New MIDiA Latin American Streaming Report, in English, Spanish and Portuguese

MIDiA has just published its latest report on the Latin American streaming music market, and we have versions available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

MIDiA has been tracking the Latin American music market for over five years, including annual consumer data and market metrics.

Our latest report ‘Latin America Streaming Music Market: YouTube and Spotify Take Hold’is written by our long term Latin American music analyst Leo Morel and features data on Mexico, Brazil and the region as a whole.

 

 

The report includes analysis and data on:

• Consumer adoption of YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and other streaming services
• Playlist penetration
• Wider consumer music behaviour eg downloads, CDs
• Streaming revenues (subscriptions, ad supported music ad supported video)
• Streaming users (subscriptions, ad supported music ad supported video)

Companies and brands mentioned in the report: Apple, Deezer, Google, iPhone, iTunes, Movistar, Spotify, TIM, Virgin Mobile, Vevo, Vivo, YouTube

The reports are immediately available to our clients, while you can purchase the individual reports here:

• English
• Spanish
• Portuguese

The reports each come with PDF, Slides, Excel and infographic.

For any questions please email info@midiaresearch.com

10 Trends That Will Reshape the Music Industry

The IFPI has reported that global recorded music revenues have hit $19.1 billion, which means that MIDiA’s own estimates published in March were within 1.6% of the actual results. This revenue growth story is strong and sustained but the market itself is undergoing dramatic change. Here are 10 trends that will reshape the recorded music business over the coming years:

1. Streaming is eating radio: Younger audiences are abandoning radio for streaming. Just 39% of 16-19-year olds listen to music radio, while 56% use YouTube instead for music. Gen Z is unlikely to ever ‘grow into radio’; if you are trying to break an artist with a young audience, it is no longer your best friend. To make matters worse, podcasts are looking like a Netflix moment for radio and may start stealing older audiences. This is essentially a demographic pincer movement.
2. Streaming deflation: Streaming music has allowed itself to be outpaced by inflation. A $9.99 subscription from 2009 is actually $13.36 when inflation is factored in. Contrast this with Netflix, for which theinflation-adjusted price is $10.34 but the actual 2019 price is $12.99. Netflix has stayed ahead of inflation; Spotify and co. have fallen behind. It is easier for Netflix to increase prices as it has exclusive content, but rights holders and streaming services need to figure out a way to bring prices closer to inflation. A market-wide increase to $10.99 would be a sound start, and the fact that so many Spotify subscribers are willing to pay $13 a month via iTunes shows there is pricing tolerance in the market.
3. Catalogue pressure: Deep catalogue has been the investment fund of labels for years. But with most catalogue streams coming from music made in this century, catalogue values are being turned upside down (in the streaming era, the Spice Girls are worth more than the Beatles!). Labels can still extract high revenue from legacy artists with super premium editions like UMG did with the Beatles in 2018, but a new long-term approach is required for valuing catalogue. Matters are complicated further by the fact that labels are now doing so many label services deals, and therefore not building future catalogue value.
4. Labels as a service (LAAS): Artists can now create their own virtual label from a vast selection of services such as 23 Capital, Amuse, Splice, Instrumental, and CDBaby. A logical next step is for a 3^rdparty to aggregate a selection of these services into a single platform (an opening for Spotify?). Labels need to get ahead of this trend by better communicating the soft skills and assets they bring to the equation, e.g. dedicated personnel, mentoring, and artist and repertoire (A+R) support.
5. Value chain disruption: LAAS is just part of a wider trend of value chain disruption with multiple stakeholders trying to expand their roles, from streaming services signing artists to labels launching streaming services. Things are only going to get messier, with virtually everyone becoming a frenemy of the other.
6. Tech major bundling: Amazon set the ball rolling with its Prime bundle, and Apple will likely follow suit with its own take on the tech major bundle. Music is going to become just one part of content offerings from tech majors and it will need to fight for supremacy, especially in the ultra-competitive world of the attention economy.
7. Global culture: Streaming – YouTube especially – propelled Latin music onto the global stage and soon we may see Spotify and T-Series combining to propel Indian music into a similar position. The standard response by Western labels has been to slap their artists onto collaborations with Latin artists. The bigger issue to understand, however, is that something that looks like a global trend may not be a global trend at all but is simply reflecting the size of a regional fanbase. The old music business saw English-speaking artists as the global superstars. The future will see global fandom fragmented with much more regional diversity. The rise of indigenous rap scenes in Germany, France and the Netherlands illustrates that streaming enables local cultural movements to steal local mainstream success away from global artist brands.
8. Post-album creativity: Half a decade ago most new artists still wanted to make albums. Now, new streaming-era artists increasingly do not want to be constrained by the album format, but instead want to release steady streams of tracks in order to keep their fan bases engaged. The album is still important for established artists but will diminish in importance for the next generation of musicians.
9. Post-album economics: Labels will have to accelerate their shift to post-album economics, figuring out how to drive margin with more fragmented revenue despite having to invest similar amounts of money into marketing and building artist profiles.
10. The search for another format: In 1999 the recorded music business was booming, relying on a long established, successful format that did not have a successor. 20 years on, we are in a similar place with streaming. The days of true format shifts are gone due to the fact we don’t have dedicated format-specific music hardware anymore. However, the case for new commercial models and user experiences is clear. Outside of China, depressingly little has changed in terms of digital music experiences over the last decade. Even playlist innovation has stalled. One potential direction is social music. Streaming has monetized consumption; now we need to monetize fandom.

How YouTube’s 1bn+ Club is Changing the Face of Global Music Culture

Throughout 2018, while locked in a bitter war of words with rightsholders and creators over Article 13, YouTube quietly but dramatically expanded its role as the most powerful platform for creating global superstars. Nowhere is this better illustrated than with the YouTube music videos that have one billion streams or more. Not only did that number become bigger than ever in 2018, but the rate at which videos joined the 1bn+ club grew too. With music audiences fragmenting into algorithmically defined niches, YouTube continues to create truly global scale, mass market audiences.

As of Q1 2019, 139 music videos have joined the 1bn+ club, with a record 52 of those reaching one billion in 2018 alone. Not only are more YouTube videos joining the 1bn+ club, but they are getting there faster. On average, the 1bn+ videos released in 2018 got to that milestone ten times faster than those released at the start of the decade. But something very interesting is happening. Now that Latin America and US Hispanics are becoming a major constituency of the YouTube audience, Latin music videos are becoming the dominant part of the 1bn+ club. 63% of all 2018 videos that reached one billion streams were Latin music videos. YouTube is fast establishing itself as the consumption method of choice for Latin American audiences, and their listening behaviour is helping reshape the face of global music culture. In doing so, YouTube is helping to create a new generation of superstars – Latin superstars.

The artist with more 1bn+ videos than any other is Puerta Rican reggaetón and Latin trap artist Ozuna. He appears, either as the lead artist or as a featured artist, on eight, yes eight, videos with a billion streams or more, generating 10.1 billion streams to date. Although Anglo-centric artists fill three of the other top five spots, the tide is turning. In 2018 Latin 1bn+ videos generated three and a half times as many streams as Anglo-centric pop 1bn+ videos did.

There is another important, less obvious implication of the rise of Latin artists on YouTube. Latin America is now such a large part of the global streaming user base that it can generate hits that look global in scale, but in reality are only regional. India will start to do the same in 2019 and 2020. Record labels need to take a more nuanced approach to reading global-scale data trends. Just because a track breaks into Spotify’s Global 100 does not mean it is a global hit. In today’s world, global scale does not always mean global appeal.

Hip Hop, a tale of two streams

On audio streaming services Hip Hop is the ubiquitous genre, with its artists among the highest profile in the music industry. Spotify’s top three most streamed tracks of 2018 were all Hip Hop, while for Apple Music it made up the entire top seven. Among YouTube’s biggest tracks, however, Hip Hop is a minor player, with just 7% of 1bn+ videos. Demographics and geography play roles, but so do the respective relationships of the platforms with the major labels. The labels have more overall influence on Spotify and Apple Music’s programming, and additionally focus intense efforts on influencing their curated playlists (Spotify especially). Because Hip Hop is the priority genre for the major labels, all of whom have a strong US-centric worldview, Apple Music and Spotify end up with a strong Hip Hop skew. YouTube, however, is much less directly influenced by the record labels and relies on algorithms rather than programming to surface content for its users. YouTube’s genre mix thus more closely follows the tastes of its users, while Apple and Spotify’s more closely follow the priorities of the labels.

So, what does the rise of Latin artists and the under-performance of Hip Hop on YouTube say about today’s global music landscape? For me, it is this:

Anglo-centric artists have been the global superstars for decades because it took the marketing dollars of big, global record labels to make them. Now, large scale, regional audiences can have the same impact, by just listening.

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This post highlights just some of the data and findings that are going to be revealed in our forthcoming report: 1bn+ Music Videos: Latin Takeover

 If you are a MIDiA client and would like to get early access to the data email enquiries@midiaresearch.com

 If you want to learn more about how to become a MIDiA client, email stephen@midiaresearch.com

Despacito Is About To Hit 4 Billion YouTube Views

­­In January Despacito became the second fastest music video in YouTube history to hit one billion views, taking just 97 days to do so. Now it is on track to hit four billion. In January Despacito was part of a succession of new music video consumption records that YouTube and Vevo are setting. YouTube music video views are on the rise, dramatically so, driven both by more users (YouTube announced 1.5 billion signed in active users) and deeper engagement. This is YouTube’s music renaissance and the record labels (their marketing divisions at least) are loving the increased exposure their artists are receiving. At first glance this might not appear to make much sense, given that: a) video streaming growth is outpaced by audio streaming in key markets such as the US and UK, and b) that the whole value gap-grab debate is as far from a resolution as it has ever been. Then, along comes Despacito to drive yet another bulldozer through everything, breaking all the rules again.

The days of one billion streams being considered exceptional are fast disappearing. Despacito added one billion streams in July alone. Just as Spotify spent 2015 and 2016 continually rewriting the rules each quarter, now YouTube is doing the same in 2017. Spotify, of course, is also having a spectacular year but it has established a steadier pace of change, especially in developed markets. Spotify is the new normal (until it’s not again). YouTube had its ‘normal’ but now the acceleration of usage, particularly from Latin America, is making the previously accepted reference points irrelevant.

Moreover, Latin American driven streams might actually intensify the value gap-grab debate. In 2016 YouTube delivered a monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) of $0.07 to the labels. In contrast, Spotify delivered a monthly ad supported user ARPU of $0.34. On paper YouTube has a lot of ground to make up, but things are a little more complex than that. YouTube pays out a share of ad revenue to rights holders. So, if revenues go down the amount it pays goes down by the same rate. Spotify (at risk of simplifying excessively) pays out on a per stream basis. So, if revenues go down, Spotify still pays a certain amount.

This is where Latin America comes in. The local video advertising markets throughout Latin America are much less developed than in the US and, additionally, there is much less advertiser demand. Compared to the US, there are fewer advertisers with less money to spend on consumers, who also spend less money. This means that advertiser demand massively outstrips supply, which suggests that ad prices are lower. So, as Latin American YouTube music consumption grows, effective per stream rates will decline. In our MIDiA’s 2017 Predictions Report, 2016, we predicted that this would happen.

“In 2017, audience behaviour will continue to grow faster than advertiser budgets, meaning that CPMs (and in the case of YouTube, effective per stream rates for music) will fall.”

YouTube and the music industry are unlikely to truly see eye to eye, but value gap or no value gap, we are now at a decision point. The accelerating role of Latin America and other emerging markets in YouTube consumption will see more and more records broken, with bigger and bigger hits made, but the gap between consumption and revenue will widen. So the music industry needs to decide what it really wants YouTube to be for the next few years: promotion or revenue. Trying to make it do both well will most likely result in YouTube doing neither of them properly.

YouTube And Latin America Are Taking Over The World

Unless you have been on Mars for the last couple of days you will have seen the news that Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ has become the most streamed track in history with 4.6 billion streams. The figure includes a couple of versions of the track (ie the one include a certain Justin Bieber) but is an impressive tally nonetheless. The landmark raises 2 key trends:

1. The role of the Latin American market
2. The role of streaming

Latin Takeover

On the first point, Latin America is becoming a streaming powerhouse. This is a trend we have long anticipated at MIDiA and it is why we have a Latin American analyst (Leo Morel in Brazil) and have been fielding consumer surveys in the region since we launched the company. ‘Despacito’ is not an isolated event. For example, Shakira’s ‘Chantaje’ became the first Latin American Spanish language track to reach 1 billion views earlier this year. But Latin America’s contribution to streaming is uneven. It accounts for 17% of all subscribers globally but 27% of all streaming video users. Indeed, Brazil and Mexico are Vevo’s 2^nd and 3^rd largest markets globally, after only the US. The socio-economic realities of Latin America mean that it will always over index towards free streaming compared to European and North American markets. But the streaming appetite is clear. With such large streaming appetite, expect Latin American audiences to increasingly shape future hits. Once enough Latin American fans get behind a track the snowball effect kicks in: once in Spotify’s global streaming chart it then finds its way into curated playlists and then volumes grow even faster. A similar effect is felt as the momentum kicks YouTube’s and Vevo’s algorithms into gear. But because the region skews towards YouTube and Vevo the regional revenue impact under indexes. Thus we have an emerging dynamic where Latin American audiences create the hits and European and North American audiences pay for them. This is the new normal.

Just as important as the rise of Latin America, is the continued rise of YouTube. Value Gap or no Value Gap, YouTube’s role in breaking and making hits is clear. More so, it is becoming more pronounced. YouTube streaming growth might be slowing in the US but the same does not necessarily apply globally. Indeed, taking the time it takes for YouTube / Vevo music videos to reach 1 billion views we can see that the 2017 hits ‘Despacito’ and ‘Shape Of You’ got there 40% faster than the average for tracks from 2016, 2015 and 2012. Only Adele’s 2015 hit ‘Hello’ got there faster, and that was a highly anticipated event that is a unique case.

 

YouTube added 500 million users between 2012 and 2017. That is no mean feat but nor is it stellar growth. Over the same period Facebook added more than 1 billion users and WhatsApp came from next to zero to 1.2 billion. YouTube is a mature platform and so growth is not just measured in terms of users but also in terms of engagement, especially streams per user. And this is where YouTube really seems to be delivering. A way of relating the growth of 1 billion view music videos to the total user base is dividing the average number of monthly views each video had en route to 1 billion and dividing that by the total number of YouTube users. In 2012 this figure was 0.19, by 2017 it had fallen to 0.17. Thus, for the 1 billion club, more YouTube users are streaming these songs more times. Growth is coming both from audience and activity.

 

There are other mitigating factors. For example it is conceivable that YouTube and Vevo are simply becoming better at creating mega hits, concentrating the audience around big hits. Thus making YouTube/Vevo more of a superstar economy. Vevo’s recommendation algorithms and YouTube’s autoplay feature play a role too, contributing to more streams. The autoplay was negotiated, along with full albums, from the labels as part of YouTube’s Music Key service. A service that never even made it out of beta, but YouTube of course held onto the good parts of that deal. Spotify, that is how you do digital deals!

 

The fact that streaming records are now being broken with such regularity shows that we have arrived at a tipping point. Streaming is transitioning from fast growing digital revenue stream, to the centre of an entirely new business. As impressive as ‘Despacito’s numbers are, get used to these sorts of records being made and broken on a regular basis. And get used to Latin America and YouTube playing an ever bigger role.

 

Streaming’s First Steps into 2014

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

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

Digital Colonialism

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

Super Cheap Flat Rate Access

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

Scale Does Not Impact Everyone in the Same Way

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

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