‘Awakening’ Now Available In Paperback

Regular readers will know that I recently published the Kindle version of my book “Awakening: The Music Industry In The Digital Age”.  Many of you have already bought it (thank you!) but some of you also wanted to know when the paperback edition was going to be available. Well you need wait no longer, you can buy the paperback version of ‘Awakening’ right now by clicking here.

If you are interested in the music industry then this is the book for you. Whether you are a label executive, music publisher, artist, songwriter, entrepreneur or simply interested in what you can learn from the music industry’s experience and want to know what the future holds then this is the book for you.

I wrote this book with three key objectives in mind:

1.    To provide the definitive account of the music industry in the digital era, as an antidote the distorted picture that is painted by the biased and often poorly informed extremes that dominate the industry narrative

2.    To help anyone in the music business better understand how the other parts of the industry work, what they think and what their priorities are

3.    To act as a primer for anyone wanting to build career or business in the music industry, so they know exactly what they’re getting in to, how the business works, the relationships, the conflicts and what’s been tried before.  I want to help people not waste energy making the same mistakes others have, and to also benefit from the insight and experiences of the super smart people I interviewed in the book

The book is full of data, analysis and interviews with more 50 interviews with the CEOs, senior decision makers, artists, managers, start up founders and other decision makers that have shaped the music industry over the last 15 years.  It includes chapters on every key part of the industry (labels, artists, songwriters, start ups, tech companies etc.) and is split into three sections:

1. How We Got Here
2. The Digital Era
3. A Vision For The Future

This really is the only book you need to read on the music industry’s digital transition.  But don’t just take my word for it, check out these 5 Star Reviews:

“I really enjoyed this book. It gives a wide view to music industry, consumption tendencies and much other useful information. Is a must for all of the music industry professionals.”

“Great book on today’s digital music business – how we got here, who did what and most crucially why they did it. There’s no shortage of firmly held opinions and theories about the music industry and how it has navigated its digital transformation and Mulligan’s book is an essential analysis of what’s actually been going on. Insightful, non-judgemental and very well researched and informed, if you want to understand today’s digital music business, read this book.”

And if you’re still not convinced, take a read of the sample chapters on Amazon.  ‘Awakening’ is also available on iTunes and Google Play.

I hope you find the book as interesting to read as I did writing it.

My New Book – Awakening: The Music Industry In the Digital Age

I am very excited to announce the launch of my book ‘Awakening’ which charts the rise of digital music and how it is changing the music industry. ‘Awakening’ is the definitive account of the music industry in the digital era. With exclusive interviews with the people who shaped today’s industry it tells the inside story of how the music business grappled with the emergence of an entirely new digital economy

The music industry is on the brink of an utterly transformative period of change that will result in the creation of an entirely new industry tailor made for the digital era. ‘Awakening’ presents the vision of how and why this change will come, what this future will look like and how the first steps on the journey are already being taken. The book includes interviews with 60 of the music industry’s leading figures, including globally successful artists and more than 20 CEOs (a full list of interviewees can be found at the bottom of the page). Alongside the insight from this unprecedented executive access, ‘Awakening’ uses exclusive consumer data, official market statistics, proprietary models and multiple additional data sources. In doing so it constructs an unparalleled picture of the new global music economy presented across 60 charts and figures.

All good stories start in the beginning. ‘Awakening’ deconstructs the failed state experience of the analogue era music industry with the definitive account of the music industry’s transition from booming $28 billion powerhouse to today’s much humbled $15 billion business. Music fans used to be told what to listen to when, where and how. In the new music industry the balance of power lies with the fans with themselves. The old music industry had the record labels at its centre, the new digital era industry will have the consumer at its core. The change will be generation defining and will transform forever what it means to be an artist and a fan. Livelihoods will be destroyed, others created, millionaires made, culture transformed. The change is already underway. ‘Awakening’ looks at each individual component of the music industry today and looks at each one is dealing with change and preparing for the future. From the superstar artist to the small independent label, from the pirate company CEO to the major label CEO, in the book I explore the incredibly varied picture of confusion and innovation, uncertainty and brilliance, fear and confidence. Most of all it is the story of a rebuilding, an Awakening of the new music industry.

The book has three sections:

• How We Got Here: A detailed history of the years up until the launch of the iTunes Music Store, exploring how Napster changed the music industry forever and how the industry responded, or rather didn’t
• The Digital Era: This section has 7 chapters, one for each of the key stakeholders (labels, artists, songwriters, pirates etc) and explores what the current market means to each of them
• A Vision For The Future: A vision for what the next music industry will look like and what needs to happen to enable this to take place

I was extremely fortunate to interview many of the most important figures in the music industry of the last 15 years, including CEOs of major record labels, CEOs of all the major streaming services and platinum selling artists. I’ve managed to get the inside track on exactly what was happening behind the scenes.  I personally learned a huge amount while writing this book and I am confident virtually every reader will do so too.

In short, once you have read this book you will know practically everything that there is to know about the digital music market and where it is heading!

For anyone interested in the music industry and the lessons it provides for all media and technology businesses in the digital era, this is the only book you will ever need.

The book is available now on Amazon and iTunes and Google Play.

Also 10% of net profits will go to the music therapy charity the Nordoff Robins trust.

If you are a journalist and would like a review copy please email me at mark AT midiaresearch DOT COM

People interviewed for this book

Adam Kidron             Founder and CEO, Beyond Oblivion
Alexander Ljung         Founder and CEO, Soundcloud
Alexander Ross        Partner, Wiggin
Alison Wenham        CEO, AIM
Axel Dauchez           CEO, Deezer
Barney Wragg          SVP Universal Music eLabs / Global Head of Digital, EMI
Ben Drury                 Founder and CEO, 7 Digital
Benji Rogers             Founder and CEO, PledgeMusic
Brian Message          Manager, Radiohead, Nick Cave / Chairman MMF
Cary Sherman          CEO, RIAA
Chris Gorman           Founder and CEO, MusicQubed
Cliff Fluet                   Partner, Lewis Silkin / Director 11
Daniel Ek                   Founder and CEO, Spotify
David Boyle              SVP Insight, EMI
David Byrne              Solo artist / Talking Heads
David Isrealite           CEO, MPAA
David Lowery           Camper van Beethoven / The Trichordist
Edgar Berger            President & CEO International, Sony Music Entertainment
Elio Leoni Sceti         CEO, EMI
Erik Nielsen               Manager, Marillion
Geoff Taylor              CEO, BPI
Gregor Pryor             Partner, Reed Smith
Helienne Lindvall       Award winning songwriter
Ian Hogarth                Founder and CEO, Songkick
Ian Rogers                 CEO, Beats Music / CEO TopSpin
Jack Horner               Founder Frukt
Jay Samit                   SVP, EMI / EVP & GM, Sony Corp America
Jeremy Silver            VP New Media EMI / Chairman musicmetric
Jim Griffin                   CTO Geffen Records / CEO, Cherry Lane Digital
Jon Irwin                    President, Rhapsody
Jonathan Grant          Above and Beyond / Founder, Anjunabeats Records
Justin Morey              Senior Lecturer Music Production, Leeds Beckett University
Keith Harris                Manager, Stevie Wonder / GM, Motown
Keith Thomas            Grammy Award Winning Producer and Songwriter
Ken Park                    Chief Content Officer, Spotify
Larry Miller                 COO, a2b Music / President Reciprocal
Liz Schimel                VP Music, Nokia
Lohan Presencer       CEO of Ministry of Sound Group
Mark Kelly                 Marillion / CEO, FAC
Mark Knight               Founder and Chief Architect, Omnifone
Martin Goldschmidt   Founder and MD, Cooking Vinyl
Martin Mills                Founder and Chairman, Beggars Group
Michael Robertson   Founder and CEO, MP3.com
Nenad Marovac        Partner, DN Capital
Oleg Fomenko          CEO, Bloom.fm
Paul Hitchman          Founder and Director Playlouder/ MD Kobalt
Paul Vidich                EVP, WMG / Director, Reverbnation
Peter Jenner             Manager Pink Floyd, Billy Bragg / MD Sincere
Peter Sunde              Founder, The Pirate Bay
Phil Sant                    Founder and Chief Engineer, Omnifone
Ralph Simon             EVP Capitol & Blue Note / Founder Yourmobile
Robert Ashcroft        SVP Network Services Europe / CEO PRS for Music
Roger Faxon             CEO, EMI
Scott Cohen              Founder, The Orchard
Simon Wheeler         Director of Strategy, Beggars Group
Sumit Bothra             Manager, The Boxer Rebellion, PJ Harvey
Tim Westergren        Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Pandora
Tom Frederikse        Partner, Clintons
Tony Wadsworth      Chairman & CEO, EMI Music UK & Ireland/Chairman BPI
Wayne Rosso           President, Grokster
Will Page                  Chief Economist, Spotify

Note: positions either refer to current position held by interviewee or key position held during the narrative of this book.

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The Three Things Streaming Needs To Fix Next

I spent a couple of days last week in Barcelona for the annual Future Music Forum, which is developing into an important date on the music conference circuit.   Later this week I will post some of the highlights of my opening address but first I am going to spend some time developing some of the white hot issues surrounding streaming that were raised at the conference.

In a really strong field, two speakers in particular stood out: Beggars head of strategy Simon Wheeler and PledgeMusic founder Benji Rogers.   Their presentations and the conference as a whole were infused with a sense that streaming is changing everything, and more quickly than most people expected. This change is manifesting itself in three big issues:

1. Deciding what streaming’s main role is
2. What happens to the middling majority of artists
3. How to monetize the relationship between artists and fans

1. Time To Decide Whether Streaming Is Marketing Or Sales

It is clear that most labels are conflicted about streaming. They are waking up to the fact that its promise as a retail channel will take time to realize and even then it may not be a like-for-like replacement for lost album sales. Which is prompting labels to increasingly view streaming as a marketing channel too. But if streaming is both the discovery journey and the consumption destination, then what, as a label, are you trying to actually sell with streaming? Across the bigger labels in particular the digital business teams and the marketing teams need to agree on a common view on what the streaming end game is, else risk accelerating album sales decline without adequately driving streaming revenue growth.

If the question is complex for subscription services for free streaming the picture is much clearer, especially for YouTube. As Simon Wheeler said in his presentation: “YouTube is not driving sales. People are going there to consume music. The end.”  If that isn’t a case for windowing YouTube and free tiers of freemium services then I don’t know what is.

2. What Case For The Middling Majority?

Wheeler also made a vital observation that the streaming success stories tend to be split between mega hits on the one hand (such as Calvin Harris’ 1 billion Spotify streams and Avicii’s 250 million ‘Wake Me Up’ Spotify streams) and slow burn success stories on the other. He cited the example of the XX’s eponymous album that is still in the Spotify indie top 100 five years after release.

This streaming dualism makes it look like label A&R strategy may have to choose between massive hits or long-term success. And if so, what happens to the rest in the middle? You effectively end up with three key types of streaming artist (see figure):

• Evergreens
• Middling Majority
• Hit Machines

Could it be that  streaming will end up being the natural selection process for the challenge of catalogue bloat? There is simply too much music being released at the moment, creating the Tyranny of Choice, where listeners are paralysed by excessive choice. For an artist trying to break through, the background noise can be deafening and also kill any chance of making meaningful cut through. And if you do manage to do so then the endless torrent of new releases pushes you straight back to the margins.

If the streaming natural selection process plays out then unless you have created either an album that people will want to listen to again and again or instead a monster hit, then you will simply drift into oblivion. In the old model you might have sold a couple of tens of thousands of albums and managed to sustain some sort of career. 20,000 album sales would be $180,000 gross revenue but 5 million streams (roughly an equivalence in popularity) would be $50,000 gross revenue. Perhaps streaming’s Dystopian Darwinism will kill off the ability to forge a career built on mediocrity. That may be no bad thing.

3. Monetizing the Relationship

If streaming is eating into sales then the obvious next step is to drive other spending from streaming music consumers. Hence commerce integrations from the likes of TopSpin, Bandpage and PledgeMusic. Unfortunately it isn’t that straight forward as Pledge’s Benji Rogers pointed out. Rogers rightly found himself turned to at the Future Music Forum as the fan relationship guru and he made a crucially important observation: simply because some one is listening to a song does not mean they are necessarily going to want to buy anything from that artist. Instead streaming services need to think more subtly, looking at how to nurture an artist-fan relationship rather than simply trying to sell someone a t-shirt because they happen to be streaming a track.

Artists and fans are closer than ever but this journey is only getting going. And now that artists are building deeper relationships with their fans while sales revenues decline, they need to get smarter about how to monetize them.  The key question though is whether this can be enough to offset the impact of declining music sales revenue. To help answer that I created a ‘Streaming Ancillary Revenues Model’.

A new MIDiA Research consumer survey shows that 11% of streaming consumers are VERY likely to buy merchandise and tickets from their favourite artists in streaming services. I used this conversion rate against the following artist straw man for a hypothetical Year 1 versus Year 2:

• 100,000 albums sold decline to 60,000
• Streams increase from 30 million to 45 million streams
• Total recorded music revenue (streaming and sales) consequently declines by 17%
• 11% of fans buy $30 of merch, special editions or tickets each year
• Ancillary revenues grow to represent 33% of total revenues
• Revenue decline across all income streams is just 3%

So ancillary revenues can significantly soften the impact revenue decline.

(The additional factor of the longer revenue cycle for albums on streaming services should also push the total revenue up further in the longer-term but is not included in these calculations.)

There are many obvious caveats and assumptions here (not least of which is the varying margins across different revenue streams) but these are broadly the right mix of drivers and levers. You can download the model here: Music Industry Blog Streaming Ancillary Revenues Model 9 14  I invite you to play around with it and test your own theories. If you are an artist you might want to plug some of your actual numbers into Year 1 and your projections into Year 2.

Change Is Difficult But It Is Also A State Of Mind

The streaming picture is changing at an absolutely staggering rate and everyone across the value chain needs to get their heads around all the potential permutations else get left behind.

These are both exciting and daunting times. As the bland management consultancy phrase goes ‘change is difficult’. But it is. However, the way that you view and prepare for change both have as much impact on how it affects you as the change itself. Streaming is changing everything. Those who learn how to reinvent themselves for the realities of this brave new world will be those best placed to survive and perhaps even thrive.

Streaming’s First Steps into 2014

2013 was a big year for streaming, with the IFPI reporting total trade revenues of $1.1 billion and a total of 28 million subscribers globally.  2014 will be a crucial year and today Rhapsody revealed its contribution to the growing global picture.

As of April 2014 there are 1.7 million global subscribers to Napster and Rhapsody, up from a little over 1 million in April 2013.  Those numbers were boosted in part by the transition of Sonora customers in Latin America from Rhapsody’s October deal with Telefonica in which the Spanish telco reported would amount to the transition of ‘hundreds of thousands of existing customers’. 

Digital Colonialism

Latin America is undergoing something of a digital gold rush with European and US companies seeking to ‘colonize’ the digital market like modern day conquistadors.  It is a real pity that more is not being done by indigenous services. ‘Digital colonialism’ aside, Rhapsody’s Lat Am focus is part of a wider recognition of the importance of emerging markets to the longer term viability of the digital market.  How these markets adopt digital will play an increasingly influential role in shaping global strategy.  In some markets the download will have a long term transition technology role, acting as the digital stepping stone between the CD and access based models.  In others, there will be a technology leapfrog effect with consumers going straight to access based models, in a similar way that many consumers in emerging markets skipped the PC web entirely and went straight to the mobile web.

Super Cheap Flat Rate Access

What is clear though, is that the available spending power of emerging market consumers is far lower than in US, Europe and especially than in the prosperous Nordics.  So the 9.99 model simply doesn’t apply.  Labels are already heavily discounting wholesale rates for emerging markets but the likelihood is that the majority of customers will be monetized with hard bundles, with the consumer paying nothing.  This is a different model from telco bundles in western markets where telcos invest heavily as strategic marketing efforts (and typically lose money).  Instead, emerging market bundles will be long term offers, a permanent feature of mobile packages.  Telcos pay far less to labels but get much bigger scale.  The risk of heavily devaluing music is moot, as in the territories this model works in, music already has zero value to consumers as a monetary proposition.

Scale Does Not Impact Everyone in the Same Way

Back over in the western world, where the vast majority of streaming revenues currently are  (c. 90% to be precise), some of the initial sheen is beginning to fade.  Beggars Group have long been positive exponents of the streaming model and have rightly earned plaudits for paying artists 50/50 net receipt deals. However last night Beggars’ head of strategy Simon Wheeler intimated that those rates may not be sustainable.  The main reason is that streaming is such a key part of digital revenues now that the 50/50 share damages under-pressure margins.  But it is also because of the operational costs of streaming for a label (vast quantities of data to account – ‘billions of lines of data’, bandwidth costs etc.).  This highlights an issue I have been talking about for a while, namely that the great bright hope of scale (i.e. ‘when we reach scale, streaming will make commercial sense to everyone’) does not apply equally across the digital music value chain.  If you are a big label or publisher with a big catalogue of repertoire you will measure the impact of a million new subscribers in terms of millions of new dollars each month.  Scale benefits you well.  But if you are a single artist with just a few albums you will measure the impact of that same 1 million new subscribers in terms of hundreds of dollars a month.  Beggars Group sits somewhere in the middle of that scale-impact continuum.

The counter balancing of good news story / bad news story is nothing new to streaming, and it will continue to characterize the evolution of the market in 2014.  The shift from distribution models to consumption models is arguably the most dramatic transition the recorded music industry has ever been through, and consequently the change will have seismic repercussions.  Streaming revenue will come of age in 2014, but as it does so expect more speed bumps along the way.