Abbey Road 50 Years On: The Two Worlds of Music Listening

Half a century after it first after it first topped the charts, the Beatles’ Abbey Road is back at the summit of the UK charts. With the anniversary editions retailing for between $20 and $100, the impact on Universal Music’s revenue will be even more pronounced than the chart position, as we saw with the deluxe editions of the White Album (which had editions priced up to $145) helping the Beatles become the fourth-biggest UMG artist in revenue terms in 2018. The continued success of the Beatles tells us three main things:

1. The band has enduring appeal in a way few bands have so long after their demise
2. Universal is doing a fantastic job of managing the legacy of the Beatles with smart and effective catalogue marketing and product strategy
3. Older, physical-focused music fans remain the quickest route to high-value, large-scale revenue

It is this last point that is going to be explored here.

Streaming is not yet everything, by a long stretch

While streaming is well established, it is still a minority activity (i.e. less than half of the population streams – the rate is even lower when you factor in emerging market regions such as sub-Saharan Africa). Most of you reading this will have been streaming for many years now, so this may sound a bit crazy, but we all live in our own filter bubbles, surrounded by people with similar world views and behaviours. The reality is that we are still in a transition period where the old and the new coexist. This dual-reality paradigm underpins the Beatles’ continued success.

 

Looking at data from MIDiA’s forthcoming artist insight platform Index, we can see that the top 15 biggest audiences ranked by overall listening is significantly different from the top 15 streaming audiences. The differences become far more pronounced as we work our way down the rankings. Mass market linear media (especially TV and radio) used to be the only way in which record labels turned artists into mainstream brands. The biggest artists of today (in fact all of the artists in both of the top 15 rankings) built their fanbases sitting on the shoulders of big, traditional media. Big media of course still plays a crucial role – as illustrated by the fact that the top five most-listened to artists have all recently been in major movies. In fact, movies are emerging as the mass medium that can still create globally relevant cultural moments in the way that radio and TV used to.

Niche is the new mainstream

Now though, newer artists are building their fanbases outside of traditional media, using digital marketing channels to laser-target specific audiences rather than the traditional carpet-bombing approach. As a consequence, when we look at the top 15 most-streamed artists based on those audiences that actually know the artist we see a totally different picture with artists like Post Malone, Martin Garrix and Bille Eilish among the top performing. These are still-big artists; artists that have found global niches with genuine scale, but niches nonetheless. This is the era of fragmented fandom. Niche is the new mainstream.

The first global pop band, perhaps

The Beatles were arguably the first big, global pop band – I say ‘arguably’ because there are many other claimants to that title, but whether they were first, or among the first, they helped create the template for artist success that shaped the modern recorded music industry. Now, as part of our cultural history they have an additional emphasis. The film ‘Yesterday’ will have introduced new audiences to the Beatles’ music, as will the hype around the return of Abbey Road. However, the majority of Beatles fans are old (59% are aged over 45) with an average age of 46. This aligns with average age of consumers that still buy CDs and that still listen to albums.

This does not mean that young people are not listening to the Beatles also (and on streaming they skew younger), also even with an average age of 45 this means that a large portion of the core fanbase are not from the Beatles’ original generation.

However, it is a very different demographic from Spotify users (average age 34) and, for example, Billie Eilish fans (29). Beatles fans skew towards older consumers that are more likely to buy and listen to physical albums.

For all the chart modifications, actual album sales still have key impact

 With all of the reformatting of charts to recognise streams, album sales still carry much more weight, because:

1. A lot of streams are needed to be equivalent to an album (1,500 in the UK, 1,250 paid streams or 3,750 ad-supported streams in the US)
2. Newer, streaming-centric artists tend to be track artists rather than album artists, and tend to have a larger share of ad-supported listeners, so it is harder for them to top album charts

When a once in a generation event like Abbey Road at 50 comes along, and the older, CD and vinyl buying audience comes out in force, you do not need too many of them to create a chart-topping album. As I illustrated in my post on the White Album, 75,000 sales of a $100 deluxe edition can generate the same label income as more than 60 million streams – though how much Universal actually retains of that due to its commercial relationships with the band and its estates is another issue entirely.

The key takeaway from Abbey Road at 50 is that we still have a long, long way to go on the streaming journey. In fact, you might say it is ‘the long and winding road’.

Television Performance Measurement Is Falling Short

TV measurement needs a new measurement currency for the streaming era. At MIDiA we’ve spent the last year working on a solution: MIDiA Index. So excited to be able to share news of it with you. Let me know your thoughts.

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

When the television first entered homes around the world, it was a safe assumption that if it was on it was the centre of attention in a room. Whatever was broadcast to the screen for that evening would be closely regarded with well-deserved awe. The household TV set could depend upon its audience.

Today, however, it is no longer sufficient to assume that a) there is a TV set, b) anyone is watching it and c) what is on it is even being paid attention to. Yet the traditional measurement metrics that the industry still relies upon fail to reflect these distinctions. With multitudinous offerings, attention economy oversaturation, and smartphones and laptops more pervasive than TVs, the difference between a television playing idly in the background and a show holding millions in rapture is more critical than ever. It is no longer enough to measure by simply looking at what’s being played on a screen, whatever screen it is you are measuring. Instead, measurement needs to go beyond this to understand what’s being actively watched, how, and what sort of brand impact it is having.

Of course, innovators have entered the marketplace with attempted solutions to the pitfalls of traditional tracking in a modern world; social media stats and public demonstrations of sentiment are the first steps in bridging the gap. Nevertheless, we can do better. And, as a matter of fact, at MIDiA Research we have done exactly that.

Our proposition: a single dashboard for shows that pulls every metric you need into one place underpinned by a new currency for audience measurement. We call it MIDiA Index. Index gives you dashboards for all the shows you need to track, comprising demographics, viewing metrics, streaming metrics, social activity, show fandom, brand awareness, audience demand, and market share – including trends over time, in different regions, and across networks and streaming services – with all of the information literally at your fingertips to peruse and act on. MIDiA’s Index combines streaming data, social data, and our own proprietary survey data and market models, putting together a complete picture of show performance. MIDiA then applies a sophisticated series of algorithms to these inputs to create an overall MIDiA Index score, our measurement benchmark that we believe can become a future currency for measurement; a way of immediately understanding the combined engagement, fandom, demand and brand impact that transcends platforms and devices, digital and analogue. Looking at shows from all of these angles, trends that would otherwise be missed, instead come to the fore.

Whether you are a TV network tracking your own shows in comparison to other networks, a TV operator looking to benchmark the real value of the shows you have licensed or an advertiser wanting to get a much better sense of which audience your brand should be targeting, our goal is to help you understand the true value and impact of a TV show in the digital era. Our aim is to help our clients to understand not just the face value of a show’s relative success, but how it has been performing, why, and what the ongoing opportunities are.

If you’re still curious just get in touch with Tommy King. We’re in our final weeks of testing and getting ready to take Index on its public debut. Let’s start the conversation now.