We’re Hiring: Business Development Manager

MIDiA is hiring for a new position: a Business Development Managerfocused on the TV/video space.

Over the last year we have been fast building our capabilities and profile in the TV and video space, including delivering the opening keynote at Mipcom and launching our next generation TV audience insight platform Index.

We have a huge opportunity in 2020 and we are looking for a driven commercial person to help us realise it.

We want with a passion for the industry, good connections, a proven ability to follow a rigorous sales process and the skillsets to close high value deals.

The successful candidate will join our team based @ the Ministry in London.

You can find more details on the role here:

If you think this could be the role for you then we’d love to hear from you info@midiaresearch.com

Last Call for Our Artist Survey

This is your last chance to take part in our global artist survey – we are closing the survey this Friday (19th April).

In partnership with independent distribution company Amuse, MIDiA Research is undertaking a detailed study of the music artist landscape. We are fielding a survey to the artist community, exploring issues such as:

• What success looks like to you
• Career aspirations
• The importance of signing to a record label
• Financial wellbeing
• Maintaining creative control

If you are a singer, DJ, producer, performer, or in a band, then we’d love to hear your views. Just click the link to take the survey.

All of your responses will be treated as strictly confidential and will only ever be presented in aggregate as part of results for the entire survey – so never attributable to any individual. We will not use any of your responses to contact you again for any purpose, unless you specifically provide your email address to us in order to be interviewed in more detail for the research project.

We will also send you a summary of the findings so that you can see how you fit into the picture amongst your fellow performers, and benchmark yourself against their aggregate responses.

If you have any questions concerning the survey the please email us at info@midiaresearch.com

Calling all Artists!

In partnership with independent distribution company Amuse, MIDiA Research is undertaking a detailed study of the music artist landscape. We are fielding a survey to the artist community, exploring issues such as:

• What success looks like to you
• Career aspirations
• The importance of signing to a record label
• Financial wellbeing
• Maintaining creative control

If you are a singer, DJ, producer, performer, or in a band, then we’d love to hear your views. Just click the link to take the survey.

All of your responses will be treated as strictly confidential and will only ever be presented in aggregate as part of results for the entire survey – so never attributable to any individual. We will not use any of your responses to contact you again for any purpose, unless you specifically provide your email address to us in order to be interviewed in more detail for the research project.

We will also send you a summary of the findings so that you can see how you fit into the picture amongst your fellow performers, and benchmark yourself against their aggregate responses.

If you have any questions concerning the survey the please email us at info@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!

Radio Is Streaming’s Next Frontier

This week MIDiA held its latest quarterly research and networking event at Gibson Brands Showrooms in the heart of London’s West End. The event was heavily over-subscribed and was a great success (there are some photos at the bottom of this post).

The event combined a presentation from Pete Downton, deputy CEO of our event sponsor 7digital, a keynote from myself and a panel of leading industry experts. Here are a few highlights of my presentation.

Streaming music has got where it has today largely by being the future of retail and replacing the download model, which in turn replaced the CD model (though vestiges of both remain). That premium model will continue to be the beating heart of streaming revenues for the foreseeable future but will not be enough on its own. The next big opportunity for streaming is to become the future of radio, which incidentally is around double the size of the recorded music market. In doing so, it will be a classic case of disruptive insurgents stealing market share from long-standing incumbents.

The opportunity for streaming is to build ad revenue around the younger audiences that are simply not engaging with traditional radio in the way that previous generations of young music fans once did. As the chart above shows, radio’s audience is aging and has an almost mirror opposite demographic profile to streaming. What is more, radio’s audience is declining by around one percentage point each quarter. It might not sound like much, but you normally do not measure change in terms of consistent quarterly trends. Instead there is normally quarterly fluctuation. So, this is nothing short of a major decline.

However, what is interesting is that free streaming is not growing by the same rate radio is declining. Instead, what is happening is that radio and streaming audiences are co-existing, with many that have spent a long time doing both eventually shifting all of their listening to streaming. Added to this, older consumers tend to embrace change more slowly than younger audiences. So, radio’s older listener base effectively acts as a disruption buffer.

What all this means is that radio is facing an existential threat like no other but it has some time to get its house in order, to identify how it can meld the best of the radio model with streaming experiences to start its fight back. And make no mistake, radio has so many unique assets that streaming does not (local content, talk, news, sports, weather, travel, brand personality etc.) and Apple’s underwhelming success with Beats 1 shows that hiring a bunch of radio people and launching a station does not guarantee success. Nonetheless, streaming services will get there. And Spotify’s recently launched Pandora-clone in Australia indicates just how serious the radio frontier is to streaming.

For more (a lot more!) data and analysis on how radio and streaming are facing up against each other, check out our new report Radio – Streaming’s Next Frontier: How Streaming Will Disrupt Radio Like It Did Retail which can be purchased directly from our report store here and is also available immediately to MIDiA clients as part of our research subscription service.

Join Us At ‘Radio Is Streaming’s Next Frontier’

I’m very pleased to announce that MIDiA is hosting a special industry event on Wednesday 7^th February at Gibson Brands in central London, in partnership with 7digital. The event ‘Radio Is Streaming’s Next Frontier’ is going to explore how in 2018, streaming music is going to start impacting radio just like it has spent the last few years replacing downloads. Streaming spent the first phase of its life being the future of retail, it will spend the next phase becoming the future of radio.

In this free-to-attend event we will present some of our latest research, including exclusive data, ranging from big picture trends through to tactical data, such as exactly how much each streaming service is affecting each radio station.

In addition to my research presentation there will be panel discussion from industry experts:

Is Streaming and Radio a Zero Sum Game?

Moderator: Zach Fuller

Panellists:

• Jeff Smith: head of Music, Radio2 and Radio6
• Pete Downton: deputy CEO, 7digital
• Chris Baughen: VP Content and Formats, Deezer

After all this there will be drinks and networking. The event was publicised to MIDiA clients and newsletter subscribers first so there are only a few places left. So, RSVP your slot here now!

Hope to see you there, and watch out for a sneak peak of some of the research soon.

Free Report: Lyrics Take Centre Stage In Streaming Music

We are pleased to announce the publication of a brand new, totally free, Streaming Music report. In this report, we present the findings of an exclusive consumer survey fielded in November 2017 to consumers in the US, UK and Germany, deep diving into streaming behaviours and the growing role that lyrics is taking. The report download link can be found at the bottom of this post.

The report includes data on:

• Overall music consumption and streaming behaviours
• Weekly Active User (WAU) penetration of all key streaming music apps
• Tenure splits of streaming users by streaming service
• Consumer attitudes towards lyrics
• Lyric users by tenure length of individual streaming services
• The relationship between lyrics users and streaming loyalty
• Key drivers for using lyrics, with gender splits

Here is an overview of some of the findings of the report that we wrote on behalf of LyricFind.

Streaming music has put the audience in control, letting music fans choose what, when and where they listen. One of the most dramatic changes that streaming has enabled is the expansion of music from a lean-back, linear experience into something far more engaging and interactive. Now fans lean forward to choose the songs they want, build playlists, comment and share. Lyrics are centre stage in this shift, transforming from static-print-hidden-away-inside-album-sleeve notes, to a dynamic extension of the music itself. Lyrics permeate the streaming music ecosystem, from websites, through YouTube and Vevo to the streaming services themselves.

Whereas lyrics in the analogue era used to be domain of music aficionados, in the streaming era they are a mainstream behaviour for audiences as diverse as they are widespread. The motivations are similarly varied, with the most cited being to know the words (81%) followed by being able to sing along (72%). Among streaming services users who are music subscribers, penetration of lyrics usage rises to 88%. What is more, lyrics have a strong link with music subscriber loyalty among 91% of all music subscribers that have been using lyrics for more than three years.

However, many lyrics users want more out of their lyrics experiences, with 56% of subscribers wanting lyrics to be in time with songs. Younger users, in particular, are raising their expectations, with 16-24 year olds the most likely to want new lyrics features.

Streaming is transforming music consumption across the board

Music consumption is in the midst of a transition period, with streaming rapidly ascending to become the dominant format. As with any transition, the old world coexists with the new, due to old habits dying hard and older groups of consumers changing behaviours slower. Thus, we see radio (66%) and free streaming (43%) as the two dominant forms of music consumption. Crucially, a strong overlap exists between the two: 72% of streamers listen to radio and 47% of radio audiences stream music. This indicates: a) that the transition will pick up pace, as nearly half of radio listeners are already swapping out some of their radio listening time for streaming; and b) that there currently remains enough that is different between radio and streaming for the two to coexist. The biggest takeaway though, is that streaming has a massive amount of growth potential ahead of it.

Lyrics are an integral part of the streaming experience

Lyrics are at the centre of the streaming music experiences: 79% of all music streamers use lyrics, rising to a comprehensive 88% of music subscribers. Wanting to know the words to songs is the main driver, with 65% of music subscribers stating this as their reason for using lyrics. Next, 55% of subscribers and 51% of free streamers said they wanted to be able to sing along with their favourite song. More social activities like singing with friends and karaoke score relatively lowly, indicating that lyrics are a very personal and integral part of how music fans interact with music.

Lyrics have a clear correlation with music subscriber tenure and with churn. The longer that consumers have been music subscribers, the more likely they are to use lyrics, while consumers that have cancelled their subscriptions are much less likely to use lyrics. Across Deezer, Spotify and Google Play, an average of 98% of subscribers with three plus years tenure use lyrics. This contrasts with lyrics penetration among churned out subscribers, with an average of just 60% across the same three streaming services. The importance of lyrics features is further underscored by the fact that 55% of streaming lyrics users say they are more likely to pay for a streaming service that ‘has great lyrics features’. For music subscribers overall, the rate is 43%, rising to 48% of Deezer users and 52% of Tidal users.

Lyrics Take Centre Stage In Streaming – LyricFind – Report

Why Netflix Can Turn A Profit But Spotify Cannot (Yet)

Having just celebrated its 10^th (streaming) birthday, Netflix followed up with a strong earnings release, announcing 5.8 million net new paid subscribers in Q4, sending its share price up by 9%. This wraps up a stellar year for Netflix, one in which it doubled down on original programming and delivered acclaimed hits such as Stranger Things and The OA, shows that don’t fit the traditional TV mould. In fact, Stranger Things was turned down by 15 TV networks before finding a home at Netflix and The OA’s oscillating episode lengths (from 1 hour 11 mins to 31 mins) would have played havoc with a linear TV schedule (not even considering its mind bending plot).

Netflix closed 2016 with 89.1 million subscribers and the temptation to benchmark against Spotify’s equally strong year is too strong to resist. Spotify (which celebrated its decade in June 2016) closed the year with around 43 million subscribers, 48% the size of Netflix. But a closer look at the numbers tells another growth story.

Read the full post on the MIDiA blog by clicking here.

MIDiA’s 2016 Predictions – Here’s How We Did

Part of our job at MIDiA Research is to help our clients ‘look round the corner’ and see what disruptions and innovations are likely to impact their businesses. In short, our job is to help understand what the future holds. This is why in 2015 we published our ‘2016 Predictions’ report in which we made a number of big calls on the coming year in digital content. Here’s how we did:

Macro Trends

1. Mobile messaging apps will surpass 6 billion. VERDICT: Correct. (There are now more than 6.5 billion)
2. Video will eat the world. Whatever media business you are in, in 2016 you will be a video company too. VERDICT: Correct. (2016 was the year video took centre stage)
3. Some or all of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google will start to aggregate TV channel apps and SVOD apps to join the digital TV dots. VERDICT: Correct. (Amazon and Apple both made their first TV app aggregation moves in 2016)

Music

1. Digital will finally be more than 50% of revenue. VERDICT: Correct. (Q2 major label results showed digital as 54% of recorded music revenue)
2. Streaming holdouts will trickle not flood. VERDICT: Correct. (Indeed, remarkably few artists held back albums. Exclusives became the new black instead)
3. Spotify will still be the leading subscription service. VERDICT: Correct. (At the end of September Spotify had 40 million subscribers compared to just under 18 million for Apple Music)

Mobile

1. Android app revenue will surpass iOS. VERDICT: Wrong. (Apple’s App Store still has almost twice the revenue of Play Store. In our defence on this one this was as a result of Android under performing and Apple over performing. Android increased OS market share but still did not overtake app store revenue which means that Play ARPU reduced while Apple App Store ARPU increased.)
2. Adblocker disruption will accelerate for publishers. VERDICT: Correct. (Adblock plus now grew big enough to open it’s own adexchange, and publishers can do little but get on board)
3. Big freemium games will lose steam. VERDICT: Correct. (Fewer apps in the top free and top grossing app charts now compared to January)

Video

1. More unbundled SVOD services will launch. VERDICT: Correct. (2016 saw a succession of new video services)
2. Mobile video will blur at the edges. VERDICT: Correct. (Messaging apps have made video central to the user experience with the Snapchat illustrative stories feature now being replicated on Instagram)
3. Interactive ads will gain traction on TV channel apps. VERDICT: Wrong. (Although still be tested on selected Fox Networks authenticated channel apps, they have not moved into the mainstream…yet )

We’ll be publishing our 2017 Predictions report in the next few weeks. To learn how to get a copy of the report and of our 2017 Predictions report and also our 2016 Predictions report email us at info AT midiaresearch DOT COM.

Introducing The Future Music Forum

This September MIDiA will be participating in the Future Music Forum (FMF) in Barcelona. We’ve been involved with the FMF since its inception and we think it’s a great, intimate event that combines forward thinking presentations with informal but highly productive networking. And of course it is in sunny Barcelona!

This year I’ll be doing the opening keynote: Music Rebooted: How Emerging Technologies And Gen Z Are Changing Music For Good. In this presentation I will be looking at how audiences are changing, talent is changing, content is changing, and all at an unprecedented rate. How what used to work doesn’t and what does work won’t in the future. Technologies as diverse as VR, Musical.ly and Snapchat are transforming what success looks like and writing new rules for success. So, just as you thought you were getting your head around how to make the economics of streaming work now you have to change the entire way you look at what music looks like and what it means to fans.

In addition, MIDiA’s Paid Content analyst Zach Fuller will be moderating a panel: Social Media Influencers / Music Industry’s New Talent Pipeline. In this panel Zach will lead a discussion exploring how millennial audiences now rely on social media platforms to capture their experiences, communicate with others, and find information used to make purchasing decisions (among other things). He’ll look at how marketing with social media influencers is one of the most cost-effective and powerful ways that brands can reach millions of consumers on Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube.

FMF runs from the 20th of September to the 21st, with an additional Synch Summit running alongside starting on the 19th. We hope to see you there.