Exclusive COVID-19 Research Package for Independent Entertainment Companies

During these unprecedented times, the entertainment industries are experiencing rapid change and have been forced to adapt accordingly – from the near collapse of live entertainment, through the cessation of filming and recording, to the surge in home entertainment consumption. This is a period of huge uncertainty for everyone, from both a personal and a business perspective. At the same time, though, lockdown measures have turned the majority of consumers into captive audiences for entertainment. The content companies that survive the pandemic’s socio-economic dislocation – some will even thrive – will be those who best understand where and how to allocate their resources. For smaller companies with limited resources, such decisions can be ‘make or break’ at the best of times, let alone during COVID-19.

This is why MIDiA has put together a special, heavily discounted research package for small- to mid-sized independent entertainment companies to help them with commercial and marketing strategy during this challenging time. This exclusive offer has been designed specifically for independent labels, publishers, talent agencies, TV / film production companies, games publishers, sports agencies and any other small, independent company focused on the entertainment sectors.

MIDiA’s main subscriptions have a 12 month duration, but we appreciate that few smaller companies can afford to take on a long-term commitment right now, so we have created a discounted three month package for small- to mid-sized entertainment companies. Included in this package are three months’ access to:

• MIDiA’s COVID-19 research vertical
• One research vertical (chose from Music, Video, Games, Sports)
• The Media and Marketing vertical
• Access to Fuse, MIDiA’s proprietary data platform

Access covers both new reports and all previously published reports and data in the respective coverage areas.

Our COVID-19 vertical is unsurprisingly a brand-new service but already has three reports – and we’ll be publishing one or two new COVID-19 reports every month throughout the worst of the pandemic. This research deep dives into the near- and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on entertainment businesses and includes industry analysis, consumer insight and market models. To get a better feel for our COVID-19 coverage, take a look at the shorter, free version of our first COVID-19 report here.

The price for all of this is £3,500 ($4,300).

If you are a small- to mid-sized independent entertainment company and would like to learn more about this special package, then email one of our team:

stephen@midiaresearch.com (music companies)

colette@midiaresearch.com (video, games and sports companies)

State of the Streaming Nation 3.0: Multi-Paced Growth

Regular followers of MIDiA will know that one of our flagship releases is our State of the Streaming Nation report. Now into its third year, this report is the definitive assessment of the streaming music market. Featuring 16 data charts, 37 pages and 5,700 words, this year’s edition of the State of the Streaming Nation covers everything from user behaviour, weekly active users of the leading streaming apps, willingness to pay, adoption drivers, revenues, forecasts, subscriber market shares, label market shares, tenure and playlist usage. The consumer data covers the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria and the UK, while the market data and forecasts cover 35 markets. The report includes the report PDF, a full Powerpoint deck and a six sheet Excel file with more than 23,000 data points. This really is everything you need to know about the global streaming market.

The report is immediately available to MIDiA clients and is also now available for purchase from our report store here. And – for a very limited-time offer, until midnight 31^stJuly (i.e. Wednesday) the report is discounted by 50% to £2,500. This is a strictly time-limited offer, with the price returning to the standard £5,000 on Thursday.

Below are some details of the report.

The 20,000 Foot View: 2018 was yet another strong year for streaming music growth, with the leading streaming services consolidating their market shares. Consumer adoption continues to grow but as leading markets mature, future growth will depend upon mid-tier markets and later on emerging markets. Disruption continues to echo throughout the market with artists direct making up ground and Spotify spreading its strategic wings. Utilising proprietary supply- and demand-side data, this third edition of MIDiA’s State of the Streaming Nation pulls together all the must-have data on the global streaming market to give you the definitive picture of where streaming is.

Key findings: 

THE MARKET

• Streaming revenue was up $X billion on 2017 to reach $X billion in 2018 in label trade, representing X% of total recorded music market growth
• Universal Music consolidated its market-leading role with $X billion, representing X% of all streaming revenue
• There were X million music subscribers globally in Q4 2018 with Spotify, Apple and Amazon accounting for X% of all subscribers, up from X% in Q4 2015
• With X% weekly active user (WAU) penetration YouTube dominates streaming audiences, representing X% of all of the WAU music audiences surveyed

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

• X% of consumers stream music for free, peaking at X% in South Korea and dropping to just X% in Japan
• X% of consumers are music subscribers, peaking in developed streaming markets Sweden (X%) and South Korea (X%)
• Free streaming penetration is high among those aged 16-19 (X%), 20-24 (X%) and 25-34 (X%) while among those aged 55+ penetration is just X%
• Podcast penetration is X% with pronounced country-level variation, ranging from just X% in Austria to X% in Sweden

ADOPTION

• 61% of music subscribers report having become subscribers either via a free trial or a $1 for three months paid trial
• Costing less than $X is the most-cited adoption driver for music subscriptions at X%
• Today’s Top Hits and the Global Top 50 claim the joint top spot for Spotify playlists among users, both X%
• As of Q1 2019 there were X YouTube music videos viewed one billion-plus times, of which X were two billion-plus view videos and X were three billion-plus

OUTLOOK

• In retail terms global streaming music revenues were $X billion in 2018 in retail terms, up X% on 2017, and will grow to $X billion in 2026
• There were X million music subscribers in 2018, up from X million in 2017 with Xmillion individual subscriptions

Companies and brands mentioned in this report: Alexa, Amazon Music Unlimited, Amazon Prime Music, Anchor, Anghami, Apple, Apple Music, Beats One, CDBaby, Deezer, Deezer Flow, Echo, Gimlet, Google, Google Play Music, KuGou, Kuwo, Loudr, MelOn, Napster, Netflix, Pandora, Parcast, QQ Music, RapCaviar, Rock Classics, Rock This, Sony Music, Soundcloud, SoundTrap, Spotify, Tencent Music Entertainment, Tidal, Today’s Top Hits, T-Series, Tunecore, Universal Music, Warner Music, YouTube

The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming-native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via the traditional music marketing. Instead of blowing a huge budget on carpet bombing TV, radio, print, online artists and their teams are finding their exact audiences, focusing on relevance and engagement rather than reach and scale.

The traditional model is great at creating household brands but so much of that brand impact is wasted on the households or household members that are not interested in the artist. Niche is the new mainstream. Targeted trumps reach. But too many label marketers fear that unless they use the mass media platforms, they will not be able to build national and global scale brands. They might be right, at least in part, but this is how the future will look and new marketing disciplines and objectives are required. Here’s some brand new data to show why.

Since Q4 2016 MIDiA has been tracking leading TV shows every quarter for awareness, fandom, viewing and streaming. Since the start of 2019 we have been doing the same for artists, with viewing swapped out for listening. These metrics provide a rounded picture of an artist’s full brand impact and consumption, while the ratios between these metrics give a unique view of just how individual artists are performing and of the impact of their respective marketing strategies. Later in the year we will be feeding this data into Index for Music,a unique new dashboard tool to combine with data from social platforms, streaming, searches, reviews and other metrics that create an end-to-end view of artist impact. We have already built our Index for Video tool which you can find out more about here.

In the above chart, using the consumer data component of Index, we have taken a contiguous sample of the five artists that represent the mid-point of each third of the rankings (i.e. top, middle and bottom) for two of these ratios:

• Fandom-to-streaming, which we call Streaming Conversion
• Awareness-to-fandom, which we call Brand Conversion

The results show some very clear artist clusters with clear implications for artist success and marketing strategy (remember, these are ratios not rankings of how well streamed or popular they are):

Streaming Conversion

• Rising streaming stars: These artists have twice as many people streaming them as they do fans. These artists are largely younger, frontline artists that are building their careers first and foremost on streaming platforms. These are artists that have not yet built their fanbases but are being pushed hard by their labels on streaming and elsewhere. Their listening is being driven by promotional activity. Pusha-T is the exception, a much longer established artist.
• Established artists: These artists are largely well-established artists whose streaming audience penetration correlates with their fanbases. Their listening is largely organic. Dua Lipa is the exception, still relatively early in her career but already with an established fanbase driving organic streaming.
• Low-streamed superstars: These are artists that built their careers in the pre-streaming era and while are household names, have streaming audiences smaller than their fanbases, not having managed to migrate large shares of their audiences to streaming

 

Brand Conversion

• Heritage superstars: The majority of people who know these big heritage acts like them. In some ways brand conversion is an easier task for such artists than frontline artists. As they have been around so long, it tends to be the very bests of their catalogue that people know. The fact Queen outranks the Beatles is testament to the way in which the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has created new relevance for the band.
• Big brand artists:This eclectic mix of artists are – Julia Michaels excepted – well established artists that have benefited from years of label marketing support, with about half of all people that know them liking them.
• Over-extended brands: One of the most important changes wrought by streaming and social is that fanbases no longer need to be built via mass media. However, big artists, especially major label ones, still rely upon mass media to become global stars. The result is a lot of wasted marketing budget. In this group, which is dominated by Hip Hop artists, more than half of the people who have been made aware of the artists do not like them. The marketing dollars spent on reaching those people has not converted.

We will be diving much deeper into this data in a forthcoming MIDiA client report and also at our next free-to-attend (depose required) event in central London: Managing Fandom in a Fragmented Content Landscape. Join us at the event to get a sneak peak of MIDiA’s artist data and our Index tool. All attendees will get a free copy of the presentation. In addition to the data key note there is a panel featuring people from Kobalt, TikTok, ATC and more to be confirmed. Sign up now, only limited places remain!

See you there!

The Classical Music Market: Streaming’s Next Genre?

Classical music has long been viewed by many as a rarified genre that stands apart from other forms of music. While there is clearly something in that, something new is happening to the classical market: streaming is opening up a new, more diverse base of fans. Many of these are finding new entry points to classical music, such as hearing piano concertos on Relaxing Piano playlists. These new audiences bring with them new expectations about what classical music listening should be like and they present a major new opportunity for the classical market.

I am excited to announce the release of a report on the global classical music market that covers this concept and much, much more. MIDiA researched and wrote the report on behalf of classical music streaming service Idagio. (To be clear, this report is an objective and independent analysis of the classical market, not one of those ‘white papers’ that exists to champion the virtues of the client’s proposition.)

With that important caveat out of the way, I strongly recommend you download the full report for free here. It is packed with exclusive new consumer data that presents a unique view of classical music consumers and how they are engaging with streaming. The survey was fielded in the US, UK, Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Germany and South Korea.

A fill list of contents is at the bottom of this post.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the report that helps contextualise why classical music is gaining new relevance in today’s streaming world:

Classical music fans are a crucial music consumer segment that is too often overlooked in the mainstream of the music industry, and especially within the streaming market. However, the clear picture that has emerged in this report is one of a large and diverse group of consumers that include large volumes of mainstream music consumers who are also fans of other genres. The traditional image of Classical fans of only being older, traditionally minded and musically aloof does not stand up to scrutiny. Instead we see a group of people that are increasingly both youthful and digitally savvy, and that have wide tastes that go beyond just Classical music. This though, is not just a reflection of the diversity of these consumers but also of the way in which streaming is helping Classical music find a new, younger generation of fans.

Alongside this, streaming services risk getting locked in a race to the musical middle-ground in order to build the biggest audiences possible, with record labels and producers rushing to fill this overcrowded space with increasingly formulaic playlist-optimized songs. Songs that like fresh fruit are designed for quick, immediate consumption, not for longevity. This vicious circle of song optimization / playlist optimization may be the path of least resistance but it can ultimately lead to an unsatisfying overall music experience. Classical music provides an antidote to the algorithm-defined mainstream, and of the status update driven chaotic maelstrom that is digital life. Now we are starting to see the signs of a new generation of Classical music fans searching for a refreshing, reassuring alternative to the tumult and homogeneity of mainstream.

Go download the free report! (No registration required)

Preparing for the Post-Album Industry

This is a guest post by Keith Jopling, MIDiA’s Consulting Lead. It is a follow-up piece to What’s Next In Playlist Innovation?

Every week I’m still excited to check out the latest album releases. They are the gift that keeps on giving. But that gift feels different these days, more like receiving flowers or chocolate and less like anything you might say is a keepsake.

It’s becoming very rare these days for me to fall in love with an album the way I used to. I miss it, but there it is. Some of this is a conscious trade-off, since I enjoy compiling and curating playlists. But to some extent, it just feelslike I don’t have the time to give (i.e. invest in repeated listens) in the way albums – good ones – truly deserve.

Broader listening trends confirm that this applies to people in general. The penetration of adults that claim to listen to whole albums monthly, stands at just 16% (Q4 ‘18 data from MIDiA, a drop from 22% in the previous quarter), compared with say, 35% listening to music on the phone.

This is self-reported of course. Behavioural data on actual album listening is a patchwork of proxy measures, such as ‘listens (to individual album tracks) from the artist’s album page’ on Spotify. To be fair, we never ever really knew how consumers who bought albums actually listened to them. Survey data I saw a long time ago, before the streaming era kicked-in suggested that some purchased albums were played on average, just over once.

Competing in the attention economy

As the management consultants say, what can’t be measured won’t get done, and so in a world of real-time statistical feedback, why make an album if you cannot know who is listening and how? There is already a creative conversation in the industry about “skip-rate reduction” and one way to achieve this is to front load albums with the catchiest tracks, but where does that leave the art of album sequencing and story-telling?

The album’s competitive pressures go wider than music. In the attention economy, albums compete with Netflix, Fortnite, TikTok and Instagam. In music’s own attention economy, albums compete with singles, playlists, games, podcasts and box sets. And those latter two categories are literally stealing the show. This is unsurprising in the streaming world – a better way of coping with the content waterfall is a ‘consume-once-only’ approach. The idea of spending the same 45 minutes over & over to build up familiarity with a record seems taxing.

Albums are no longer water cooler moments

What seems particularly telling for music, is that ‘Netflix and shows’ is the water cooler conversation now. Pop culture talk is all about what you’ve watched, are watching or should watch, and any similar conversation about listening is conspicuous by its absence. The ‘event album’ seems to be over. Is it just me or do artists seem to want to drop albums with less fuss now anyway? Perhaps the element of surprise (Bowie’s legacy yet again) is smarter than facing the “aftermath of promotion”. But it’s also not without risk given the tonnage of new music flowing through. Coupled with this, some artists are either eschewing the format or at the very least questioning it. If we take the world’s biggest artist right now, Ariana Grande – what role did her album play in the scheme of things?

What choices does this leave labels and artists?

When the CD began to give way to streaming, it’s fair to say the labels embraced it. In some ways, the CDs decline was ushered in rather than managed out. Back around 2012 I was in the room when one label boss took hold of a CD and flung it across the room smashing it into shards. I was impressed if surprised. But are labels taking the same level of aggressive-progressive when it comes to succeeding the album?

I’ve already argued previously that the main format to succeed the album is the playlist, and that there is further innovation to go (also acknowledging Apple’s release regarding a more creative approach top playlist cover art). Meanwhile there is no doubt that the EP has made a comeback, and has become a useful vehicle for new artists to drop a collection of songs as a showcase of their repertoire.

But let’s take a look at some other options:

• (Bring back) Album Exclusives:With some services so favouring the single track, could the labels divide & rule with full album licensing fenced off to other album focused services? Now I know we’ve been there before, and ‘nobody’ liked it much, but things are different now, and platform differentiation is a strategy both labels and platforms need when it comes to content. If some services stepped up in full support of the album, it stands a better chance longer term. A more radical option? Sell full albums exclusively on label-owned streaming services.
• Physical Exclusives (through vinyl):Favouring both the true fan and the artist, perhaps vinyl should become the exclusive way to hear the whole collected work. With traditional vinyl at capacity one innovation I am keeping an eye on is Virylsteam-based manufacture. For artists looking to do something truly different, this is an option. Pre-order, custom versions, pre-sale and merch during tours, and pop-ups, as well as sell-through Amazon, Bandcamp and brick & mortar, the product sale potential is larger than it looks.
• More visual outputs:Universal has doubled-down on video. Apple has doubled-down on video. Video remains huge, and continues to grow in short-form, and now long-form too. TV and theatrical productions are hunting very actively on music’s turf. It’s fascinating but by definition, not the same ubiquity potential of audio formats. Music films can do wonders for song catalogues however, Bohemian Rhapsdoy has proven that.
• Experiment with entirely new formats:Easy to say, harder to do. New platforms such as voice and the car provide options without a doubt. Of course, an option for the producer sector is to do nothing much – simply wait for the technology sector to stumble on the next scaleable format. They are certainly trying, from Spotify’s Canvas moving images, to Pandora’s new Stories format, to Apple’s continued video format innovations such as Up Next. The platforms pitch these formats to artists as much as labels. One problem for labels is keeping up with the tail wagging the dog. Without knowing if the format will last, should they invest and convince artists to make stuff the platforms want? For example, should they make vertical videos just because Spotify wants vertical videos that month, or podcasts because it’s now all about podcasts, until it isn’t?
• Expand into the live sector: Not easy. Wider representation of artists got a bad rap with the ‘360’ degree deals, but yet again, times have changed and a re-evaluation is due. With money coming in from streaming as well as outside investment, labels could buy smaller live promoters and venues.

What does this mean to the artist proposition and label economics?

Okay, so now we are down to the rub. The album is still the format that drives industry economics as a whole. The conversation around the artist proposition (and therefore the deal) has been changing for some years, but still essentially centres on the album as the economic unit. This must surely see more rapid change, to be replaced by agreed song numbers, or simply a time period covering numerous ‘artist projects’. We’ve already seen the first ‘lifetime’ deal between Elton John and Universal.

For the vast majority of artists, revenues are now following a pareto curve, with their ‘top songs’ (between five and ten say) making up a fraction of their catalogue but the large majority of their streaming income. When an established active artist releases a new album, the impact is often on those jewels in the crown more than the new collection, and if one or two songs make it into the crown, then bingo! The project pays off. The goal of any artist project is to get another jewel in the crown, but is an album the critical vessel to achieve that goal?

Perhaps the golden rule here is that the one size fits all model is becoming unfit for purpose. We’re already seeing some innovation, especially from Hip Hop artists like Migos, Drake and Kanye, but this trickle needs to turn into a flood. We’re getting to the time for ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’.

The last days of All Killer No Filler?

I still use my primary source of the past 20 years to find new records, The Guardian G2 and Pitchfork. I can’t find any new albums via Spotify’s personalised feeds, because that’s mostly now just ‘for me’, or singles. Apple Music does a better job of presenting new release albums, and I guess both the streaming rivals are serving their own listener base appropriately.

Despite everything you read above, I feel the album will endure. The digital streaming age is a challenge to artists to make better albums, the ‘all killer no filler’ approach. The album as a canvas still feels relevant for some artists, but only some.

The album is already a niche in consumption terms, unmeasurable in streaming terms, but still the essential deliverable in the deal. That’s out of step, and those labels and artists with one eye on the mid-term future will already be planning for what the game looks like going forward. It’s what Reed Hastings calls “constantly worrying about what’s next” and it’s worked for him so far.

We don’t just write it. For a ‘post album world’ conversation with Keith & Mark contact us at MIDiA. We’ve already been helping labels, artists and managers rethink the album, drop us a line at info@midiaresearch.comto see how we could work with you.

 

What’s Next For Playlist Innovation?

This is a guest post from MIDiA Research’s Keith Jopling.

In this era of access to all music and everything about it, I do enjoy reading artist interviews, and pay attention to artists’ views on the modern music industry. What caught me recently were Mark Ronson’s remarks on songwriting in the age of the playlist in The Guardian:

“Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way through the whole fucking song or you don’t stand a chance. It’s kind of crazy how you have to think about music now.”

I have heard similar views from artists in recent years and they do have grounds, though you’ll be hard pressed to prove that streaming and playlists have truly altered music per se. After all how would that equate with the huge success of ‘slow music’ playlists, from Peaceful Piano to Esquenta Sertanejo to Your Favourite Coffeehouse?

There has certainly been an industry skew towards ‘streaming hits’ though. More artists are making “Spotify-core” (i.e. music that will do anything to avoid being skipped) and that’s a genre perhaps lacking in subtlety, But can it be accused of crowding out other, subtler types of music?

I would argue that playlists have changed the way we listen more than they have changed music itself. If the first port-of-call for music consumers is to hear songs on playlists, a lot of context around the music is lost. Already, research has shown that listeners are hard pushed to recall song titles, let alone the albums those songs are taken from. Speaking of albums, it strikes me as high time the industry now evaluate just what a ‘post-album’ world will look and sound like. So perhaps somewhere to start is to think about more innovation with the format that in essence, has replaced the album – playlists.  

Are playlists now set in stone as 30-50 tracks that are forever subject to optimisation tools and analytics? I very much doubt it. Despite playlists becoming valuable commercial music real estate in their current form (at least on Spotify) it seems to me that there is plenty of scope for further creative development of the format. We are far from ‘peak playlist’. A glance at the latest MIDiA global consumer data for Q4 2018 would back this up, with just 17% of music streamers claiming to listen to playlists regularly. though that number nearly doubles for Spotify subscribers to 31%. Critical mass for Spotify but hardly mass behaviour for the market overall.

That said, playlists do greatly reflect the way consumers interact with music: compiling or selecting, listening and sharing, sometimes adding context along the way. The opportunities these behaviours offer as a vehicle for promoting and monetizing artists are immense and perhaps still largely untapped, especially with regard to contextualization of new talent, as well as the creative resurfacing of songs from within music catalogues too.

A slowdown in playlist innovation

Spotify came to be the platform that really owns the playlist format, and it achieved this through a breakneck period of innovation between July 2015 and September 2016, with curated playlists brands like Rap Caviar and Today’s Top Hits augmented with the personalised “made for you” power triangle of Discovery Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix.

But since then, in over two years there has been little of that same calibre, other than somewhat lighter initiatives such as “Your Time Capsule”. More recently, Spotify has begun to fuse some curated playlists together with algorithmic suggestions (‘algotorial’). The strategy to personalise more playlists not only makes it harder for its competitors to copy, but introduces many more song slots for direct or independent artists to fill. The strategy is smart but perhaps lacks imagination.

Playlist Innovation Timeline: There has been a slowdown following 18 months of blistering innovation led by Spotify between July ‘15 and September ‘16.

Despite this, remarkably none of the major streaming competitors have made moves to innovate in the playlist space either, which seems a shame when streaming services are desperate for differentiation strategies. Instead, Amazon, Apple and Deezer seem to have largely played a game of follow the leader, with similar playlists themes, visual presentation and even ever blander names. In recent days Pandora has launched something called Stories, a mesh of podcast + playlist, which seems not only to lack imagination but to be muddled. Isn’t that just a tweak on radio?

Many artists and labels are concerned about the power that services have with regard to playlisting. While getting tracks on to the current raft of major playlist properties represents a challenge for A&R and marketers the music industry, the more accessible platform-hosted independent curated playlist have been around since Napster.

There are few, if any, limits to the potential reach of these playlists, and their value is determined in part by how creative they are, and in part how shareable they are. The recording industry’s earlier efforts to build playlists or influence playlists have fallen short though lack of imagination, global thinking, context and shareability, but that just means that the industry is free to work more creatively with the wider playlist community. It surprises me that Spotify, which plays host to independent curators still (and hopefully will continue to) doesn’t do more to tend to the community. But this perhaps creates room for others to do so.

Personally, I can see new exciting playlist platform tools like Soundsgood helping global playlist curators reach audiences more easily, providing many more opportunities for artists, labels and creators in the process. Other platforms like Stationhead and Lost are doing interesting things too with curators and tracks, but perhaps could get more traction if they switched focus to playlists?

Bringing back context

I like playlists as much as the next music fan, but like Mark Ronson and many other artists and music fans, I also feel they have commodified music somewhat. One thing I would like to see much more of for playlists is context. Why can’t we have sleeve notes for playlists about how they were put together (let alone by whom and why?). It looks to me like there is an opportunity to bring some context and personality back into playlisting. Mixtapes from the cassette age were lovingly compiled, often with handwritten notes and homemade cover art.

I’ve played with some of these ideas with my own playlist site the Song Sommelier. The Song Sommelier was created as a passion project to bring mixtape and vinyl values back to playlisting. Each playlist is accompanied by bespoke artwork by ‘resident’ artist Mick Clarke, and a reader or ‘digital sleeve notes’ by the playlist curator. For this project we chose to use the Soundsgood player to allow users of any streaming service access the playlists, doing away with those widgets that direct the music fan to either Spotify or Apple. It’s still more than a two horse race after all.

My hope is that with the artwork, sleeve notes and more original themes for the playlists, will make fans and listeners listen to playlists more like they used to with albums – paying more attention and hopefully connecting with the song collection on a deeper level. At least that might make Mark Ronson cheer up a bit (though his new “Club Heartbreak” playlist on Apple Music suggests it might be a while).

Perhaps a key question is how important is context to the music itself? It depends on your point of view, but context may be the thing that divides the passionate music fan from the casual one. Really, who wants to listen to a collection called “Get Home Happy” or “Prime Chill”, whether it’s curated or personalised? Except I guess some people do. Mostly, I would welcome some more creative thinking and innovation that can take playlists to another level.

MIDiA Research Welcomes Veteran Telco Analyst Paolo Pescatore To Team

I am very pleased to announce that seasoned and respected analyst Paolo Pescatore is joining MIDiA’s analyst team, to head up our new Telco Consumer Services research stream. Paolo has spent the last 20 years covering telecoms, media and technology (TMT) research and advising leading telcos and technology companies at the c-suite on topics such as convergence, content bundles and consumer services.

As the digital content marketplaces pick up pace, media companies, streaming services and other content providers are increasingly looking for new ways to reach otherwise elusive consumers. Telco content bundles are becoming a more important focus than ever before. Meanwhile, telcos are looking to how they can add value in marketplaces where they often risk being marginalised by OTT services and content providers going direct-to-consumer.

MIDiA’s new Telco Consumer Services research coverage will provide unrivalled insight and analysis into the space, combining Paolo’s leading expertise with MIDiA’s consumer and market datasets.

This is what Paolo has to say on his coverage and on joining MIDiA:

“We are witnessing major change in the technology, media and telecoms marketplace. Consumers’ insatiable appetite for connectivity and content is showing no signs of easing up. The rollout of 5G along with fibre and cable, points towards a future driven by convergence underpinned by content. Further disruption lies ahead, given the need for more vertical integration.

“I’m delighted to have joined MIDiA, which has a wealth of proprietary consumer data. This combined with analyst insight and strategic advice allows clients to better understand the opportunities that lie ahead. I look forward to working closely with my new colleagues at MIDiA who have already firmly established themselves as the go to analysts in content and media.”

Paolo has previously held analyst roles at CCS Insight, IDC and Ovum.

You can read Paolo’s first MIDiA blog here.

If you are interested in learning more about MIDiA’s Telco Consumer Services coverage email Arevinth Sarma at arevinth@midiaresearch.com

Making Free Pay: Finetuning Freemium

Streaming is transforming music and TV business models, driving growth in both audiences and revenue. A balance between free and paid tiers and services has been key to this success, but, growth is not always balanced, and as we approach maturity in many western markets, more may be needed of free, ad supported options. Likewise, for unlocking longer-term, larger-scale growth in emerging markets.

We know these issues matter, but we also know it can be hard to plan for the next phase when there is so much activity and resource requirement being delivered by the current phase. Therefore, to help media companies and streaming services alike, we have put together a curated insight event to provide the definitive evidence base for setting the balance between free and paid.

Join us for this free event, to see exclusive, previously unseen MIDiA data presented by our Research Director Tim Mulligan and a panel of industry experts tackle the burning questions. This event will help you understand:

• Just how big will streaming music and video advertising get?
• What is the right balance to strike between free and paid?
• How will this balance vary across different regions across the globe?
• How many more consumers will make the path from free to paid?
• Why are streaming audiences so interesting to advertisers and how can they reach them?
• What impact will the tech majors’ domination of global ad revenues have on streaming services?

The event is free to attend, and will be in central London on the 17^thOctober. Places are limited though and going fast, so be sure to sign up soon if you plan to come.

As a sneak peak, here is one snippet from Tim’s presentation:

TV and music have a long history in ad supported via broadcast TV and radio. Both also have had the opportunity to convert an unprecedented volume of consumers to subscription relationships through streaming. The focus right now is all on subscriber growth, but the flatten out phase of the s-curve will come and when it does, ad supported can, and should, pick up the baton and run with it. The challenge is how to do that without unravelling subscription revenue.

Both music and video will follow a similarly shaped growth trajectory over the coming years in terms of advertising’s share of total revenue. However, music will lag far behind with just 38% of streaming revenue coming from ad revenue in 2025, compared to 56% for video. This will reflect both the positive and the negative. On the plus side, music will be generating strong subscription revenue in 2025, thus commanding much of the revenue share. However, it will also be generating much less annual ad revenue per user (ARPU) in 2025 than video: $4.69 compared to $20.37. In fact, video will see ad supported ARPU nearly double by 2025 from 2017, while music will add just one dollar.

This reflects multiple factors, including:

1. Social video (YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook) will generate far more ad supported video revenue than it will ad-supported music revenue
2. Video ads command a higher ad rate than audio ads
3. TV ad budgets are much bigger than radio ad budgets, and their transition to streaming will accelerate video ad revenue growth
4. Few music services have scaled their ad sales outside of the US (though some encouraging signs are occurring there)
5. Emerging markets will be key drivers of ad-supported music audiences, but digital ad markets will take time to get established

Ultimately, streaming ad growth will be shaped in equal measure by traditional ad market dynamics, and the tech and ad sales capabilities of the streaming services in each and every respective market. This means that in many markets we will see free audience growth far outstrip ad revenue growth. Just one of the many challenges posed by a growing ad supported streaming sector.

Join us on the 17^thfor this and much more – see you there!

The Outlook for Music Catalogue: Streaming Changes Everything

Friday’s news that catalogue acquisition business Hipgnosis Songs Fund is set to float on the London Stock Exchange,having already raised around $260 million, reflects a booming market for music catalogues. However, the outlook for catalogue is not quite as straight forward as it at first appears. MIDiA Research has just published a major new report looking at the state of catalogue and its future: The Outlook for Music Catalogue: Streaming Changes Everything. This report was six months in the making and pulls data from a wide range of industry sources to provide a definitive view of the global catalogue market, both in terms of revenues and also mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The report is immediately available to MIDiA subscription clients and is also available for individual purchase on our report store here. Here follows a brief overview.

Album unbundling is now hitting catalogue

Music catalogue sales is fundamentally about nostalgia, enabling us to relive our younger years through rediscovering music that mattered to us. In the old sales model, record labels could release a greatest hits album every eight–10 years and convince consumers to pay for a dozen or more songs, when in reality they only ever wanted a handful of them. If you think about the artists that sound tracked your younger years but are not among your favourite artists, there are probably only around five songs that you can actually recall as liking. In the old sales model you would have listened most to those tracks on the full album, and even then, probablyonly a dozen or so times before lessening your listening. Now, with streaming, you can get straight to those five tracks, skipping the others, and probably still only listen to them a handful of times each, perhaps adding them to a playlist that you’ll listen to occasionally. The old model would have generated, say $5 gross revenue for the label. In the streaming model, five songs listened to ten times each would generate 28 cents for the label. It is the album unbundling dynamic all over again.

Younger audiences look forward, not back

Younger Millennials and Gen Z – those born between 1995–2014 – have more content pushed to them that is tailored specifically for them than at any other stage in history. This is digital’s baby boomer generation. They have never had it so good. With Instagram and Snapchat feeds perpetually filled with new content, they have little need or want to look back. The music industry isn’t helping things either with hundreds of thousands of tracks released every month, leaving little time for older music.

Even within streaming catalogue listening, the focus is very much on the new rather than the old. In the UK, according to the BPI, more than 70% of all catalogue (24-plus months old) streams are from on or after 2000. If we go back to the 1960s, where some of the most iconic catalogue artists were at their peak – e.g. the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – this decade accounted for just 3.6% of UK catalogue streams in [year]. In traditional catalogue valuations, the likes of the Beatles and the Stones will account for a major portion of valuations. In the streaming era, their value diminishes markedly.

 

Catalogue is caught between the two extremes of streaming and physical, with current revenue boosted by older CD and vinyl buyers coalescing around old favourites. These physical formats are often high-priced premium products and therefore create a skewed picture when comparing the consumption business of streaming to the sales model. Catalogue’s outlook is nuanced. Music catalogue generated $11.5 billion in retail revenues in 2017, which was up from 2016 and it will continue to grow through to 2025. Yet catalogue’s share of recorded music revenues will diminish.

Many strings to catalogue’s bow

Catalogue also looks different depending on where you sit in the value chain. If you are an influential indie label group like Beggars, you’ll see catalogue still performing strongly on streaming because you have the influential music that fans want to discover. Meanwhile, publishing catalogues are commanding large fees, not least Sony ATV’s $2.3 billion acquisition of 60% of EMI Music Publishing. Music publishing has felt the impact of streaming much more slowly than labels, but it is happening. Mechanical royalties from sales are plummeting, sync revenues are stable but a far larger volume of syncs are happening thus reducing average synch incomes. Meanwhile on streaming, publishers get a much smaller share of revenue than labels. And of course, streaming is killing off radio, another key publishing income source. So what labels are beginning to experience now, publishers will too.

The future needs rewriting

None of this means that catalogue is dead, but it does need an overhaul if it is to retain relevance. Selling people nostalgia is no longer enough on its own (though of course a solid market still exists for selling digital remasters to aging rock fans). The Guardians of the Galaxy is a great example of how to make catalogue work in the current market. For young fans of the movie, the music is simply the soundtrack to part of their culture that just happens to be decades old. The music is given new cultural context for a new generation. This is the sort of thinking catalogue needs to thrive in the streaming era.

A catalogue bubble

There is a risk that we are in a catalogue bubble. Acquisitions are on a rapid rise – check out the reportfor our year-by-year catalogue M&A activity – and will likely continue to rise over coming years, as illustrated by Hipgnosis, though given that the average transaction value for catalogues is $140 million the initial $260 million may not go that far.

The risk with the current market is that valuations are being built using the models that were shaped in the distribution era and that don’t properly reflect the dynamics of streaming. Also, there is a finite number of decent sized catalogues for sale, which means it is a sellers’ market, thus driving prices up further still. 

With these dynamics and streaming’s emphasis on the new set to create a world of mega hits and audiences with less inclination towards looking back, catalogue is at a tipping point. Either it changes to meet the market or the market leaves it behind.

IFPI Reports $17.3 Billion for Recorded Music in 2017

Today the IFPI released its estimates for global recorded music revenues in 2017. That figure was $17.3 billion representing an 8.9% growth on the $15.7 billion it reported last year. The numbers are bang in line with the numbers MIDiA reported last week ($17.4 billion / 8.5% growth – see here for more) and reflect a year of fantastic growth. The headlines are:

• Streaming is the fuel in the engine: Streaming revenues were up 37% to hit $6. Billion (this however underrepresents the value of the market as the IFPI groups Pandora under ‘mobile personalization and other’ wiping out the best part of a billion dollars of streaming revenue). MIDiA’s broader definition of streaming puts 2017 revenues at $7.4 billion. Whichever definition you go with, the narrative is clear: streaming is dragging the entire recorded music industry back into growth (all other sales formats are in decline). The recorded music industry is on track to become a streaming industry in all but name.
• Legacy format decline is slowing:Physical and download sales fell at a slower rate in 2017 than they did in 2016. This, in turn enabled streaming growth to have a bigger impact on overall revenue growth. The legacy formats will decline steadily now until the channel stops stocking them. The first big step will be when Apple turns off the iTunes Music Store. This is something we predicted back in 2015, forecasting that it would happen by 2020. That bet is still looking good.
• UMG still leads the pack: As major label revenues are a matter of public record via company reports we can calculate 2017 market shares against IFPI 2017 total. UMG comes in at 29.8%, Sony 22.2%, WMG 18.0%, Indies 27.7% and artists direct 2.7%. These numbers are all within a 10^thof a percentage point of the results MIDiA published last week. As we reported then, the key takeaways are that UMG still leads the pack, WMG has grown faster than the other majors while artists direct were the single biggest growth driver in 2017. (Note it appears that artists direct now appear in the IFPI numbers though the $100 million difference between IFPI’s and MIDiA’s numbers mean that has come off either the artist direct or indie numbers)

All in all, a stellar year for recorded music revenues, with plenty of growth yet to come, especially as emerging markets start to deliver at scale.