How (and why) Billie Eilish won Glastonbury

Glastonbury returned to great fanfare after the pandemic-enforced break, which meant it was the first one since 2019. The music world has changed a lot since then, with streaming getting bigger than ever and TikTok now established as a cornerstone of the music business. Back in 2019, the standard thing to do was to look at how much Glastonbury boosted streaming numbers of artists who were on the bill, but in today’s world, it is the impact on an artist’s fanbase that is arguably most important.

The BBC and Glastonbury partnership is a fandom engine room 

Glastonbury plays an important role because it is broadcast (TV and radio) and streamed in the UK by the BBC, which means it is a rare thing in today’s on-demand world: it is a cultural moment. Due to the splintering of culture and the fragmentation of fandom, cultural moments in music have largely gone, replaced by the asynchronous paradigm that streaming enables. In the past, summers were soundtracked by hits that everyone knew, now algorithms and personalisation mean that everyone has their own summer hit. Meanwhile, streaming has turned music into a utility, more of a soundtrack to our daily lives than a cultural touchpoint. If streaming has turned music into water, then what we now need are glasses to drink it from. In the UK, Glastonbury provides a counterpoint to that dynamic, presenting a few days in which everyone, from casual viewers through to due hard music fans, can watch great music – music that is, crucially, often outside of what they would usually listen to. The reason this matters is because streaming algorithms deliver us more of what we like and, thus, narrows our cultural scope. The handpicked and diverse line up of Glastonbury, amplified by the expert curation and programming of a national broadcaster, breaks music listeners out of the algorithm cage. There are not many algorithms that would present Wolf Alice alongside Diana Ross. The Glastonbury / BBC combination thus presents a real-world evidence point for how genuine discovery can be brought back into music. It is not instead of streaming, but, instead, amplifying it. 

Finding new audiences

So much for the consumer case, but what about the artist case? What an artist (and labels) really want is not just a temporary streaming boost, but a long-term lift to fanbases. Big streaming counts are a great calling card, but, unless they are huge, they do not add up for most artists. And a weekend bump is only of any real value if it provides the footprint for a longer term fanbase lift. So, what really matters is how a one-off event drives fandom growth. But how is that measures? Well, it just so happens that MIDiA is currently building a fandom measurement tool that we are calling Music Index. Let us take a look at some of MIDiA’s Index data to show just how much impact Glastonbury has already had on some of the artists who performed there.

One of the key things we do with Index is create artist cohorts to enable comparisons across similar artists, with the top performing artist in each category indexed as 100 and the others against that base. So, we defined a Glastonbury cohort to track fandom and engagement impact across these artists. Looking at the top five artists in our ‘engagement’ metric (a hybrid measure that includes streaming, YouTube, etc.), the clear winner was Kendrick Lamar, with AJ Tracey being a close second and Wet Leg a not-too-distant third. These three artists all saw the biggest gains during and after Glasto.

The vast majority of established artists do not rely on streaming as their primary income, so measuring engagement is only part of the picture. Which brings us onto our next metric, ‘fandom’, another hybrid metric that captures a large collection of fandom and social behaviours. What is interesting here is that the rankings are very different, with Billie Eilish, who was not even in the ‘engagement’ top five, not only coming out on top, but way ahead of the rest. Unlike with engagement, the distance to second and third spots is much larger. Notwithstanding, Kendrick Lamar grabs another podium spot and also saw a stronger uplift than Megan Thee Stallion, though the latter was already more highly ranked before Glasto and remains ahead.

One of the key inputs into MIDiA’s Music Index is Wikipedia. It is a heavily underrated artist metric that is front of mind for music marketers. Wikipedia is so useful because it reflects a consumer’s desire to go further, to learn more about the artist. It is a fandom lean-in metric. Whereas a Google search may simply be geared to going and finding a track, a Wikipedia view is a first step towards a deeper level of fandom. The Wikipedia spikes for the Glastonbury artist cohort demonstrates a very clear pattern of spikes in line with performances, thus highlighting the huge benefit of a widely broadcast and streamed live performance in penetrating new audiences for artists. Beyond the bigger acts, Sam Fender and Yungblud both saw strong spikes following their performances, further evidence of the unique power of the broadcast and streamed event helping artists connect with new fans.

Taken together, the Glastonbury impact can be defined as follows:

• Kendrick Lamar might have gotten the biggest consumption bump, but Billie Eilish is likely the one who ended up with the largest long-term uplift to her fanbase
• The Glastonbury / BBC partnership makes a compelling case for the power of building artist reach to wider audiences via tentpole, live performances broadcast and online 

Artists in the UK understand just how Glastonbury can create career-defining cultural moments – just ask Sam Fender. But the case here should be less about Glastonbury itself and more about how the live / broadcast / stream model presents a global use case for reinvigorating cultural moments in the era of splintered culture.

If you are interested in learning more about MIDiA’s forthcoming Music Index tool (there is a LOT more to it than what was covered here!) then drop a line to 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.

The Top TV Shows Of 2017, And The Inexorable Rise Of Netflix

This is a guest post by MIDiA’s Tim Mulligan (also my brother!)

For the past 15 months MIDiA Research has been tracking every quarter more than 60 leading TV shows across the US, UK, Canada and Australia. With the fragmentation of TV audiences and the rise of streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video that are notoriously guarded with their data, it is becoming progressively more difficult for TV companies and advertisers to know just how popular individual TV shows actually are. Many are increasingly turning to social media as a guide to popularity, but these are demographically skewed. For example, the audiences of Facebook and Twitter are both older, so rankings based on these platforms skew results towards shows that are popular among older consumers. This is why the likes of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones usually top such rankings. (More than half of the audiences for both shows are aged 35 and above, compared to, for example, just 36% for 13 Reasons Why).

This is why we developed the MIDiA TV Show Brand Tracker, surveying 3,500 consumers, to track popularity of shows with a neutral and objective methodology. The results provide a unique view of which shows are resonating with consumers in the streaming era.

CBS’s The Big Bang Theory tops MIDiA’s Brand Tracker rankings with an average 45% fan penetration across all of 2017. The Big Bang Theory tends to underreport on Twitter and Facebook rankings but has topped our list in each quarter in every market except for the UK where it is shunted into third place by the BBC’s Sherlock and ITV’s Broadchurch. CBS also takes second spot with 41% fan penetration, holding the same position in the US and Australia, but slipping to third in Canada and sixth in the UK.

2017 was a massive year for HBO’s Game of Thrones with season 7 premiering in July, which drove a three-percentage-point spike in fandom in Q3 – up to 33%. Game of Thrones is a top-four show across all four markets surveyed. Although Game of Thrones is HBO’s only show in the top 20, the network has three other shows in the Top 40 including Westworld (which maintained strong fandom despite having aired in December 2016, suggesting that season 2 will get off to a strong start in 2018).

The BBC is one of the strongest performing networks with three shows in the top 20. AMC’s The Walking Dead takes sixth position with 27% penetration, but fandom varies markedly by market, slipping to just 10^th in the UK.

Perhaps the biggest story of 2017 is the rise of Netflix as a TV network. Netflix, with seven, has more shows than any other in the top 40, though only two are in the top 20 (Stranger Things and House of Cards). Superhero shows have been a big win for Netflix with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Daredevil all in the top 40. But, the one to pay attention to is 13 Reasons Why at number 23, driven largely by 16-24-year-old viewers. In the post-linear schedule world Netflix has learned how to super serve audience segments with shows that are ‘prime time’ titles within its service that would not be able to occupy prime time slots on broadcast TV because their appeal to older audiences is limited.

Stranger Things was Netflix’s biggest hit of 2017, taking eighth spot overall, but first among 16-19 year olds and second place for 20-24 year olds. Netflix might have built its revenue business around 25-44 year olds but it is winning the programming battle for younger millennials. Traditional TV networks should pay heed.

If you would like to learn more about MIDiA’s TV Brand Tracker and how to get access to the data, email us at info@midiaresearch.com 

The Global Implications Of The BBCs Streaming Strategy

Yesterday the BBC’s Director General Tony Hall laid out a vision for the future of the BBC (for an excellent take on this see the blog post from MIDiA’s video analyst Tim Mulligan, and yes the name may look familiar, he’s my brother!).  The BBC has long played a crucial innovation role in the digital content economy but it has yet to carve out a convincing role for itself in online music.  It has built up a compelling YouTube content offering and it has pursued a streaming coexistence strategy with its innovative Playlister initiative but the bigger play has yet to be made.  That looks set to change, with the announcement that the BBC is planning to launch a ‘New Music Discovery Service’, which would make the 50,000 tracks broadcast by the BBC every month available to stream for a limited period.  The initiative is interesting in itself but its implications are more profound and could have global repercussions.

Radio Still Rules The Roost But The Streaming Fox Is At The Door

Radio is still by far the main way most people interact with music.  75% of consumers listen to music radio regularly compared to 39% that stream for free. Radio also remains the main way in which people discover new music and its DJs are still some of the most influential tastemakers on the planet cf Apple poaching Zane Lowe from the BBC’s Radio 1.  But things are undoubtedly changing.  Music radio penetration among 16-24 year olds falls to 65% while streaming rises to 54%.  In Sweden streaming has overtaken music radio among 16-24 year olds.  All of this without even considering YouTube which has overtaken radio for 16-24 year olds in markets as diverse as UK, US, Sweden, Germany and Mexico and is on the verge of doing so in France.  (All consumer data is from MIDiA Research).  Radio held its own throughout the digital revolution of the last 15 years but the cracks are now there for all to see.  Most radio broadcasters do not yet have the assets to properly navigate the digital transition.  In most markets there is no dedicated digital platform (the US and UK are two notable exceptions) so broadcasters rely increasingly on mobile streaming for engaging audiences digitally.  Which means they are one swipe of a finger away from a bewildering array of radio alternatives.  It is this dynamic that underpins the BBC’s approach to streaming.

The Tyranny Of Choice

Though streaming had been around long before Spotify (hello Rhapsody) the Swedish upstart simply made the model work.  It did so by fixing buffering and by giving consumers frictionless (i.e. not cost and easy to use) access to all the music in the world.  By fixing that problem Spotify inadvertently created a new problem: the Tyranny of Choice.  Consumers are paralysed by excessive choice.  The Tyranny of Choice is of course not solely Spotify’s fault but it was certainly a catalyst for it. With the traditional gatekeepers / curators (delete as appropriate according to your worldview) increasingly bypassed by data-driven discovery, mainstream music fans are left feeling utterly bewildered.

Consumers Don’t Get Curation

The BBC is keenly aware of its value as a curator and quite frankly thinks it can do a better job than pure play streaming services.  It is probably right.  But what it doesn’t yet know how to do is communicate and deliver that value outside of the framework of radio.  The problem with curation is most people don’t think they need it.  Just 5% of consumers state they want discovery and recommendation features from streaming services.  Yet these are in the main the very same consumers that listen to music radio, which of course is all about discovery and recommendation.  The difference is that it doesn’t feel like it.

Setting Curation Free

This the challenge for the BBC and all radio broadcasters: how can they take the essence of DJ led programming and translate that into the streaming environment.  Apple’s approach of simply taking programmed radio and building on demand streaming around it is one bold approach but it is just a first step. The BBC, and other publicly funded broadcasters, have the advantage of being able to take the long view, of planning for long term evolution rather than focusing on ‘flipping’ their start up or keeping shareholders happy each quarter.

The BBC is placing the bet that giving its curation the maximum ability to permeate and interact with the streaming marketplace will give it the best chance of delineating which models will work and how best to bottle up that curation magic dust.  It is also a bold move because if it follows its course this could see the BBC’s content, curation and editorial break free of the confines of the BBC.  Because if it works well enough out in the ‘streaming wild’ why would a user need to even visit a BBC property.  The BBC is setting curation free.  It is a strategy that gives a hat tip to BuzzFeed, a company with a stated intent to distribute content as widely as possible even if that ultimately means killing off the BuzzFeed website.  A quote from BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti sums up the thinking perfectly: “Content might still be King but distribution is Queen, and she wears the trousers.”

So watch the BBC’s streaming endeavours closely because the outcomes will likely provide blueprints for thriving in the streaming era for media companies of all types and sizes right across the globe.

What Future For The Album In The On-Demand Age?

Recently BBC Radio 1’s head of music George Ergatoudis stirred up something of a storm with his claim that “albums are edging closer to extinction”. Nonetheless there is a growing body of evidence that the album does indeed seem to be losing its relevance in today’s track and playlist led world. And the implications stretch much further than the confines of the recorded music business. (Hint: live music industry, you need to be watching your back too.)

The Advent Of Grazing

When Napster emerged 15 years ago it kick started an irreversible transformation in music consumption. The music business had spent the previous three decades turning the singles dominated market of the 1950’s into the albums led market of the 1990’s, but with Napster consumers suddenly did not have to take the whole album package anymore. The labels had their own fair share of blame. When the vinyl LP had been the dominant format albums typically had 8 tracks, but with the CD labels felt compelled to fill every one of its 74 minutes’ capacity, resulting in a preponderance of filler tracks over killer tracks. Couple this with album price hyperinflation and you had the perfect recipe for consumer revolt. Little wonder that music fans cherry picked tracks, skipping the filler for the killer. Grazing replaced immersion.

Ironically the issue became even more pronounced with the advent of the iTunes Music Store. Whereas with file sharing many users downloaded entire albums – and as bandwidth and storage improved, entire discographies – listening still skewed towards the stand out tracks. Indeed the hoarding mentality of these digital immigrants was one borne out of being children of the age of scarcity, with a ‘fill up quick while you still can’ mentality. With iTunes, price was a limiting factor and so people focused on acquiring single tracks rather than albums. Labels and artists had been scared iTunes would cannibalise album sales, they were right.

Digital Natives Set A New Pace

In the subsequent decade new digital behavior patterns have become more clearly defined, particularly among the digital natives. Playlists and individual tracks have become the dominant consumption paradigm. Even music piracy has moved away from the album to smaller numbers of tracks, with free music downloader mobile apps and YouTube rippers now more widespread than P2P. This is the piracy behavior of the digital natives who have no need to hoard vast music collections because they know they can always find the music they want on YouTube or Soundcloud if they want it.

The behavior shift is clearly evidenced in revenue numbers. Since 2008 alone US album sales (CD and digital) have declined by 22% (IFPI), while digital track sales outpace digital album sales by a factor of 10 to 1. The top 10 selling albums in the US shifted 56.4 million units in 2000.  In 2013 the number was 14.7 million (Nielsen SoundScan). Even more stark is the contrast between playlists and albums on streaming service. Spotify has 1.5 billion playlists but just 1.4 million albums (see figure). While the comparison is not exactly apples-to-apples (album count is a catalogue count and playlist count is a hybrid catalogue / consumption count) it is nonetheless a useful illustration of the disparity of scale. (In fact the 1.4 million album assumption is probably high due to a) duplicates b) singles and EPs c) compilations.)

Even the much heralded success of Ed Sheeran’s album ‘X’ does not exactly paint a robust argument for the album. ‘X’ set the record for first week global plays of an album on Spotify with 23.8 million streams. But that represents just 0.27% of weekly Spotify listening (based on Spotify’s reported 40 million active users, 110 minutes daily listening and an average song length of 3.5 minutes).

The Album As A Mainstream Consumption Paradigm Was A Historical Anomaly

This is the consumer behavior backdrop for the demise of the album.  Creatively the album still represents the zenith of an artist’s creativity and many albums are still most often best appreciated as a creative whole. Core fans and music aficionados will still listen to albums but the majority of consumers will not. The album as the mainstream consumption paradigm was a historical anomaly of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. In the 50’s and the 60’s the single was the way the majority interacted with music, and now in the early 21^st century it is once again. There has always been space for vast diversity of artists along the niche to mainstream spectrum but as a consumption format the album is closer to the Steve Reich end than it is the Katy Perry end.

Artists And Labels Need To Catch Up With Consumer Behaviour

The majority of artists will still make albums and labels will indulge them because their organizations and business models are built around the format. But therein lies the problem: the more that consumer behavior evolves, the more distant the gap between artists’ recorded output and their fans’ demand becomes.

There is more music released now than ever before and most likely more music listened to than ever before. But the amount of music listeners in the world’s top 10 music markets – which account for 91% of revenue – has not increased at anything like the same rate. People are spending less time with individual artists and albums. In the on-demand age with effectively limitless supply they flit from here to there, consuming more individual artists in a single playlist than an average music fan would have bought albums by in an entire year in the CD era. Fewer fans develop deep relationships with individual artists. Right now this translates into fewer album sales. In 10 years’ time it will manifest as a collapse in arena and stadium sized heritage live acts. In fact we are already witnessing the impact, after all what are festivals and DJ sets if not the playlist translated into a live experience?

As painful as it may be for many to accept, the tide has already turned against the album. The challenge to which artists and labels must now rise is to reinvent creativity in ways that meet the realities of the on-demand world.* If they do not, artists will eventually find the chasm between their wants and their audiences’ needs quite simply too wide to traverse.

*For those interested I wrote a couple of reports on this very topic a few years ago:

The Music Format Bill of Rights: A Manifesto For The Next Generation Of Music Products

Agile Music: Music Formats and Artist Creativity In The Age of Mass Customisation