Growth drivers – what comes after streaming

The pandemic-defined 2020 was an outlier year across digital entertainment, with the extra 12% of time consumers spent with entertainment boosting everything, including music. One of the effects was that streaming grew more than it would have otherwise, delaying the inevitable slowdown in streaming revenue growth. This artificial 2020 boost meant that the slowdown impact was felt even more strongly when it arrived in Q1 2021. 

The major labels saw streaming revenue grow by just 0.8% between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021, while Spotify saw revenues fall by 1%. Seasonality plays a major role here (a similar trend was seen last year) and year-on-year revenues were up by around a quarter. Nonetheless it reflects a maturing market. 

Back in 2019 Spotify’s revenues grew 15.7% from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019, while the majors’ streaming revenue was up 3% between Q4 2017–Q1 2018. In short, when the market was growing faster, seasonality did not result in flat / negative growth. Streaming is still in good shape and is going to remain the core of recorded music revenues for the foreseeable future, and Spotify’s price increases will bring a little extra revenue in 2021, but it is clearly time to start thinking about what comes next.

There is an argument that in today’s post-format world, we should not even be thinking about the next thing. So, it is better to think about what new business models and user experiences can grow alongside streaming, to diversify the music industry’s income mix. 

Music businesses, labels in particular, are busy exploring where future growth will come from. The more pessimistic argue that this is largely as good as it gets, that there will not be a ‘next streaming’. That might be right in terms of a single revenue source, but the early signs are that there is enough potential in a range of sources to collectively drive growth. Here are a few of the music industry’s potential growth drivers:

• Games: Ever since the Marshmello Fortnite event, games has acquired a new degree of importance for the music business. WMG’s stake in Roblox points to just how serious labels are taking the opportunity. With global games revenues hitting $120 billion in 2020 (around $100 billion more than the recorded music market) and more than a third of those revenues being driven by cosmetic (i.e., non-gameplay) spend, there is a wealth of opportunity. But to succeed, music companies will need to think about creative ways to enhance the gaming experience rather than simply seeing it as another licensing play.
  
• Social: Revenue from the likes of TikTok and Facebook finally became meaningful in 2020, accounting for around three quarters of the growth registered in ad supported. We are still scratching the surface of what social can do for music, but building tools for users to create their own music and audio will be key. Facebook’s Sound Studio could prove to be a defining first step towards the establishment of the consumer’s version of the social studio.
  
• Creator tools: As regular readers will know, MIDiA considers the current revolution in the creator tools space to be one of the most important shifts to the entire music business in recent years. Not only is it transforming the culture of music creation, it represents a new set of opportunities for deepening artist-fan relationships and a set of new facets for the future of music companies.
  
• Next-generation sync: Although traditional music sync revenues fell in 2020, music production libraries (including royalty free) grew. We are on the cusp of a major new wave of opportunity in sync, with social content, platform and creators representing a scale of demand that far exceeds that of the traditional sync market. And it is the slow-moving nature of that traditional sector which means that the likely winners in the social sync market will be the new generation of companies that offer solutions that are sufficiently agile and fast to meet the scale of micro-sync demand.
  
• Live streaming: The pandemic virtually created the live stream marketplace, resulting in a tidal wave of new start-ups rushing to fill the void left by live. While the results have been a mixed bag, there have been enough high-quality successes to suggest that this is a sector with longevity that will outlive lockdown. The services that will prosper when IRL returns are those that deliver genuinely differentiated experiences that complement rather than try to replace IRL live. 
  
• Fitness: Another of the pandemic’s second order effects was a surge in consumer spending on home fitness equipment, including Peleton. Right now there is some meaningful music licensing revenue building around the space, but Beyoncé’s Peleton partnership shows that the opportunity goes way beyond simply piping music into workouts. Crucially, the Beyoncé partnership creates an audience that is focusing their entire attention on the artist, which is rarely the case when people are listening to music on audio streaming services.
• Fandom: Fandom is the next frontier for music monetisation. Western streaming services monetise consumption, whereas Tencent Music Entertainment monetises fandom, with two thirds of its revenue coming from non-music activity. We are beginning to see a flurry of activity in artist subscriptions and meanwhile, Patreon goes from strength to strength. Check out this free MIDiA report for more on how to tap the fandom opportunity.

To reiterate, streaming is, and will remain for many years, the beating heart of recorded music revenue. In fact, more than that, most of these new opportunities exist at such scale because of streaming. Until now, streaming enabled revenue growth in its own right, now it will enable growth in new adjacent markets.

The COVID Bounce and the coming Attention Recession

2020 was by any measure a unique year in modern times. While the societal impact of the pandemic was, and continues to be, horrific, for the entertainment industries it was a year of plenty. At the start of the pandemic, MIDiA Research estimated that there would be an extra 15% of consumption time for the average working consumer. Well, now that the end of year data is in, we can confirm that this ‘COVID bounce’ did in fact happen, with overall consumption time up by 12%. When you consider that the working population is only a subset of the overall population, that 12% means that we were pretty much on the money with our prediction. But while this uplift was seen right across entertainment, some formats did better than others and, crucially, some of that extra time will diminish whenever it is that the population starts returning to work and going out again. Which means that for the first time ever in the Attention Economy, there will be an Attention Recession, with very obvious potential ramifications for all entertainment companies.

The full results of MIDiA’s highly detailed COVID media consumption study is now available to MIDiA clients in the report ‘Media consumption: Lockdown’s attention boom’ and the accompanying dataset. Here are a few of the high-level findings.

• Everything was up: 2020 was a case of a high tide rises all boats, with all forms of entertainment increasing average consumption time. Video consolidated its position as the leading format in terms of hours spent, but the largest percentage gains were in games (30%) and non-music audio (24%). Consumers even increased their time doing nothing / chilling, illustrating that despite the unsettling chaos of the pandemic, consumers found more time to relax and also to contemplate. Interestingly, doing nothing increased by a greater rate than listening to music.
  
• Audiobooks were audio’s big winner: While podcast listening was up by an impressive 35%, audiobooks were lockdown’s biggest winner, increasing average time by nearly 50%. The radio and music businesses’ obsession with podcasts is understandable given how much focus the likes of Spotify, Amazon and Apple have placed on them, but the audiobooks category has emerged as the dark horse of the piece. When all audio time is considered together (radio, music, streaming, podcasts, audiobooks), audiobooks now account for a similar share of total time as podcasts do. Though music streaming was up too during lockdown, it grew more slowly than podcasts and audiobooks so was flat in terms of total share. Radio lost share. The shift is reflected in Spotify’s numbers: its average content hours per monthly active user (MAU) fell by 1% in 2020. Given that this figure includes podcasts, the inferences are: a) Spotify lost share of audio time, and b) music hours fell. It wasn’t just Spotify that did not keep pace with the audio boom. Even apps like the BBC’s Sounds saw a fall in the ratio of weekly to daily users. 
  
• Casual gamers boosted games: Games’ growth was driven both by core gamers using the former commute time to get in some extra time on their consoles and gaming PCS. But the biggest growth was driven by mobile casual games. In previous years, mainstream consumers had driven a games surge, adopting titles like Candy Crush, but then shifted much of this time to the likes of Netflix and Spotify as the Attention Economy saturated. With more time on their hands in lockdown, mainstream consumers flocked to casual games once again. This will be a likely casualty of the coming Attention Recession.
  
• Music is just one lane in audio: COVID-19 catalysed many pre-existing trends; the audio shift was one of those. Just as Netflix took TV out of the TV, podcasts took radio out of radio and contributed to a wider trend of consumers taking an increasingly format-agnostic view of audio. Breaking long-held habits in lockdown, audiences were able to try out new things and, given that we are nearly a year into the lockdown era, establish new behaviours that will remain to some degree post-pandemic (if that is ever a phrase that will really ring true). Traditional habits like the commute and exercise will now see audiobooks and podcasts competing for music time like never before. For music companies, this means that they need to understand they are now in the audio business and they are predominately just competing in one lane. This does not mean that they inherently need to become ’audio businesses’, but it does mean that they need to build strategies that account for this shift. Meanwhile, Amazon once again emerges as the dark horse with music, podcasts and – via Audible – audiobooks. Amazon looks set to be a big beneficiary of the lockdown legacy.

If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to learn how to get access to the ‘Media consumption: Lockdown’s attention boom’ report and data then please email stephen@midiaresearch.com.

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.

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

The COVID Bounce: Part II

In their early stages, COVID-19 self-isolation measures have quickly created new consumer behaviour patterns, oriented around four key axes:

1. Communication
2. Entertainment
3. Information/news
4. Education (for children at home)

The demand for the first two of these behaviour groups is clearly illustrated by the mobile apps that consumers are downloading. Across the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, the top 10 most downloaded free apps are dominated by video communication apps and games. These types of companies have been some of the biggest winners in the early stages of COVID-19.

Meeting the demand for human connection

The top two apps are ones that have been around for a long time but have found their moment in the current crisis. Following years establishing itself as a tool for business, Zoom has become the go-to for work-from-home staff, consumers and a host of people and small businesses looking to continue classes with students such as music classes, fitness and yoga. Zoom has managed to achieve that most elusive of consumer market forces: to become synonymous with an entire product category, much like Spotify has for music, Netflix for video, Google for search and Amazon for e-commerce.

Multiple other video communication apps such as Google’s Hangouts have also grown strongly, but the biggest business-focused winner after Zoom is Microsoft Teams. Over the last half a decade, Microsoft – the original tech major – has been rebuilding its business, establishing itself once again as a global power player. With its strong focus on enterprise and utility capabilities, Microsoft could be better positioned than the consumer-facing tech majors (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) to weather the likely COVID-19-driven recession. Apple’s Facetime has also experienced strong usage during the COVID-19 dislocation, but because it is a native iOS app does not appear in the app store charts.

Houseparty has grown fast… perhaps too fast

Houseparty has achieved a similar role for the pure-consumer side of the equation. After years of modest success – it was launched in 2016 – it has rocketed up the app store charts, with its highly social, fun focus giving it particularly strong reach among younger age groups. The early signs though are that Houseparty’s owner Epic Games may not have been fully prepared for the surge in usage. While its original Gen Z and Millennial target user groups may have been tolerant of the wide social reach Houseparty delivers, there are widespread accounts in the media of older consumers reacting badly to features such as people unexpectedly joining parties who they are not close to but were automatically added when they synced their contacts to the app. Also, as with any rapid growth comes the risk of scams, as illustrated by frustrated users complaining that their payment details have been hacked via the app. Although Epic Games claims it has been the victim of a smear campaign these are all the sort of unintended consequences of rapidly growing into new user segments. Houseparty is running to keep up and risks a consumer backlash if it cannot respond quickly and robustly enough. Epic Games of course knows all about global scale success so should be able to bring the expertise to bear.

Filling the down time

The other big app gainers are games, with four placings in the top 10. While games as a wider sector has been a key beneficiary of the COVID-19 dislocation, mobile games tend to skew more towards casual gamers. Popular mobile games are often easy to play, giving them wider appeal. The four games in the top 10 – Save the Girl!, Perfect Cream, House Restoration and Park Master – are clear illustrations of bored consumers looking to fill the extra time they have on their hands. Mobile games were early winners in the attention economy but lost market share as other forms of media grew in competition. Now, with an average of 15% of new attention time being available for employed consumers – due to no commuting or going out for leisure – mobile games is enjoying a similar dynamic as in the early days of the app economy. With disruptions to TV, film and music production, this boom will likely extend – albeit at lower rates – beyond the social-distancing phase, until other media categories can produce enough new content to win back more consumption time.

Post-COVID new world order

When the COVID-19 dislocation finally ends, consumers and businesses alike will return to a state of greater equilibrium. The transition will be steady rather than instant, and newly-established behaviours will take time to change. However, the point from which they will change will be different from today as consumers and businesses are still only beginning to establish new forms of normality in these abnormal circumstances. However, what is clear is that consumers and businesses will take with them into the post-COVID world new perspectives on life and behaviour.

Video messaging was already on a strong upward curve but COVID-19 has accelerated that by rapidly expanding its business use and pushing it to older, more mainstream audiences more quickly than it would otherwise have done. When the COVID-19 dislocation subsides, video messaging is one of the activities that will have a higher usage watermark than before the crisis.

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) December 9th 2019

Go east: Universal Music launched Red Records, an Asian repertoire joint venture label with AirAsia Group. With Western repertoire accounting for around only a third of all streams in Asian markets, UMG needs local bets to benefit from the Asian opportunity. They’ll be hoping for some BTS-style export successes, too.

Gameloft closure: Pioneering French games company Gameloft closed its UK office, following rumours of a Brisbane closure also. The lesson here is that it is hard to build a games publisher with the sort of longevity that music labels and TV studios have. Not many do so (without getting bought, that is).

Manchester City sponsorship: EPL club Manchester City just signed its first training kit partner Marathonbet for an eight-figure deal. The deal illustrates both how much value lies in top-tier sports leagues and how much betting companies are willing to spend on acquiring customers.

Not buzzing now: Last year MIDiA predicted BuzzFeed would either close or be bought. It is now under threat of strike-off from regulators for being two months late filing accounts. In its prime, BuzzFeed was a pioneer in making digital-first content and – for better or for worse – helped shape today’s digital media landscape. Unfortunately for BuzzFeed, in doing so it taught the world how to compete with it. 

More woe for Saatchi and Saatchi: Another accounting error for the UK ad agency (this time bigger…) sent shares tumbling. The ad agency sector is in crisis phase. Beyond accounting scandals, the whole premise of agency ad buying is challenged by the power of self-serve ad platforms and companies wanting to own their customer data.

Facebook Is Finally Ready To Become A Media Company

Facebook beat estimates with its latest earnings but announced that ad revenues would likely slow in 2017 as the digital ad market feels the pinch of advertiser budgets lagging the shift in user behaviour. Facebook’s stock fell by 7% but it already has Plan B in motion: to become a media company. Facebook delayed this move as long as it possibly could, showing little enthusiasm for getting bogged down with content licenses while it was able to drive audience growth and engagement by piggy backing other people’s content. That strategy has run its course. Facebook is now about to start looking and behaving much more like a media company, but in doing so it will rewrite the rule book on what a media company is.

The Socially Integrated Web

Back in 2011 I published a report ‘The Socially Integrated Web: Facebook’s Content Strategy and the Battle of the Ecosystems’. You can still download the report for free here. In it I argued that Facebook was starting out on a path to become a media company, but not the sort of media company anyone would recognise:

Change is afoot in the Internet.  Facebook’s new Socially Integrated Web strategy is set to make Facebook one of the most important conduits on the web. It is pushing itself further out into content experiences in the outside web while simultaneously pulling more of them into Facebook itself. Facebook is establishing itself as a universal content dashboard – a 21st century cable company for the Internet, a 21^st century portal – establishing its own content ecosystem to compete with the likes of Apple and Amazon. While traditional ecosystems are defined by hardware and paid services, Facebook’s is defined by data and user experience.

Now with ad revenues set to slow, Facebook is flicking the switch on phase 2 of this strategy. Think of it as the Socially Integrated Web 2.0.

Wall Street Doesn’t Like Mature Growth Stories In Tech

As Apple, Pandora and others have found to their cost, Wall Street likes its tech stocks to be dynamic growth stories. It doesn’t like mature growth stories – that’s what traditional company stocks are for. So what can a tech company with a mature customer base do? The answer is to switch on new user monetization strategy, with content and services the lynchpin. Apple’s new supplemental investor materials outlining iOS users’ services spend is a case in point. Monetizing audiences is the new black. This is the game Facebook is now starting to play.

How Facebook Will Become A Next Gen Media Company

Moving from curating to licensing is a subtle but crucial shift in Facebook’s role as a content distribution platform. Here are the pieces that Facebook will stitch together as it begins its transition towards become a next generation media company:

• Games: In August Facebook announced its gaming platform Facebook Gameroom, a Steam for casual games. It followed that with the announcement it will bring Instant Games to Messenger – an extension of its messaging bot strategy. Games is a logical place for Facebook to start carving out its media company role as it has become the default home of casual PC gaming. It also wants to own a slice of the hugely lucrative mobile gaming market.
• Filters: Snapchat and Line have created global marketplaces for stickers and filters. Facebook is set to follow suit and is now experimenting with Snapchat-like filters. Filters may not look like media assets in the traditional sense, but the whole point about next generation media businesses is that they contain next generation content assets. Filters are an early indication of how the definition of content will change over the next decade and Facebook now has a horse in that race.
• Video: Despite the embarrassment of having over reported some of its video metrics, Facebook has quickly become a major player in the online video space, accounting for 29% of short form video views. The next step for Facebook is to start building a discovery and curation layer. When it does, expect video consumption to boom. This will be a major step towards its media company future. It will however have to build a lot of tech for rights holders and content creators. Right now, its aversion of getting tied up with policing rights means that many rights holders don’t even post content there. YouTube has a massive head start with its highly sophisticated Content ID stack. Facebook will need to follow YouTube’s lead.
• Live Stream: Facebook has been doubling down on its live streaming, expanding its focus from user and celeb streams towards more traditional media content such as Steven Colbert’s Showtime Monologue, partnering with 50 media outlets for presidential election coverage, and eSports. eSports could be as lucrative as traditional sports within the next 10 years and the shift has already begun – Twitch accounted for more streaming video bandwidth than the Olympics.
• Next generation TV operator: One of the most disruptive moves Facebook can make, at least from the perspective of traditional media, is to stitch together its video assets and combine them with video subscription apps like Netflix and TV channel apps like iPlayer and HBO Go to create an all-in-one video destination straddling, UGC, short form, live streaming and TV content. The rise of video apps has created a bewilderingly fragmented video landscape. Facebook can stitch it all together to become a next generation TV operator. It will face direct competition from Apple, Amazon and Alphabet if/when it does.
• Editorial: Facebook took a lot of flak for its decision to censor, on grounds of nudity, a famous Vietnam photo showing the effects of a napalm attack on Vietnamese children. The photo had been posted by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten and its editor-in-chief Espen Egil Hansen wrote “Editors cannot live with you, Mark, as a master editor”. Facebook eventually bowed to public pressure and reinstated the photo. While Facebook may have been wrong to censor the photo it revealed that Facebook is already a ‘master editor’ whether Facebook or traditional media like it or not. Facebook hosts such a vast amount of content that the master editor role is inescapable. Aftenposten might have editorial credibility but what about a white supremacist publication? Facebook is already an editor in chief, in short it is already a media company.
• Music: Facebook’s recent ad for a music licensing executive got music business types all excited. But music is the content vertical Facebook probably has least to gain from switching from host to licensed service. Streaming music is a notoriously difficult business to make money in (Spotify’s gross operating margin is around 17%). Facebook needs to grow margin, not just revenue, and with all its other content options it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to loss lead with an AYCE music service when it can get a bigger return on that investment elsewhere. IF Facebook does do something in music either expect it to be a more radio-like experience for its mainstream audiences (Pandora had a gross operating margin of around 40% in 2015) or – and this is more likely – something for younger users that has music at its core but that is not a streaming service. Think something along the lines of lip synching app Musical.ly.

Facebook is a past master at business model transformation. Its co-opting of younger audience focussed messaging platforms in the face of ageing social network audiences was a best-in-class example of a company disrupting itself before someone else did. Now Facebook is set to make another major change in its strategy before it finds its core business disrupted. Media companies beware, there’s a new player in town and its betting big, real big.

HMV Interim Results and What they Mean for Music Sales

Interim results are out for HMV, always a good litmus test for the state of music and media sales.  I’m not a financial analyst so I’m not going to discuss the financial fundamentals, rather what this means for the music industry.

 

HMV stores sales (i.e. excluding Waterstones) are actually up over period.  But technology and gaming, rather than music, have been key to this growth, increasing their combined share from 18 percent to 23 percent.  HMV knows where its future lies.  HMV is plotting a course that brings it closer to European peers such as Saturn in Germany and Fnac in France and Åhléns in Sweden: it is not just becoming much more than music, it is planning for a future when music will no longer be a core product.  As you can from the chart below, music’s share of total sales is declining sharply and is strongly outweighed by DVD, which itself is now losing share to games and electronics.

 

So where does that leave music sales if Europe’s key high street music retailers are rapidly developing in other directions?  It would be nice to say that this is part of a process towards strong online sales.  But none of Europe’s major high street retailers have managed to steal any serious market share from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.   They should have been able to, as they have the decades of music retailing and programming expertise that Apple is just learning.  Selling in MP3 format is a crucial asset (which HMV now have) but they need to price as aggressively as Amazon is now in the UK and, most importantly, integrate heavily in store. This means that when you’re browsing the shelves in HMV you see most CD titles have offers for download discounts and bundles e.g. buy this album and get the other as a download for half price.

 

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it hasn’t happened because those responsible for in store CD sales are scared of accelerating cannibalization of their dwindling sales by driving people online.  It’s too late for those kinds of concerns.  The shift is already happening.  All that’s left now is an opportunity for HMV to help drive the process rather than continue to be dragged along, losing customers and market share all along the way