2018 MIDiA published a report predicting that music catalogue was going to decline. We faced a lot of opposition then but now we are beginning to see that catalogue is indeed undergoing a fundamental change. For deep, legacy catalogue, streaming dynamics are stripping out the long tail and boiling down entire decades to a handful of tracks. Think of it this way: if 10% of the artists released in the 1980s were ‘successful’ at the time, and 10% of those were successful enough for their music to still be listened to now, and that the songs that are still listened to are 10% of these artists’ entire 1980s output, then you end up with 0.1% of the music from the 1980s being streamed at any meaningful scale now. Added to that, new music gets pushed to more lean-back playlists so is listened to more times. The multiplier effect for new music acts as a divider for older music. As an illustration, 40 music videos on YouTube have more than one billion views but in October 2019 Guns ‘n Roses ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was the only one from the 1980s that had a billion views.

If you own the rights to those catalogue gems then the value of that asset is arguably higher now than ever before, because it has won the Darwinian game of catalogue evolution. But the rest fall by the wayside.

Ellie Goulding: niche mainstream

So, the current dynamics of streaming programming favour new versus old. It may not always be so, but this is where we are right now. These same dynamics can then be used to create hits – demand creation, if you like. This is where Ellie Goulding comes in. Goulding’s Joni Mitchell cover ‘River’ was an Amazon exclusive yet became the overall UK number one in large part because Amazon ensured it was on just about every holiday-themed playlist. Every time someone asked Alexa to play Christmas music, ‘River’ soon found its way there. Because Echo listening skews so heavily lean-back, ‘River’ simply became part of the sonic festive wallpaper, much in the same way ‘All I Want for Christmas’ did on radio. Just like with radio, lean-back listeners are unlikely to stop whatever else they are doing in order to change the track. Because streaming economics do not differentiate with lean-back and lean-forward listening, passive listening is just as valuable as active listening. Radio has become as valuable as retail but is much easier to manipulate.

The other crucial aspect of this is that Amazon has shown that you only need to find and activate a small slice of the mainstream to have a mainstream hit. As MIDiA first said last year, niche is the new mainstream.

At the start of this post I stated that streaming’s effects are both cultural and commercial. The commercial backdrop to all of these consumption and programming shifts is that the rate of revenue growth is beginning to slow (not just in percentage terms – that is a natural effect of markets getting bigger) but also in absolute terms. Early last year we predicted that streaming growth would start to slow towards the end of 2019 in developed markets and the ERA figures for the UK are the first evidence of this shift. Globally, growth will be sustained by emerging and mid-tier markets, but in markets like the UK and US, growth is peaking. The significance is that the conflation of radio and retail does not matter so much when everything is growing. When growth slows, however, quirks of the market can become business challenges. The ROI of throwing money at campaigns to cut through the audio clutter becomes problematic when the promise of the pie getting ever bigger begins to wane.

All of these things are of course simply part of a maturing and changing market. Nevertheless, the marketing strategies currently employed have been developed in an environment of growth abundance. The challenge for streaming’s next chapter is finding the new rules that are more ROI focused but can still play to streaming’s consumption strengths. Delineating different rates for lean-forward and lean-back streams feels like a logical place to start, but more evolution will need to follow – each iteration of which will trigger its own waves of unintended consequences. Exciting times.

Five Trends Changing Music Marketing

This is a guest post from MIDiA Research analyst Keith Jopling

Marketing music has never been straightforward. That’s why back in the day, label executives would use the single as the shortcut to finding an audience on which to propel the artist, and even more importantly, their latest album. Meanwhile, radio stations were largely in lockstep, since they would rather play the ‘catchiest’ hits as well as help build familiarity for those hits (those that got through dreaded call-out research). Still, neither side really knew which songs audiences would take to their hearts. The signal was foggy, at least until the record reached the shops. Even then, it was hard to know whether people liked the music, or just didn’t know about it. Hence the market was a constant flow of ‘push and pray’.

The single biggest change brought by streaming is the clarity of the signal. It has improved. It is clearer now which songs people really like. The art of marketing is to seed the song into the right places and wait to see what pops where. The challenge for label marketers isn’t so much to grasp this new world – they do. Their challenge is to have enough direct levers they can pull to make the new world order tip in their artists’ favour. The cause of many a migraine for marketers, however, is that they have very few direct levers and are at the mercy of gatekeepers, influencers and other layers that sit between their songs and the audience.

The problems for music marketers are manifold. We’ve listed just some of them here, each with a kernel of a solution. Whether music marketers have it in their power to fashion the solutions into actionable marketing tactics is a different story. But, given that global marketing is one of the core competencies of a modern record label (and a modern artist manager), the broader solution is for marketers to push their agenda higher up the chain, and for more corporate-level innovation and investment to get the marketing engines changed up and fit for purpose. We argue as well that to succeed in doing this, marketers should change behaviours and start marketing for the environment now, not yesterday.

In this short report (download for free on the MIDiA webpages), Consulting Director Keith Jopling examines five problematical trends changing the way music is marketed, and points to potential solutions.

Problem (and solution) 1: Managing linear decline

The steady decline of linear radio and TV audiences is eroding these platforms’ contribution to music marketing effectiveness. The industry seems to live in hope that this will find a self-cure. A label’s power to get an artist’s song on the radio is seen by the artist as second fiddle to streaming, so the solution is obvious – either work with radio to improve its relevance or -get better at playlist pitching and see radio as a bi-product or bonus, not an essential. With playlist pitching getting harder, perhaps the former option is actually the better one.

Currently, radio is the only large-scale media that labels have for reaching national audiences at a shared time and place. But radio’s rolling playlist slots are too low in volume. One simple change would be for labels/publishers/managers to convince radio brands to expand their playlists to accommodate many more slots for new music (preferably with much better analytics to measure this, as audiences continue to migrate from broadcast to on-demand). For one thing, it would help radio’s issues in competing with streaming platforms if they could increase their capacity for song discovery by trading off new songs with catalogue plays or heavy rotation hits – ‘track of the hour’ rather than ‘track of the day’. Radio could argue that it is a better discovery platform than streaming, given it can add powerful context (daypart, presenters, artist stories) that streaming currently does not. Radio provides a sense of community. Streaming platforms are frozen wastelands in comparison. Radio can only make this argument however, if it can go further to compete with streaming on volume.

The plethora of branded radio apps now on the market is hardly a joined-up force to take on streaming, but if the market continues to evolve this way, then radio providers must use their brand equity and identity to serve super-niches, and serve them better – be it genre, demographic, a particular scene, theme or location. The most successful will begin to stem the loss in audience reach, but also fill the gaps left by streaming services to hold onto those audiences in terms of engagement and emotional attachment. For all the rhetoric of streaming platforms, one of those gaps is music discovery.

Download our free report to read the following further problems & solutions:

• Managing streaming economics and higher song volumes
• Managing post-album creativity
• Managing global-local culture
• Managing music value

Fan upsell is the money left on the table

In the mainstream pop world, the upsell potential to super-fans remains a gaping hole in the potential growth for the industry. Labels have acquired merchandise companies for incremental revenue but have so far stayed clear of the one sector in which the artists’ ‘product’ remains a scarce premium – live performance. Yet, real estate and demand can be created outside of the main live sector dominated by Live Nation and AEG. Companies like Dice and Sofar Sounds and even City Winery in the USA have proved this.

Some horizontal thinking is required on the subject of music’s value problem – whether it be that previous ‘promotional’ channels be abandoned unless there is directly attributable consumption as a result, or that labels can create more live real estate (through monetising showcases or converting tour support funding into direct ticketed appearances). Artists remain super-valuable brands. Average revenue per artist must go one way – up. Artists must use this as the benchmark for choosing their preferred means of representation, not just the size of their streaming numbers.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) August 23rd 2019

Taylor Swift, pre-sale love: Taylor Swift tends not to adhere to prevailing industry trends. As a millennial artist with a strong Gen Z following, streaming should rightly be the core of her recordings career. Having started her career very young in the album era, however, she and her fans still love album sales. So, on the eve of her first UMG album ‘Lover’, she has hit one million pre-sales– which is kind of spectacular in the post-album era. Add this to BTS helping push South Korean sales into growth, and we have an emerging trend: pop acts mobilising young fanbases on a global scale to buy albums as a gesture of fandom. 

Apple TV+, on its way: Apple confirmed plans to launch its video subscription service by November, part of a drive to reach $50 billion in service sales by 2020. Services represent 21% of Apple’s revenue and it is making a big deal of transitioning to being a services business. A cynic might argue that of course Apple would say this when iPhone sales are dipping below 50% revenue. While wearables are booming, there is no iPhone successor on the horizon, so services need to drive mid-term growth.

Korn, brutal mosh pit: Nu-metal veterans Korn have announced they are doing virtual gigs in MMO games AdventureQuest 3D and AQWorlds. The band have had characters made of them and they promise a ‘brutal mosh pit’ and an ‘unforgettably brutal, monster-filled virtual rock concert’ – as well as the opportunity to take selfies backstage with the band. Making in-game concerts work is no easy task (look at how long it has been since Marshmello’s Fortnite ‘gig’). But the potential is clear, and they will get easier to do.

Google, privacy fightback: Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy has risen in the agenda. Companies that don’t rely on advertising (Apple in particular) have been able to leverage this to position privacy as a product. Google can’t afford to be a passive observer, as advertising is 83% of its revenue ($33 billion last quarter). Its Chrome team has thus proposed a ‘privacy sandbox’, which aims to deliver accurate targeting for advertisers without compromising user privacy. Blocking cookies can reduce publishers’ ad revenue by half, so Google needs a privacy-friendly version of targeting, fast.

PAOK, licensing brinkmanship: Greek Super League football club PAOK will stream its first match of the season on itsown OTT platform because it hasn’t yet got a licensing deal with national broadcaster ERT. Sports licensing is in an unusual place right now. On the one hand, traditional broadcasters are seeing audiences decline while having to spend more on drama to compete with Netflix (so less to spend on sports), while on the other new streaming players are increasing their spend. Expect more speed bumps like this along the way.