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.

Free-to-Attend Event: Monetising Fandom

Join us on Wednesday 17^thJuly in central London for MIDiA’s next free-to-attend event: Monetising Fandom in a Fragmented Content Landscape. Regular attendees of our events will know that they combine great new data and analysis with insightful panels and a mix of attendees not quite like at any other event, with representation from across multiple industries.

Next week is a big one. We will be showcasing a brand-new stream of data for MIDiA: audience fandom. With audiences fragmenting across so many different platforms, formats and content genres, the attention economy not only puts pressure on every form of content, it also necessitates a complete rethink of how we measure success. Pre-streaming, success was much easier to understand: album sales and TV ratings were nice, simple-to-measure metrics. Now though, audiences are spread across a host of different platforms, sometimes consuming, sometimes simply engaging with social or promotional content. It all contributes to the artists’ brand impact, and in the era of the attention economy, extended brand reach is more important than it has ever been.

In this event we are going to showcase our latest audience insight data on music artists and TV shows, and we will present our case for an entire new way of measuring and understanding success.

The event itself will include a keynote presentation from Mark Mulligan, followed by a panel discussion featuring representatives from TikTok, ATC, Kobalt and Spirit Media.

Follow this link to sign up (fully-refundable deposit required).

For those of you who are not in London, a live stream will be made available on our Facebook page at 18.30 BST.

The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming-native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via the traditional music marketing. Instead of blowing a huge budget on carpet bombing TV, radio, print, online artists and their teams are finding their exact audiences, focusing on relevance and engagement rather than reach and scale.

The traditional model is great at creating household brands but so much of that brand impact is wasted on the households or household members that are not interested in the artist. Niche is the new mainstream. Targeted trumps reach. But too many label marketers fear that unless they use the mass media platforms, they will not be able to build national and global scale brands. They might be right, at least in part, but this is how the future will look and new marketing disciplines and objectives are required. Here’s some brand new data to show why.

Since Q4 2016 MIDiA has been tracking leading TV shows every quarter for awareness, fandom, viewing and streaming. Since the start of 2019 we have been doing the same for artists, with viewing swapped out for listening. These metrics provide a rounded picture of an artist’s full brand impact and consumption, while the ratios between these metrics give a unique view of just how individual artists are performing and of the impact of their respective marketing strategies. Later in the year we will be feeding this data into Index for Music,a unique new dashboard tool to combine with data from social platforms, streaming, searches, reviews and other metrics that create an end-to-end view of artist impact. We have already built our Index for Video tool which you can find out more about here.

In the above chart, using the consumer data component of Index, we have taken a contiguous sample of the five artists that represent the mid-point of each third of the rankings (i.e. top, middle and bottom) for two of these ratios:

• Fandom-to-streaming, which we call Streaming Conversion
• Awareness-to-fandom, which we call Brand Conversion

The results show some very clear artist clusters with clear implications for artist success and marketing strategy (remember, these are ratios not rankings of how well streamed or popular they are):

Streaming Conversion

• Rising streaming stars: These artists have twice as many people streaming them as they do fans. These artists are largely younger, frontline artists that are building their careers first and foremost on streaming platforms. These are artists that have not yet built their fanbases but are being pushed hard by their labels on streaming and elsewhere. Their listening is being driven by promotional activity. Pusha-T is the exception, a much longer established artist.
• Established artists: These artists are largely well-established artists whose streaming audience penetration correlates with their fanbases. Their listening is largely organic. Dua Lipa is the exception, still relatively early in her career but already with an established fanbase driving organic streaming.
• Low-streamed superstars: These are artists that built their careers in the pre-streaming era and while are household names, have streaming audiences smaller than their fanbases, not having managed to migrate large shares of their audiences to streaming

 

Brand Conversion

• Heritage superstars: The majority of people who know these big heritage acts like them. In some ways brand conversion is an easier task for such artists than frontline artists. As they have been around so long, it tends to be the very bests of their catalogue that people know. The fact Queen outranks the Beatles is testament to the way in which the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has created new relevance for the band.
• Big brand artists:This eclectic mix of artists are – Julia Michaels excepted – well established artists that have benefited from years of label marketing support, with about half of all people that know them liking them.
• Over-extended brands: One of the most important changes wrought by streaming and social is that fanbases no longer need to be built via mass media. However, big artists, especially major label ones, still rely upon mass media to become global stars. The result is a lot of wasted marketing budget. In this group, which is dominated by Hip Hop artists, more than half of the people who have been made aware of the artists do not like them. The marketing dollars spent on reaching those people has not converted.

We will be diving much deeper into this data in a forthcoming MIDiA client report and also at our next free-to-attend (depose required) event in central London: Managing Fandom in a Fragmented Content Landscape. Join us at the event to get a sneak peak of MIDiA’s artist data and our Index tool. All attendees will get a free copy of the presentation. In addition to the data key note there is a panel featuring people from Kobalt, TikTok, ATC and more to be confirmed. Sign up now, only limited places remain!

See you there!

Television Performance Measurement Is Falling Short

TV measurement needs a new measurement currency for the streaming era. At MIDiA we’ve spent the last year working on a solution: MIDiA Index. So excited to be able to share news of it with you. Let me know your thoughts.

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When the television first entered homes around the world, it was a safe assumption that if it was on it was the centre of attention in a room. Whatever was broadcast to the screen for that evening would be closely regarded with well-deserved awe. The household TV set could depend upon its audience.

Today, however, it is no longer sufficient to assume that a) there is a TV set, b) anyone is watching it and c) what is on it is even being paid attention to. Yet the traditional measurement metrics that the industry still relies upon fail to reflect these distinctions. With multitudinous offerings, attention economy oversaturation, and smartphones and laptops more pervasive than TVs, the difference between a television playing idly in the background and a show holding millions in rapture is more critical than ever. It is no longer enough to measure by simply looking at what’s being played on a screen, whatever screen it is you are measuring. Instead, measurement needs to go beyond this to understand what’s being actively watched, how, and what sort of brand impact it is having.

Of course, innovators have entered the marketplace with attempted solutions to the pitfalls of traditional tracking in a modern world; social media stats and public demonstrations of sentiment are the first steps in bridging the gap. Nevertheless, we can do better. And, as a matter of fact, at MIDiA Research we have done exactly that.

Our proposition: a single dashboard for shows that pulls every metric you need into one place underpinned by a new currency for audience measurement. We call it MIDiA Index. Index gives you dashboards for all the shows you need to track, comprising demographics, viewing metrics, streaming metrics, social activity, show fandom, brand awareness, audience demand, and market share – including trends over time, in different regions, and across networks and streaming services – with all of the information literally at your fingertips to peruse and act on. MIDiA’s Index combines streaming data, social data, and our own proprietary survey data and market models, putting together a complete picture of show performance. MIDiA then applies a sophisticated series of algorithms to these inputs to create an overall MIDiA Index score, our measurement benchmark that we believe can become a future currency for measurement; a way of immediately understanding the combined engagement, fandom, demand and brand impact that transcends platforms and devices, digital and analogue. Looking at shows from all of these angles, trends that would otherwise be missed, instead come to the fore.

Whether you are a TV network tracking your own shows in comparison to other networks, a TV operator looking to benchmark the real value of the shows you have licensed or an advertiser wanting to get a much better sense of which audience your brand should be targeting, our goal is to help you understand the true value and impact of a TV show in the digital era. Our aim is to help our clients to understand not just the face value of a show’s relative success, but how it has been performing, why, and what the ongoing opportunities are.

If you’re still curious just get in touch with Tommy King. We’re in our final weeks of testing and getting ready to take Index on its public debut. Let’s start the conversation now.