Post-Pandemic Programming

COVID-19 caused dislocation and disruption to the global entertainment business. Now, the recession and the prospect of further pandemic peaks create an unprecedented outlook for entertainment companies. Many of the shifts that occurred during lockdown will define the new market dynamics. The old rule books are being rewritten and new approaches to entertainment business models and experiences will be crucial to move from the holding pattern of survive to the growth mode of thrive. Approaches that worked for decades will no longer work while new innovations will gain traction in a mid-term market that will necessitate an entirely new approach for players across the entertainment industries. MIDiA has kicked off a new programme of research, analysis and insight around these dynamics. We call it Post-Pandemic Programming.

COVID-19 created a mini-recession via lockdown measures, stifling many businesses in an instant, paving the way for the onset of a more traditional, wider recession. All recessions though have uneven impact, affect many companies adversely but some positively. The early signs are that while there were many lockdown losers there were also plenty of companies that fared well, even thrived during lockdown. What was definitely going on, was a reallocation of spend. For example, in Q2 2020 Live Nation and Disney lost $9.9 billion between them compared to Q2 2019. Meanwhile Home Depot increased its revenue by $7.2 billion over the same period. While the comparisons are not perfect, they do illustrate the underlying dynamic well. What is crucial to understanding the post-pandemic period is identifying which of these shifts persist and which revert.

Before that though, the combined impact of the second wave and the coming recession needs to be mapped. To do this, we created a risk framework, looking at what characteristics make entertainment businesses low or high risk, both during a recession and during a pandemic. To understand the coming months, these then need to be overlayed. Companies that have both low recession risk and low pandemic risk will prosper while the adverse is also the case. So, if a company is virtual / online, is scalable, has unique content and is part of a bundle, then it is set to fare well. Enter stage left, Amazon Prime. 

Standalone digital subscriptions (e.g. Netflix, Spotify, Xbox Live) are low risk from a pandemic perspective (as the last nine months have illustrated) but the fact they are non-contract based means that they are more vulnerable to churn than say a pay-TV subscription which is contract based and therefore a subscriber has to buy their way out of a commitment (which has the exact opposite of the desired effect of cancelling to save money).

If you are interested in learning more about this research and understanding how music, video, games, sports and media companies will be affected in the coming months, there are two things you can do:

1. Check out our subscriber report
2. Sign up to our free-to-attend webinar on the 10^th November

You may need to hurry for the webinar, we are already nearing capacity since promoting it to our clients and newsletter subscribers, but there are still some spaces left. 

Why Rishi Sunak is both wrong and right

Earlier this week the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak suggested that creatives such as musicians who had seen income dry up during COVID-19 should consider retraining for the new ‘opportunities’ the lockdown economy is generating. 

The principle makes sense from an economic perspective, but it is just that – an economist’s solution to a cultural problem. A guitarist becoming an Amazon van driver or a Just Eat courier will certainly have the desired economic output (i.e. more economic productivity), but the cultural damage is potentially irreparable. Perhaps more importantly, however, it is throwing in the towel after the first round of the fight. 

A quick lesson from history

Culture is one of the most important outputs of society and the more developed a society is, the more it normally invests in that culture. A brief overview of history illustrates the point. The Roman Empire, one of the first great civilisations, was focused on warfare and expansion. It spawned some famous philosophers and orators, as well as great art (sculpture and mosaics especially). Yet warfare was the defining trait of the empire, and so the majority of the great figures we remember are the military generals and emperors. Fast forward to the Middle Ages in the same Italian peninsula and we had the Renaissance, ironically rediscovering the lost art techniques of the ancients. Although Italy in this period was dominated by warfare, and although there are no shortage of generals and petty princes to fill the history books, it is the art and culture that the period is best known for. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael are the great names of this era. There was no structured art marketplace, however; instead, rich benefactors (bankers, princes, generals) patronised them, subsidising their art. They did so often in the hope of immortalising their own names, but instead immortalised the artists. Art does not always pay for itself. Sometimes it needs a helping hand.

Small venues create national economic output; virtual ones may not

Now to be clear, I am not advocating that music should become state subsidised. Nor am I comparing the musical output of a bedroom musician with that of a renaissance master (though Kanye does think that he is ‘unquestionably’ an even better artist than even those Italian greats). The lesson to learn from history here is that in tough times, society benefits from supporting culture. If small music venues continue to fall like flies,smaller and emerging artists will be bereft of real-world places to perform and to build audiences. The music market will stagnate with new talent having one more hurdle to success put in its way. Live streaming will pick up some of the slack and may even become a valuable alternative for many artists. For the UK government, however, that will mean swapping the economic output of UK venues for that of predominately American technology platforms. That economic output will leave the UK economy – and at a time of trade uncertainty leading up to Brexit, to lose music, arguably the UK’s most culturally renowned global export over the last century, would be a weighty hit.

Artists need to experiment and innovate now more than ever before

This is bigger than national economic protectionism, and it is certainly bigger than the UK. To use that horrible management consultant phrase: change is difficult. We are cursed and blessed to live in interesting times. Technology has changed the recorded music business beyond recognition; now, because of the pandemic, technology is going to accelerate change in the live business as well. This process may be difficult, and it may be long, but it will result in a differently shaped music business in the mid-term future. Artists have an opportunity, even a responsibility, to innovate and experiment. Before COVID-19, live, merch, recording and publishing were – in varying degrees – the majority of the revenue mix for most artists. Live is unlikely to return to anything resembling normality until 2022. From this moment on, then, artists need to experiment with new models, new ways to engage with audiences and to generate income – whether that be writing for other artists on Soundbetter, making sound packs on Splice or Landr or selling digital collectibles via Fanaply. Artist income is more varied and sophisticated now than it was 10 years ago. The reality is that this trend is going to accentuate both in the lockdown economy and post-pandemic. 

However, new models take time to become viable. In this interim stage, if there is a role for state support, it is to provide artists and songwriters with the financial support and technical and business training to enable them to be winners in this new creative paradigm. Rishi Sunak was wrong to suggest that artists should retrain out of music. But he was right that they should retrain. They should retrain from being artists of the 2010s to artists of the 2020s, and that is where he should be providing support.

Independent artist creativity and innovation in the age of COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the music industry upside down in many ways but among the direct artists community there have also been signs of resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. For these ‘unsigned’ artists, 2020 is both the best of times and the worst of times. 

Self-releasing artists are not bound by industry promotional cycles, and in many cases, today’s artists must not just create their music but ‘sell it’ as well. If you have the drive to create music there is very little stopping you from writing, recording, producing and indeed releasing that music. All the tools and platforms are available. 

It’s been a boom year for music making – from record Fender guitar sales to yet another peak in streaming demand. Yet there’s never been a tougher time competitively—with 40,000 tracks released daily, cutting through the clutter is a very real challenge. The age of ‘create it and they will come’ never really existed, but today’s music market started to obliterate the notion completely and COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for the changes that were already taking place.

For MIDiA’s latest independent artist survey report in partnership with artists services and distribution company Amuse, we interviewed 346 artists around the world during the heart of lockdown to get a unique view of how the crisis is affecting artists. What we found was anxiety mixed with aspiration and creativity. The full report is available for free here but we’ve pulled out here five key themes for artist success:

1 – A sector with real scale: Artists direct (i.e. those without record labels) generated $873 million in 2019, up 32% from 2018. These independent artists represent the fastest-growing segment of the global recorded music business, a segment of global scale with real impact and influence. They are also more streaming native than label artists.

2 – Lockdown was a unique creative window: Nearly 70% of independent artists took the opportunity in lockdown to spend more time writing or making music, and a further 57% created more content for social media. Artists took full advantage of being away from the spotlight and the treadmill of promotion, to dive back into their creative spaces and make new music. In terms of releasing music, artists were split – with 46% releasing more music, but 40% putting projects on hold.

3 – Collaboration: 36% of independent artists reported working more on collaborations during lockdown than before. Music is becoming more of a collaborative undertaking than ever before and a whole ecosystem of digital tools and services is emerging to meet growing artist demand, providing more structured and networked process than many labels ever can. An unintended consequence of lockdown is that it has compelled more artists to explore ways of doing remote collaboration and many of these new learned behaviours will persist beyond the pandemic. A new way of making music is being born.

4 – Independent artists need side hustles like never before: Artists need to work multiple revenue streams to build career momentum. For independent artists, streaming is their primary source of income at 28%. Live revenue is second at 18% (which means they are less exposed to lockdown’s impact than established label artists). But the key for today’s artists is to make revenues from multiple sources including publishing, teaching, session work, sponsorship and merchandise. Artists’ need to work multiple revenue streams to build career momentum. The number of artists offering online tuition has grown hugely during the pandemic, as has artists selling their old kit. Additionally, artist skill platforms will only grow as the number of aspiring creators grows, and, as with live streaming and making sound packs, is yet another revenue stream for artists. Artists are small entrepreneur businesses. They need four or five income streams to get off the ground.

5 – Marketing IQ is becoming key: Half of all direct artists do their own marketing, with one third managing their own marketing budget, but less than one in five are working with a distributor or label on marketing activities and 40% spend nothing at all on marketing. Artists are self-reliant but still inexperienced with marketing and most are not making the most of the tools available. While almost two-thirds of artists are using Spotify For Artists, few of them are using any other marketing related tools. The independent artist must know that marketing is about research, experimentation and persistence and is even more important for independent artists that do not have labels to do this work for them.

Making and marketing music is both getting easier and harder at the same time. Easier because artists can be in control: releasing music when you want to, growing and using social media, seeking out like-minded artist collaborators and sponsors, not having to rely on paymasters or gatekeepers. Easier also because artists can go global right from the beginning. 

On the other hand, the road to a career is longer and possibly never ending. The gap between artist and fan, creator and consumer is narrowing. Equipment makers are having a boom year, and one of the many things people have done with more time on their hands is fulfil their passions. So, for aspiring independent artists, a whole new wave of competition has arrived in the form of talented amateurs, armed with the tools and the time to make their own entertainment. 

The independent artist sector had another boom year in 2019 and the early signs are that it has not only weathered the COVID-19 storm but has made the best of a bad situation, seeing lockdown as an opportunity to create, experiment and innovate. Which should not surprise us, as after all these are some of the defining characteristics of one of the most important and exciting elements on the modern music business. Pathfinding through the pandemic requires innovation and patience and it looks like the direct artists sector has plenty of both. 

Where did Disney and Live Nation’s missing $10 billion go?

In both economic and pandemic terms, we are in a relatively quiet period compared to the first half of the year. COVID-19 is at much lower levels in most countries and there are multiple sectors, such as housing and auto, that are reporting booms. These positive indicators will likely be both a pre-recession bounce and the lull before COVID-19’s second peak. However, there is a crucial subtext here, which is that one sector’s loss is often another’s gain. COVID-19 saw winners and losers, as any post-recession recovery is defined by ‘scarring’ where some companies and formats build where others have failed. For entertainment companies that lost revenue during the first half of the year, the question is whether they will regain that revenue or whether their lockdown legacy will be a long-term contraction.

Live Nation and Disney (because of its theme parks) were two of COVID-19’s biggest and highest-profile entertainment company casualties. Live Nation’s revenues fell from $3.2 billion in Q2 2019 to $74 million in Q2 2020, a 98% decline. Disney’s fall was less in relative terms (-38%) due to having a diversified business but more than double Live Nation’s loss in actual terms. Between them, Disney and Live Nation lost nearly $10 billion of revenue which can be bluntly equated with $10 billion of consumer entertainment spend that went unspent in Q2 2020. The big question is whether that spend remains dormant, waiting to be tapped when doors open again, or has it gone elsewhere – and if so, can it be won back.

The lockdown winners were companies that could trade on consumers being cooped at home: games, video, home shopping, video messaging etc. Some of these were stop-gaps that consumers turned to in order to fill the void; others represent long-term behaviour shifts. Here are some of the places consumers shifted their spend, and how it might impact recovery for entertainment businesses:

Home improvements: One of the areas to see strong lockdown growth was home improvements – people stuck at home staring at the DIY jobs they had always meant to get around to doing and now had both the time and the money to do them. Home Depot saw its Q2 2020 revenues increase by $7.2 billion, nearly three quarters of that lost Disney and Live Nation revenue. Obviously, these are not like-for-like shifts as different geographies are involved, but the direction of travel is clear. The beauty of the home improvements business model is that there is always another room to do, another project to start. The risk for entertainment companies is that a portion of these new home improvers may have got the DIY bug and will have less spend to shift back to entertainment.

Home shopping: Amazon was a huge lockdown winner, growing quarterly revenues by 42% compared to 2019, representing an increase of $38.3 billion. Those revenues include, among other things, its cloud business, which rode the wave of many of lockdown’s other success stories. Additionally, the shift to home shopping has been pronounced. Amazon’s growth has extra implications for entertainment companies. Its subscriptions were up 29% which largely refer to Amazon Prime, which of course comes with music and video bundled in and will in turn compete directly with pure-play propositions like Spotify and Netflix. This will take on added significance during the recession: when cost-conscious consumers are forced to cut back on spending, an all-in-one entertainment bundle that includes home shipping looks a lot more cost effective than a handful of standalone subscriptions. Amazon Prime is not recession proof, but it is certainly recession resilient.

Changing of the guard: Some of most interesting shifts are actually within entertainment. For example, AMC cinemas saw quarterly revenues fall by a catastrophic 99%, representing a quarterly loss of $1.5 billion while over the same period Netflix gained $1.3 billion. Again, the geographies are not directly comparable but the direction of travel is clear: old video being replaced by new video. A similar changing of the guard is happening in digital advertising. Alphabet, the powerhouse, saw revenues fall by 2% while Amazon saw its ad revenues grow by 40%. Turns out that advertisers will pay a premium to reach customers that are one click away from a purchase. Who’d have thought it…

The list of examples of lockdown shifts goes on and on. In fact, so much so that MIDiA is currently working on a major new piece of research exploring these shifts and what the long-term implications are for entertainment businesses. We’re calling it ‘Post-Pandemic Programming’. There will be a series of in-depth reports for clients and also a webinar and podcast mini-series. So, watch this space!

But returning to the above findings, the key takeaway is that companies that lost entertainment spend during lockdown should not assume that this spending is waiting in consumer’s bank accounts, ready to be spent as soon doors open again. Pent-up demand will ensure much of it will but some of it is probably gone for good, allocated to new habits developed during lockdown but that will persist long after. This is not to say that those companies cannot return to previous heights, but to do so they will need to unlock new spending from new customers. Which may not be the easiest of tasks during a global recession.

COVID-19 hit major labels much harder than it did Spotify

COVID-19 was always going to have a significant impact on the music business, and with the Q2 results for all of the major music companies now in we can start to look at just how big that impact has been so far. Year-on-year (YoY), combined major label recorded music revenues fell by 7.8% on a current currency basis while major publisher revenue fell by 1.6% over the same period (though slow reporting for income such public performance means that the full impact on publishing is yet to be seen). The figures in themselves are disappointing for an industry that has grown acclimatised to growth but the factors driving this are global economic and health policy ones. As we identified back at the start of June, income streams such as physical, public performance and ad supported are all vulnerable to lockdown impact. The only truly resilient revenue source so far is paid subscriptions. The dependency on streaming has never been higher but there are questions here too.

Major label streaming revenue fell by 0.6% in Q2 2020 compared to the previous quarter. Although it was up YoY by 6.3%, (and even allowing for seasonality), there was already a clear slowdown in growth before COVID-19 kicked it into reverse. When markets mature, the margins between growth and decline are small. So, factors such as the weakening digital ad market pushing down ad-supported revenues can be the difference between being in the red or in the black. The music business is going to have to get used to ad-supported under-performing because advertising is always an early victim of recessions.

Despite all of this gloom, the likelihood is that by the end of the year, there will have been sufficient return to growth in many sectors and regions, meaning global recorded music revenues will be higher in 2020 than 2019 – not by much, but up nonetheless.

However, the streaming slowdown emphasises just how important it is for the industry to establish a series of potential plan Bs to streaming’s plan A, and fast.

Q2 2020 wasn’t bad news for everyone in streaming. In fact, Spotify actually increased its revenues both quarter-on-quarter (2.2%) and annually by 13%, i.e. double the rate the majors grew their streaming revenue. The result is that by Q2 2020, Spotify’s total revenue was only 5% smaller than the entire major labels’ streaming revenue combined. All this was despite Spotify’s ad-supported revenue falling by 11%. Spotify’s revenues are slowly but surely becoming uncoupled from that of the majors. Although factors such as timing of revenue recognition and payments to rightsholders will play a role, the key inference is that independents grew faster than majors on Spotify in Q2, continuing the 2019 trend. Although, the term ‘independent’ is becoming progressively less useful as the market internationalizes; in addition to independent labels and artists we are seeing growing impact from regional, non-western ‘majors’ e.g. T-Series, India; Avex, Japan; YG Entertainment, South Korea.

The three key takeaways from all this are:

1. Streaming revenue growth was already slowing. COVID-19 shows us just how important it is to push new growth drivers
2. Spotify is already working on its new growth driver (i.e. podcasts) and though the slowdown in the digital ad market will dent momentum, podcasts will further decouple Spotify revenue from that of the majors
3. The more likely scenario remains that streaming and label revenues will pick up before year end, but if the recession deepens and swathes of millennials lose their jobs, then subscription revenue could be hit, which brings us back to takeaway #1

New Webinar on What Comes After Lockdown

Want to know what happens in the post-Lockdown era? Join us for our free-to-attend Recovery Economics webinar tomorrow (Wednesday 10^th June) at 4pm BST / 11am EST / 8am PT for insight on music, radio, games, TV, sports and media.

We will be presenting an overview of MIDiA’s latest research thesis: Recovery Economics. This is our framework for identifying which changed need states that emerged during lockdown will form the basis for new behaviours post-lockdown and what you need to do in order to adapt to this new normal.

What is clear is that simply doing more of the same is not a strategy. The Covid-19 lockdown created severe dislocation across many entertainment sectors but also a host of new growth opportunities. As we emerge from lockdown and enter the early stages of a global economic recession, some of these ‘new-normal’ business models will grow further, presenting increased competition for the ‘old normal’. New and established players alike will have to play by different rules in this coming period, dealing with challenges such as permanent changes to lifestyles, weakening consumer spending and ever growing competition for attention.

In the webinar we will explain how this will look across the music, TV, film, games, radio, sports and media industries.

Register now!

Recovery Economics | Bounce Forward not Back

COVID-19 social distancing measures caused unprecedented dislocation to the entertainment economy. With a recession now a question of ‘how bad’ rather than ‘if’, entertainment companies have to adapt their businesses and identify new partners to maximise opportunities in the post-lockdown era. This requires a detailed understanding of how the underlying user need states of their customers changed during lockdown, how these changes will in turn evolve, and how they can meet this new demand.

To help entertainment businesses and creators understand these dynamics and navigate the choppy waters ahead, MIDiA Research has created a new research stream entitled Recovery Economics. Recovery Economics explains what the post-lockdown era will look like, which market and audience fundamentals will remain changed and the risks and opportunities these will result in.

MIDiA clients can already access the first two Recovery Economics reports here in our exclusive COVID-19 research practice, with more reports to follow. And following on from the runaway success of MIDiA’s first COVID-19 webinar, we are showcasing some of the research highlights in another free-to-attend webinar: Recovery Economics: Bounce Forward not Back. Spaces are strictly limited so sign up soon! In the meantime, here is an introduction to Recovery Economics.

Recessions are no new thing to the global economy, but the scale and impact of the coming recession looks set to be unlike any that has been experienced in the living memory of today’s business world. Although it is COVID-19 effects that are the fire’s spark, these factors will still underpin the recession’s impact on entertainment businesses.

The crucial difference is the recession prologue that was lockdown. We can hope that COVID-19 dissipates far more quickly, but at this stage it would be imprudent of any business not to at least plan for things being markedly different for some time so that it can identify how to adapt and even thrive during such a scenario. It is time to prepare for the new normal.

Politicians talk of a lockdown ‘bounce-back’, with business returning to normal after its enforced hiatus. In practice, recessions do not work this way. Instead, the dislocation that caused the economy creates permanent scarring, with the effect persisting into the future even once the causal factors are gone. This dynamic is known as hysteresis, as economist Michael Roberts puts it:

“Hysteresis is the argument that short-term effects can manifest themselves into long-term problems which inhibit growth and make it difficult to ‘return to normal’.”

For the purposes of understanding how the coming recession will impact entertainment businesses, the crucial consideration is what ways lockdown impacted consumer demand and supply chains will have long term effects. The length and severity of the recession will be crucial in determining this as will the degree to which social distancing measures remain a feature of the economy.

Perhaps the single most important factor to consider is changed need states. User need states underpin all businesses. For consumer entertainment businesses this is particularly true. Lockdown’s reframing of consumption paradigms showed us that some businesses did not have a plan B when need states became void states (e.g. live) while others were dependent on specific use cases (e.g. radio and music streaming on the commute).

In the post-lockdown era, some void states will return to need states – but slowly, while some of the new need states that emerged in lockdown (e.g. more video conferencing, YouTube fitness trainers, wellness / mindfulness apps) will continue to prosper in the post-lockdown era.

The boredom dependency

For music streaming, podcasts and radio, the biggest need-state change will be the commute. For so long a source of captive audiences, the commute is entering terminal decline. Post lockdown fewer employees will be fully office based. Some will be entirely home-based. Nearly a third of consumers said that during lockdown they have been using their commute time to do something else rather than listen to audio. This dynamic will lessen post lockdown, but it is not going to go away.

Lockdown revealed the vulnerability of entertainment’s boredom dependency. The obvious weakness of relying on people to consume because they have nothing better to do is that as soon as they can do something better, they will. Entertainment companies will have to plan for a steady erosion of boredom-driven consumption.

For more on Recovery Economics, insight into what forms of entertainment will do best post lockdown and how to map how it will affect you, join us on June 10^th for: Recovery Economics | Bounce Forward not Back

If you have any questions regarding registration contact dara@midiaresearch.com.

Travis Scott has Only Scratched the Surface of Music Games Tie Ups

In February 2019 Marshmello caused ripples of almost tidal proportions across the music business when 10.7 million Fortnite fans watched him perform a ‘concert’ in the game. Then in April 2020 Travis Scott followed in his shoes with his own Fortnite concert, pulling in 12 million players. Given that this was in the COVID-19 lockdown the 1.3 million increase was a relatively modest increase. However, Fortnite publisher Epic Games had learned its lessons from the Marshmello event and rather than limit audience demand to one event, turned it into a residency with a further 15 million players watching over four subsequent replays of the event. This took the total to 27 million, though there will be a substantial number that attended multiple performances.

What is clear is that a format has been established and that Epic Games is honing its promoter skillset. Fortnite events are labour intensive efforts to put on and currently do not scale well (hence only two events in 14 months). But there is a much bigger opportunity here for artists and one that gains new significance in the lockdown era.

The impact of COVID-19 recurring

With the cessation of live music in lockdown, artists have seen a dramatic fall in income. Established artists can expect to earn between 50% and 70% of their total income from live—that just disappeared. However fast lockdown measures are eased, live entertainment is going to take a long time to return to normal. Indeed, it may never do so.

Virologists point to the Spanish Flu outbreak after the First World War as the relevant precedent for understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic may play out. That was a far deadlier outbreak, infecting a third of the world’s population and killing up to 50 million. But crucially, it was not a single event. It had four major outbreaks over two years. It is likely that COVID-19 will not simply go away but instead will return, either in waves or as a continual background oscillation of infection.

As of May 1^st 2020 less than half a percent of the world’s population has been infected with COVID-19. Even allowing for that being just a tenth of the actual cases, that means that 95% of the population has not had COVID-19. Consequently, the majority of consumers are going to be concerned about returning to potentially infectious environments.

The combination of easing lockdown measures and weak consumer confidence means that live is not going to return to normal anytime soon. Social distancing measures will likely see rows of empty seats in larger venues and smaller, standing-only venues may struggle to operate at all. Reduced, spaced-out crowds will both harm the live experience and prevent many live events from being commercially viable to operate. Consumer concern may even make it hard for reduced capacities to be met. So, artists are not going to be able to reasonably expect a strong return of traditional live income in the mid-term future.

Lockdown lag

Live’s lockdown lag may have the knock-on effect of making artists take a more critical view of their streaming income. When live dominated their income mix, streaming’s context was a meaningful revenue stream that built audiences to drive other forms of income. It was effectively marketing artists got paid for. Now that artists are becoming more dependent on streaming income, the old concerns about whether they are getting paid enough will likely come back to the fore. It is in the interests of both labels and streaming services, that labels use this as an opportunity to revisit their streaming splits with artists. Labels cannot afford to have artists united against the labels’ primary income stream.

Live streaming is not yet ready for prime time

Live streaming of concerts is gaining traction but lockdown came a little too early for the sector. It is under developed, under monetised, under licensed, under professionalised and lacks the discovery layer crucial to make it ready for prime time (perhaps an opportunity for streaming services). On top of this, it does not create the same scarcity of experience that live music does and the rise of virtual festivals with artists playing just a few songs makes live more like a playlist experience, which favours the platforms over the artists. Enter stage left games.

Travis Scott fans are 2.3 times more likely to play Fortnite than overall consumers, but there are 80 other artist fanbases that are more likely to play Fornite than Scott’s. How do we know this?

Every quarter MIDiA fields a music brand tracker that – among many other things – tracks which games artists’ fans play. Looking across the 10 artist fanbases most likely to play three of the top games reveals a huge amount of untapped opportunity. The old model for games and music was sync. That is still a major opportunity but in the lockdown era the potential scope is so much wider.

Not every game is well suited to hosting virtual, gameplay concerts, but the console ecosystems can support so much more. Imagine if Flohio, Ben Howard, Koffee or Slowthai were to do put on exclusive performances live streamed to FIFA players via Xbox Live followed by a gaming session to which players would pay for a premium ticket to play against their favourite artists in an eSports type set up. Tickets would be limited, to create scarcity.

Lockdown economics

The lockdown lag will create a whole new set of economics across all industries. For music it will be about exploring new income streams to recast a new music business. Games will play a major part. No longer simply a place to sync music, games will become platforms for driving artist-fan engagement.

In the Attention Economy everything is connected. In lockdown economics those connections become productised and monetised, with benefits for all. Think of this like the K-Pop and Japanese Idol models, with superfans paying for extra access to their favourite artists. Instead of handshakes and meets and greets, we have gaming sessions and exclusive concerts. Artists benefit by connecting with fans and driving income; labels get to be participants in new revenue streams and help offset growing artist concern about streaming pay-outs; games companies get to add new revenue sources and products.

A dystopian virtual future

A final thought to leave you with. Tim Ingham’s recent piece suggested that Epic Games’ long view might be to create virtual artists, with the thinking being that the Marshmello and Travis Scott concerts were already in practice virtual artists. What if Epic Games is using these concerts to learn the ropes so that it could create its own roster of virtual artists. It could follow the Japanese and Korean music agency model of building rosters of employee artists, that operate under a work for hire basis. Epic Games would own 100% of all rights while the artists perform under stage names and as game avatars. Epic Games could make these virtual artists part of the Fortnite game itself to help build tribalism and fandom, and it of course already has a highly effective virtual merch store.

In doing so, Epic Games would create a games-centric music division that operates entirely outside of the confines of the traditional music industry. Dystopian perhaps, but also entirely feasible, which is why artists and labels should probably think less about becoming integrated into the games themselves and focus more on connecting their real selves with their gaming fans.

If you are a MIDiA client we will be publishing a report on this topic shortly with thousands of data points. If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to learn how to get access to this data email Stephen@midiaresearch.com

Lockdown Listening and the Independent Artist

After an initial lockdown lull, streaming levels are – on the surface – beginning to normalise. Underlying the macro-level normalisation, ‘lockdown listening’ is in fact resulting in dramatic shifts in listening behaviour, from using the commute time for activities other than listening to music, through using smart devices to listen at home to spending more time on YouTube. (MIDiA clients can access our latest data on these trends in our latest report ‘COVID-19: Lockdown Listening’).

Some of these shifts will have long-term effect while some will last little longer than the lockdown, but now that many artists are losing between 50%-70% of their income with the cessation of live, no artist can afford not to jump on the unique opportunities lockdown listening is throwing up, however fleeting they may be. Moreover with recording studios closed, projects getting put on hold, releases pushed back, not enough music is getting to market when it is needed most. This disruption to music’s supply chain is not going away until lockdown is and independent artists are beginning to look like they could be best placed to respond.

A COVID bounce for independent artists

In 2019 artists direct (i.e. those without record labels) was the fastest growing segment of the total recorded music market, growing by 32.1% in 2019 to reach $873 million, representing 4.1% of the total market, up from just 1.7% in 2015. Momentum was already with independent artists before lockdown, now there is a growing body of evidence that they are prospering in the lockdown listening era too. In Sweden – streaming’s bellwether – indie distribution platform Amuse saw one of its independent artists get 19 of the Top 50 tracks on Spotify’s daily chart in Sweden on March 11^th and overall DIY user uploads rose 300% year-on-year for the whole month. Although daily Spotify charts need treating with some caution – especially the Swedish one which seems to routinely throw up disruptive outliers – the underlying trend is clear: independent artists can get a seat at the top table, in fact they can get a lot of the seats. Frequently this then results in majors snapping up artists, such as Lil Nas X and Arizona Nervas.

Release schedule disruption

What is unique about lockdown listening is that we are going to start to see gaps in release schedules. The longer that studio and mastering facilities remain closed, the wider the release schedule gaps will become. Right now, labels still have schedules filled with music that was written, recorded and mastered prior to lockdown. As more lockdown time passes, the more that stockpile will be eaten into. Big label artists have big label sounds. They are teamed up with top-tier writers, session musicians, producers and production facilities. This pre-lockdown advantage becomes a hindrance during lockdown. In contrast, independent artists that are accustomed to doing some or all of their recording and production themselves, lockdown listening is an opportunity to get ahead by releasing music more frequently and consistently than big label artists can. Independent artists platform CD Baby noted it had seen a 30%-50% increase in the amount of music being released since mid-March.

Live streaming to connect with fans

Lockdown may have seemed to have thrown the dynamics of artist careers upside down but in many ways, it is in fact compelling artists to get back to basics of the most important thing: the relationship with their fans. One of the growing failings of the streaming environment has been the demise of places where artists and fans can truly connect. Facebook became a place for labels and managers to sell stuff, Instagram a place for filter-perfect artificiality and streaming just a place for listening. Although there are platforms that nobly break these new rules – Bandcamp especially, fans increasingly relied on live as the place to connect. The immediate cessation of live has seen a surge of live streaming as artists look to maintain that connection. Bandsintown data shows that the number of live streamed shows continues to accelerate, up from less than 400 per day in late-March to more than 2,000 a day by mid-April.

A new artist-fan relationship

With so many live streams and no ‘programming guide’ or meta-schedule, artists have had to double down on social media activity to keep their fans informed. They have also realised – superstar missteps aside – that during these times, fans value seeing their favourite artists without the production values, without the Instagram filters, as people just like them getting through this. This taps into the psychological phenomenon where our brains respond in a particular way when we see someone that we are used to seeing in professional media contexts suddenly looking like someone just like us.

There is a real opportunity here for artists big and small to take these newly redefined relationships into the post-lockdown world. There is a dilemma though: if they don’t, they may face fan backlash, but if they do, they will have to rebuild a new artist persona that trades less on the enigma of star quality than their human qualities. This would mean an entire rewriting of the nature of fame and fandom.

Throughout the history of recorded music, artists have been one step removed, with air of mystique and otherness. The last decade has seen this softened but lockdown may be catalysing a far more dramatic shift. If it does, what we may see may actually be a normalization of fan relationships. Newer, independent artists usually depend on a deeper, loser connection with their fanbases, so many of them already arrived at this point before lockdown. Lockdown is pushing the independent artist rulebook for fan engagement mainstream.

Free COVID-19 Impact Webinar

MIDiA Research is running a free-to-attend webinar on Wednesday, April 15^th: COVID-19 Impact on Entertainment Demand and Behaviours.

Regular readers will know that MIDiA has been publishing COVID-19 impact research, data and analysis since lockdowns started taking effect in the West. In this webcast, we will be presenting some of our latest research findings as well as having a panel discussion featuring the BPI’s CEO Geoff Taylor and some of the MIDiA team, including:

• Keith Jopling (music and radio)
• Tim Mulligan (video and TV)
• Karol Severin (games)
• Alistair Taylor (sports)
• Hanna Kahlert (culture)

The panel will explore how consumer lockdowns have impacted media consumption, who are the market winners and losers, and what the likely long-term effects will be.

We have already had a very large number of sign ups so places are now limited. Click here to register: WEBINAR REGISTRATION

If you are a MIDiA client, we now have a new COVID-19 research vertical here.

If you are a small-to-medium sized independent entertainment company, you can take advantage of our COVID-19 research package here.

And if you haven’t done so already, you can download the free MIDiA COVID-19 impact report here.

Stay well and healthy.