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.

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.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) November 25th 2019

Disney tidies its streaming stats: Disney is tidying up its streaming subscriber numbers in preparation for reporting the performance so far of Disney+. In the shake-up, ESPN falls from 3.4 million to three million while Hulu goes from a 28.5 million to 29 million. All figures Q3 2019. Headline: Disney is already a streaming powerhouse and is about to become even bigger.

Spotify awards: Spotify is moving into the music awards space. The only surprise is that Spotify didn’t do this sooner; this is the equivalent of MTV moving into the awards space in the 2010s. Spotify will be hoping, probably with good reason, that it will be able to make its awards a bigger deal than YouTube has its YouTube Music Awards.

Tecent’s global gaming empire: Tencent has invested in 40% of Fortnite owner Epic Games and 11.5% in competitor PUBG. By using access to the Chinese market as leverage for getting equity stakes in western games publishers, Tencent is building a global games business. It may even be en route to becoming a global tech major. It has a long way to go, through.

YouTube creators can take a break, perhaps: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki claims her company’s analytics can take a break from making content and come back with bigger metrics. The data is likely skewed by a) under-performing channels taking a break, and b) the novelty factor of a returning creator. The underlying truth, however, is that YouTube’s monetisation system skews strongly towards high-volume output. The system needs changing if creators are to genuinely be able to take breaks.

Throw ladders down: Meghan Rapinoe’s acceptance speech for her Woman of the Year award presents a new vision for how those with influence should use their platform for others’ voices, by ‘throwing down ladders’ for others to climb up. She tackles inequality in many forms in her speech and sounds more like an accomplished activist politician than a sports personality. If only all sports people (and politicians) could make contributions like this. Go watch the video.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) November 18th 2019

Bytedance subscription: Bytedance, parent of TikTok, is reportedly close to launching a music subscription service, initially focused on emerging markets. The big question is whether Bytedance will get the deals to launch something genuinely new, built on TikTok’s foundation, or just end up launching a cookie-cutter “all you can eat” 9.99 service.

Netflix and Nickelodeon team up: Netflix and Viacom’s Nickelodeon have announced a multi-year partnership to create kids shows. This shows two things: 1) Netflix is ensuring its kids offering is up to competing with Disney+, and 2) not all traditional TV companies see Netflix as being the enemy. This is becoming a heavily nuanced market.

Tencent looking for backing: Tencent is reportedly looking for external partners to come in as part of its $3.3 billion acquisition of 10% of UMG. Given Tencent was bullish about going it alone and paying a premium, something feels odd here. Maybe Tencent got spooked by slowing streaming growth in Q3 – something MIDiA said at the start of the year would happen.

Disney streaming woes: Good news for Disney+ with 10 miillion sign ups in 24 hours – that’s more than Apple Music got in weeks after launch. Bad news: it couldn’t cope with the demand, with widespread user complaints.Turns out it is just as hard for a media company to become a tech company as vice versa. There will be broad grins in Netflix towers.

BT keeps Champions League rights: UK telco BT has secured television rights for the European Champions League for another three seasons from 2021. The deal is reported to be worth £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion), with streaming service DAZN missing out in the bidding process. Sports rights remain a highly valued asset, but the bubble will burst at some stage in the next five years or so.

Why Music Streaming Could Really Do with a Disney+

The music and video streaming markets have long been best understood by their differences rather than similarities, but the flurry of video subscription announcements in recent months have upped the ante even further. New services from the likes of Disney, Warner Bros, Apple and AMC Cinemas point to an explosion in consumer choice. These are bold moves considering how mature the video subscription business is, as well as Netflix’s leadership role in the space. Nevertheless, Netflix is going to have to seriously up its game to avoid being squeezed. The contrast with the music streaming market is depressingly stark.

Diverging paths

The diverging paths of the music and video subscription markets tell us much about the impact of rights fragmentation on innovation. In music, three major rights holder groups control the majority of rights and thus can control the rate at which innovation happens. As a consequence, we have a streaming market in which each leading service has the same catalogue, the same pricing and the same device support. If this was the automotive market, it would be equivalent of saying everyone has to buy a Lexus, but you get to choose the colour paint. Compare this to video, where global rights are fragmented across dozens of networks. This means that TV rights holders have not been able to dictate (i.e. slow) the rate of innovation, resulting in dozens of different niche services, a plethora of price points and an unprecedented apogee in TV content.

Now, Apple and major rights holders Disney and Warner Bros have deemed the streaming video market to be ready for prime time and are diving in with their own big streaming plays. Video audiences are going to have a volume of high budget, exclusive content delivered at a scale and trajectory not seen before. There has never been a better time to be a TV fan nor indeed a TV show maker.

The music streaming market could really do with a similar rocket up its proverbial behind right now. The ‘innovation’ that is taking place is narrow in scope and limited in ambition. Adding podcast content to playlists, integrating with smart speakers and introducing HD audio all are important – but they are tweaking the model, not reimagining it. Streaming music needs an external change agent to shake it from its lethargy.

Do first, ask forgiveness later

The nearest we have to that change agent right now is TikTok. TikTok has achieved what it has by not playing by the rules. It has followed that long-standing tech company approach of doing first and asking forgiveness later. Sure, it is now locked in some difficult conversations with rightsholders – but it is negotiating from a position of strength, with many millions of active users. TikTok brought a set of features to market that rightsholders simply would not have licensed in the same way if it had gone the traditional route of bringing a business plan, pleading for some rights, signing away minimum guarantees (MGs) and then taking the neutered proposition to market.

I recall advising a music messaging app client who was just getting going to do the right thing. I hooked him up with some of the best music lawyers, made connections at labels, and basically helped him play by the rules. Two years later he still hadn’t managed to get a deal in place with any rightsholders – though he had racked up serious legal fees in the process. Meanwhile, Flipagram had pushed on ahead without licensing deals, secured millions of users and tens of millions of dollars of investment and only then started negotiating deals – and the labels welcomed it with open arms. To this day, this is my single biggest professional regret: advising this person who was betting his life savings to play by the rules. He lost. The ‘cheats’ won.

We need insurgents with disruptive innovation

The moral of this story is that in the consumer music services space, innovation happens best and fastest when rights holders do not dictate terms. This is not necessarily a criticism. Rights holders need to protect their assets and their commercial value in the marketplace. They inherently skew towards sustaining innovations, i.e. incremental changes that sustain existing products. New tech companies looking to build market share, however, favour disruptive innovations that create new markets. Asking an incumbent to aggressively back disruptive innovation is a bit like asking someone to set fire to their own house. But most often it is the disruptive change that really drives markets forward.

Streaming subscription growth will slow before too long, and as a channel for building artist-fan relationships they are pretty much a dead end. There is no Plan B. Back in 1999 there was only one format; it was growing well, but there was no successor. Looks a lot like now.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) September 20th 2019

Amazon, hi-def bet: Amazon has launched its long-slated Amazon Music HD service,delivering lossless FLAC files to a new HD streaming tier. Amazon is betting on its older, higher-income user base to care more about quality than Spotify users. Amazon Prime subscribers are starting to look like digital’s premier target segment. Across its digital music offering, Amazon is now getting to the tipping point between smart segmentation and choice overkill. With HD added into the mix, in markets like the UK Amazon has 10 different digital music products and prices.

Disney+; beat that, Netflix: With its launch edging closer, Disney+ has announced its opening roster.Featuring every Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm release in existence, Disney has a movie roster that no other video subscription service can compete with. Given that so much streaming TV consumption is becoming movie-like due to binge watching, Disney has an opportunity to massively eat into Netflix and Amazon time. Netflix’s Reed Hastings isn’t just competing with Fortnite or sleep anymore.

Facebook camera in your living room, anyone? Facebook just announced its range of Portal devices with cameras for video consumption, video calling, AR gaming and more. Facebook is late to the home video game, with Amazon and Apple having made major headway. Nevertheless, Facebook’s biggest challenge remains Facebook. In the post-Cambridge Analytica world, a lot of consumers are going to be cautious at best about having a Facebook spycam in their living rooms. With a company that trades on user data, the question is: ‘Is this your portal to the world, or Facebook’s portal to your world?’

Champions league, social giant: Football body UEFA has just announced some new news for an old event. The summer UEFA Champions League final broke a record of over one billion social media interactions, “cementing its place as the world’s biggest annual sporting event”. The massive and growing global scale of football is clear. Why UEFA took so long to get the stats out, however, is not…

Extinction Rebellion: Friday marked what looks set to be the biggest day of Extinction Rebellion protests yet. This is a global movement that combines technology and grassroots activism to build a movement that transcends generations but speaks for the people of tomorrow. Having already started to shift the conversation from ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’, the decentralised Extinction Rebellion movement is beginning to achieve an irresistible momentum with a message that we all need to hear.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know)

Apple ups its artist analytics but do artists care? Kobalt and Spotify both helped reshape the music industry’s understanding of what role data should play and how it should be presented. Apple announced its Apple Music for Artists (AMFA) is coming out of betawith a whole host of cool dashboards and analytics that dive down to city level. Powerful stuff indeed. The problem, though, is not data scarcity but data abundance. Overwhelmed by dashboards and tools, artists and their managers are becoming victims of data paralysis.

Streaming video endgame:Paradigm-shifting announcements don’t come along often and when they do it is not always obvious that they are so important. This is one of them: Disney announced it will bundle its forthcoming Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN+ all for just $12.99.For a tiny fraction of a cable subscription, Disney is giving the average family everything it needs from a TV package. The bundle simultaneously competes with Netflix and the traditional pay-TV companies Disney relies upon for carriage fees. This is go-big-or-go-home for Disney and is perhaps the biggest, boldest move yet in the streaming wars.

 

Star Wars – too much too soon: When Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.1 billion in 2012 it was a statement of intent, particularly following the 2009 acquisition of Marvel. Marvel prospered with the almost TV-episode frequency of releases; the Star Wars franchise less so. With toy sales down, Galaxy’s Edge underattended, and disgruntled fansCEO Bob Iger cited ‘Star Wars fatigue’ and committed to slowing the release schedule. The temptation to saturate markets to compete in the attention economy can be hard to resist.

Pluto drives Viacom growth: Viacom’s ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV hit 18 million active users at the end of July, up from 12 million at the start of the year– with its connected TV user segment growing 400% year on year. Growth is so fast that 50% of ad inventory remains unsold. Nonetheless, coupled with Viacom’s Advanced Marketing Solutions (AMS) division US ad revenues returned to growth (6%) in the quarter while total Viacom revenues were up 6% also, to $3.35 billion. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Sports bubble? What sports bubble? With pay-TV companies losing subscribers and overspending on drama to hold off Netflix, budgets for sports rights are going to feel the pressure. But in the English Premier League (EPL) the mantra is make hay while the sun shines. Total transfer spending before the pre-season deadline reached £1.41billion which was fractionally below the £1.43billion record set in 2017. More than half the clubs broke their individual player transfer records. The market will likely get even more heated when streaming players start increasing their spend, but if they get a market stranglehold they will do what they do best: ‘bring efficiencies into the supply chain’, which is west coast code for squeezing suppliers. Be careful what you wish for sports leagues.

Disney, Netflix and the Squeezed Middle: The Real Story Behind Net Neutrality

Unless you have been hiding under a rock this last couple of weeks you’ll have heard at least something about the build up to the decision over turning net neutrality in the US, a decision that was confirmed yesterday. See Zach Fuller’s post for a great summary of what it means. In highly simplistic terms, the implications are that telcos will be able to prioritize access to their networks, which could mean that any digital service will only be able to guarantee their US users a high quality of service if they broker a deal with each and every telco. As Zach explains, we could see similar moves in Europe and elsewhere. If you are a media company or a digital content provider your world just got turned upside down. But this ruling is in many ways an inevitable result of a fundamental shift in value across digital value chains.

Although the ruling effectively only overturns a 2015 ruling that had previously guaranteeing net neutrality, the world has moved on a lot since then, not least with regards to the emergence of the streaming economy across video, music and games. In short, there is a lot more bandwidth being taken up by streaming services and little or no extra value reverting to the upgraded networks.

Value is shifting from rights to distribution

Although the exact timing with the Disney / Fox deal (see Tim Mulligan’s take here) was coincidental the broad timing was not. The last few years have seen a major shift in value from rights companies (eg Disney, Universal Music, EA Games) through to distribution companies (eg Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify) with the value shift largely bypassing the infrastructure companies (ie the telcos).

The accelerating revenue growth and valuations of the tech majors and the streaming giants have left media companies trailing in their wake. The Disney / Fox deal was two of the world’s biggest media companies realising that consolidation was the only way to even get on the same lap as the tech majors. They needed to do so because those tech majors are all either already or about to become content companies too, using their vast financial fire power to outbid traditional media companies for content.

The value shift has bypassed infrastructure companies

Meanwhile telcos have been left stranded between rock and a hard place. Telcos have long been concerned about becoming relegated to the role of dumb pipes and most had given up any real hope of being content companies themselves (other than the TV companies who also have telco divisions). They see regulatory support for better monetizing their networks by levying access fees to tech companies as their last resort.

In its most basic form, this regulatory decision will allow telcos to throttle the bandwidth available to streaming services either in favour of their favoured partners or until an access fee is paid. The common thought is that telcos are becoming the new gatekeepers. In most instances they are more likely to become toll booths. But in some instances they may well shy away from any semblance of neutrality. For example, Sprint might well decide that it wants to give its part-owned streaming service Tidal a leg up, and throttle access for Spotify and Apple Music for Sprint users. Eventually Spotify and Apple Music users will realise they either need to switch streaming service or mobile provider. Given that one is a need-to-have, contract-based utility and the other is nice-to-have and no contract and is fundamentally the same underlying proposition, a streaming music switch is the more likely option. Similarly, AT&T could opt to throttle access for Netflix in order to give its DirecTV Now service a leg up. Those telcos without strong content plays could find themselves in the market for acquisitions. For example, Verizon could make a bid for Spotify pre-listing, or even post-listing.

The FCC ruling still needs congressional approval and is subject to legal challenges from a bunch of states so it could yet be blocked. If it is not, then the above is how the world will look. Make no mistake, this is the biggest growing pain the streaming economy has yet faced, even if it just ends up with those services having to carve out an extra slice of their wafer-thin margins in order reach their customers.

MIDiA Research Predictions 2017: The Year Of The Platform

Following an 84% success rate for our 2016 Predictions report, we today launch our 2017 predictions report: ‘MIDiA Research Predictions 2017: The Year Of The Platform’. The report is immediately available to all MIDiA subscription clients and can also be purchased for individual download from our report store here.

Here are some highlights:

2016 was the year that video ate the world. 2017 will be the year of the platform, the year in which the tech majors will fight for pre-eminence in the digital economy, competing for consumer attention through formatting and distribution wars. Companies that are already using mobile Operating Systems to achieve global reach will take the next step, creating Mobile Life Ecosystems that both break out of the app silo walls and straddle them. Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, Microsoft, Apple and Google/Alphabet will be the main players. 2015 was about parking tanks on each other’s front lawns, in 2016 shots were fired, 2017 will be all-out war. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice assistance will be key battlegrounds and indeed will form the glue of Mobile Life Ecosystems.

Some of MIDiA’s other key predictions for 2017 are:

• Services are the new black: Maturing ‘phone and tablet markets mean that hardware companies will place a greater focus on digital content and services in 2017. Services are an opportunity to drive strong growth that will compensate for slowing device sales
• Ad market growing pains: Digital advertising inventory supply will exceed demand in 2017. Audience engagement will grow more quickly than advertisers’ appetite. Consequently, ad rates will decline with the bloating of the market by content farms accentuating the problem. Facebook will not be alone in seeing slowing ad revenues in 2017.
• A tech major will be hit with the first stage of an anti-trust suit: The incoming US Presidency has made its anti-trust inclinations clear. A likely early target will be the AT&T/Time Warner merger. The global-scale tech companies may be mature companies but their respective sectors are not. Regulation is one of the inevitable growing pains of maturing business sectors. Digital is next.
• Snapchat’s IPO will be digital’s canary in the mine: App store era unicorns and their attendant Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) will redefine the media and tech landscape. Not only will the success, or failure, of Snapchat’s IPO affect those of Uber and Spotify, poor showings could deflate the VC bubble andput an end to the grow-at-all-costs For the music industry, the stakes are even higher, as an under-achieving Spotify IPO would create a crisis in confidence in the entire streaming market.

Among our music predictions for 2017 are Spotify’s IPO and the subsequent start of a new generation of experiential streaming services, Tidal selling (probably to Apple) while Spotify closes out the year with around 55 million subscribers to Apple Music’s 30 million.

Five Long Term Music Industry Predictions (And How Disney Will Rule The World)

The new year is typically a time for predictions for the year. But at the midway point of the decade, rather than do some short term predictions I think this is a good time to take a look at the longer term outlook for the music industry. Here are five long term music industry predictions:

1 – Disney will become the world’s biggest music company

Consumers are buying less music and there are more ways to easily get free music than ever before, both of which make selling music harder than ever. Major labels have addressed this by doubling down on pop acts (Rihanna, Katy Perry, Rita Ora, Ariana Grande etc.) which have a more predictable route to market. Video (YouTube) and very young audiences (also YouTube) underpin the success of these artists. While the majors have been pivoting around this very specific slice of mainstream, Disney has quietly been building an entire entertainment empire for this generation of pop focused youth. Unlike the majors, Disney has TV shows and channels targeted at each key kids and youth age group and uses them to bring artists through. They start them out kids TV shows such as The Wizards of Waverly Place (Selena Gomez), Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) and Sonny With A Chance (Demi Lovato). Disney then very carefully matures these fledgling stars as their audiences age so that by the time they and their audiences are fully fledged teens, they are fully-fledged pop stars. At which point they have shaken off most of their bubble gum imagery and have conveniently acquired a little edge, a specific positioning and a personality. It is a highly effective process. Each of those three Disney stars are only in their early 20’s but already have multiple albums under their belt. Disney will not only continue to excel at this model, they will most likely become the biggest pop label on the planet. Which given where music sales are heading (pop accounted for 44% of the top 10 US album sales in 2014) could well mean Disney even overtakes Universal to become the biggest music company of all.

2 – The western pop music industry will increasingly resemble Bollywood

2014 was the first year film soundtracks accounted for 2 of the top 10 selling US albums (‘Frozen’ and ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’), generating 4.4 million sales and 30% of the top 10 overall. And both albums were Disney. In India music plays a supporting role to film in revenue terms but is culturally centre stage, the beating heart of Bollywood film. The music and film require depend on each other for context and relevance. We are set for this model to become increasingly pervasive in western markets. Just as video underpins the success of pop stars, it creates an audience bond to music in film and TV, turning the music into the soundtrack of memorable, fun and moving moments. Triggering the same emotional chemistry music does in real life. With music sales still tumbling but movie sales holding up, expect movie soundtracks to become an ever bigger part of music sales, and for the dividing line between film star and pop star to blur entirely. Expect Disney to, again, be the key force.

3 – Live music will lose ground to other live entertainment

Live has been the music industry’s ‘get out of jail free’ card, holding up total revenues while sales revenue declined. The balance of power has shifted with sales revenue now just a third of the total revenue mix, down from 60% at the start of the century. But cracks are already appearing with price increases underpinning much of the live revenue growth in recent years and the big revenue polarised between ageing rockers and pop divas of the moment. There are only weak signs of a next generation of stadium filling rock bands. The big live venues are already looking for alternative ways of getting bums on seats, with TV show spin offs in particular proving successful. Venues and promoters love TV show tie-ups because they bring big TV cross promotion which helps ensure commercial success.   TV comedy shows are now doing 10 to 12 night sell outs in 10,000 capacity venues. You don’t see many artists doing that. Shows like Disney On Ice (yes, Disney again) fill out the biggest venues with ease. And it is not just the top end that is moving away from music. Comedians like the UK’s John Bishop play tours that happily play a small club one night and an arena the next. Expect the live market to shift more towards a broader range of entertainment, especially TV tie ins, squeezing out many music acts in the process.

4 – Old world copyright establishments will lose relevance 

The fragmented nature of global music rights, especially on the publishing side, has long been a thorn in the side of digital music.   The system of multiple national rights bodies and commercial rights owners administering different parts of music rights across the globe hinders the ability of the digital music industry to be truly global. A handful of rights bodies are pushing the innovation needle, others are not. The distinctions between recording, performance, mechanical etc. served well in the analogue era when there was a clear distinction between a sale and a performance. But in the streaming dominated landscape they are less useful. Additionally the entire range of audio visual elements that an artist comprises in the digital era can be prohibitively difficult to put into a single product. This is because the rights are usually held by so many different stakeholders, each with different priorities and appetites for risk. Expect music companies, artists and their managers to increasingly collect as many rights as possible into one place so they can create multimedia experiences without having to navigate a licensing minefield. In doing so, more and more monetization will happen outside of the traditional licensing frameworks. Whether that be because all of the revenue occurs in a single platform (e.g. YouTube) or because new licensing /collection bodies are used such as Audiam or Global Rights Management administer the rights. Creative Commons might play a bigger role but the real focus is going to be on being able to license more easily AND monetize more effectively.

5– Labels will become agencies

Finally we have agencies or what you might call labels, but I’m going to call them agencies, because that is what they need to become. The label model is already going under dramatic transformation with the advent of label services companies like Cooking Vinyl’s Essential and Kobalt’s AWAL, and of fan funding platforms like Pledge and Kick Starter. All of these are parts of the story of the 21^st century label, where the relationship between label and artist is progressively transformed from contracted employee to that of an agency-client model.   Labels that follow this model will be the success stories. And these labels will also have to stop thinking within the old world constraints of what constitutes the work of a label versus a publisher versus a creative agency versus a dev company. In the multimedia digital era a 21^st century labels needs to do all of this and be able to work in partnership with the creator to exploit all those rights by having them together under one roof.

Streaming is changing the music world right here, right now, and there is an understandable amount of focus on it. But it is just one part of a rapidly changing music industry. This decade has already wrought more fundamental change than any previous one and the rate of change is going to continue to accelerate for the next five years. All of the rules are being rewritten, all of the reference points redefined. This is nothing short of the birth of a new music industry. The blessing of a generation is to be born into interesting times, and these times are most certainly that.