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.

IFPI First Take: Declining Legacy Formats Continue To Hold Back Growth

 

This post has been updated following a conversation with the IFPI

The IFPI today announced its annual assessment of the size of the global recorded music business.  For the first time in a long time the music industry has been able to announce a significant growth in revenue: 3% up on 2014 to reach $15 billion. Except that the growth isn’t quite what it first appears to be. In fact, the IFPI reported $15 billion last year for 2014, and for 2013 too. So on the surface that appears to actually be three years of no growth.

The IFPI has done this before. For example, it had previously announced a small 0.2% growth in 2013 (which was the big headline of the numbers that year). But it then downgraded that to a small decline the following year before then upgrading it to a small growth again in 2015.

The IFPI explained that they have retrospectively downgraded their 2014 number to $14.5 billion to reflect some changes in the way they report performance royalties (a minor revenue impact) and, more importantly, to create ‘constant currency’ numbers i.e. to try to remove the impact of currency exchange fluctuations. That approach works well for company reports but less well for the macro picture. The IFPI have to report this way as they are essentially summing up company reports, however when we are talking about global macro markets we run into difficulties, for example looking at music revenue as a % of GDP etc.

The approach also has the effect of generating very different growth rates. For example, if we assume that the top 10 music markets each grew at 3% in local currency terms in 2015, using the exchange rates the years took place (i.e. 2014 USD to local currency and 2015 USD to local currency) there would only have been 0.48% growth in US dollar terms. If, however, we take the constant currency approach we see 3.2% growth. When we are talking about individual companies there is a lot of value in reporting at constant currency rates as those companies are dealing with repatriating and recording revenue from across the world into their local reporting HQs. But when we are talking about global markets comprised of many local companies (e.g. the vast majority of South Korean and Japanese revenues stay in local companies so are not directly shaped by currency fluctuations) the methodology is less useful. The cracks really begin to show when you take the long view. For example if we went back 5 years with constant currency rates the value of the music business as a % of the global economy would be over stated.

So, with all that said, for the purposes of this analysis I am going to use as my baseline for comparison the IFPI’s previously reported 2014 numbers stated in its ‘Recording Industry In Numbers, 2015 Edition’.  Here are some of the key takeaways (further charts at the end of this post):

• Revenue was flat: Despite all of the dynamic growth in streaming declining legacy formats (CDs and downloads) offset their impact, keeping revenues flat. Also, once performance and synchronization revenues are removed from the mix, revenue fell slightly. This highlights the industry’s transition from a pure sales business into a multi-revenue stream model. It also emphasises the fact that we are still some way from a recovery in consumer spending on music
• Downloads and physical still both falling: Download revenue was down 16% while physical was down 4.5%. The physical decline was lower than the 8% decline registered in 2014 and played a major role in helping total revenues grow. If physical revenue had fallen at the same rate as 2014 there would have been $0.25 billion less revenue which in turn would have brought total revenues down into decline. The Adele factor can once again be credited for helping the industry out of a sticky patch. The download decline was more than double than in 2014 (6.6%) and that drop is accelerating in 2016, with Apple Music playing a major role in the cannibalization / transition trend (delete as appropriate depending on your world view). What is clear is that downloads and subscription growth do not co-exist. Though it is worth noting that the move away form purchase and ownership is a bigger trend that long preceded Spotify et al.
• Streaming growth accelerating, just: Total streaming revenue was up 31% in 2015, growing by $0.69 billion compared to 39% / $0.62 billion in 2014. This is undeniably positive news for subscriptions and a clear achievement for the market’s key players. However, it is worth noting that over the same period the number of subscribers by 63%, up from 41.4 million to 68 million (for the record MIDiA first reported the 67.5 million subscribers tally last week based on our latest research). So what’s going on? Well a big part of the issue is the extensive discounting that Spotify has been using to drive sales ($1 for 3 months) coupled with 50% discounts for students from both Spotify and Deezer and finally the surge in telco bundles (which are also discounted).  The number of telco partnerships live globally more than doubled in 2015 to 105, up from 43 the prior year. But even more significant was…
• Ad supported revenue fell: Ad supported streaming revenue was just $0.634 billion in 2015, down very slightly from $0.641 billion in 2014. YouTube obviously plays a role, and that was a key part of the IFPI’s positioning around these numbers. You’ll need to have been on Mars to notice the coordinated industry briefings against YouTube of late, and these numbers are used to build that narrative.  But YouTube is far form the only ad supported game in town, with Soundcloud, Deezer and Spotify accounting for well over a quarter of a billion free users between them. Also, the IFPI doesn’t count Pandora as ad supported, one of the most successful ad supported models. Then there are an additional quarter of a billion free users across services like Radionomy, iHeart and Slacker. So the music industry doesn’t just have a YouTube problem, it has an ad supported music problem.
• Streaming ARPU is up but subscription ARPU is down: The net effect of streaming users growing faster than revenue is that subscriber Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) fell to $2.80, from $3.16 in 2014, and $3.36 in 2013. Ad supported ARPU was down from $0.10 to $0.08 while subscription ARPU was down. The fall in subscriber ARPU is down to a number of factors including 1) discounting, 2) bundles, 3) churn, 4) growth of emerging markets services such as QQ Music (monthly retail price point $1.84) and Spinlet (monthly retail price point $1.76). For a full list of emerging markets music service price points check out the MIDiA ‘State Of The Streaming Nation’ report. The irony is that the major record labels are increasingly sceptical of mid tier price points yet they have inadvertently created mid tier price points via discounted pricing efforts. Total blended monthly streaming ARPU for record labels was $0.37 in 2015. And if you’re wondering how ad supported and subscription ARPU can both be down but total ARPU up, that is because subscriptions are now a larger share of total streaming revenue (up to 78% compared to 71% in 2014).

So the end of term report card is: an ok year, with the years of successive decline behind us, but long term questions remain about sustainability and the longer term impact of incentivized growth tactics.

Streaming Hits 67.5 Million Subscribers But Identity Crisis Looms

For our recently published MIDiA report ‘State of the Streaming Nation’ we conducted an exhaustive programme of research to assess the global streaming music market, from each of the consumer, market and service perspectives. In pulling together subscriber numbers for each of the music services (there’s a full table in the report) we found that there were 67.5 million subscribers globally in 2015. That was 24 million more subscribers compared to 2014 (also nearly double the number of new subscribers in 2014). It is clear that global subscriptions are gathering pace. However, all is not as it may at first appear:

• Zombies still walk the streaming streets: Back in 2013 I ruffled a few feathers highlighting the issue of zombie subscribers, music subscribers that are recorded in the headline numbers but that are actually inactive, normally because they are on telco bundles. Fast forward to 2016 and the issue is more firmly in the public domain due to Deezer’s IPO filings. Zombies coupled with overstating by music services accounted for around 12 million subscribers in 2015 so the active ‘actual’ subscriber number was nearer 55 million.
• Emerging markets are gaining share: Emerging markets will play a key role for streaming over the next few years. They are already driving growth for Apple and Spotify and they will collectively bring the most dynamic growth with western markets nearing saturation for the 9.99 price point. Much of the growth though will come from indigenous companies, such QQ Music (China), KKBOX (Taiwan), MelOn (South Korea) and Saavn (India).

• Free still dominates: For all the scale of of subscriptions, free still leads the way with free streaming services accounted for nearly 600 million unique users (1.3 billion cumulative users if you add together the user counts of all the services). Free thus outweighed paid by a factor of 10-to-1.

Streaming’s Identity Crisis

Streaming must overcome its identity crisis. Depending on where you sit in the music industry, streaming is either the future of retail or the future of radio. It can be both, but there is increasing pressure for it to be retail only. That would see only a fraction of the opportunity realised. Throughout its history, a small share of people have accounted for the majority of spending. Casual buyers and radio accounted for the rest.

17% of music buyers account for 61% of spending. These are the people who are either already subscribers or that will become subscribers over the next couple of years. Which leaves us with the remaining 83% of consumers. The majority of these listen to radio while a growing minority use free streaming (mainly YouTube). The question the music industry must now answer is how seriously does it want to treat the opportunity represented by these consumers? Does it want to only serve its super fans or does it also want to be global culture? Radio enabled music to be global culture in the 20^th century, free streaming will enable it to be in the 21^st.

The Free Streaming Debate Is As Complex As It Is Nuanced

This is why the free streaming debate is important but also so complex. Yes, too much free music will curtail the opportunity for paid subscriptions, but too little could consign music culture to the margins. With streaming there is an opportunity to monetize a bigger audience at higher rates than radio ever enabled. At the moment free streaming bears the burden of being all about driving sales (either subscriptions or music purchases) but that misses the far bigger opportunity for free in the streaming era: mass monetization.

What we have now is a dysfunctional system. Freemium services have licensing minimas (the minimum that must be paid per stream) that effectively prevent them from building profitable ad supported businesses, while YouTube has licenses unlike any other but is the industry’s bête noire. Only Pandora has a model that is both (largely) acceptable to the industry and (theoretically) profitable. I say, ‘theoretically’ because Pandora could get towards a 20% margin if it wasn’t investing so heavily in ad sales infrastructure and other companies.

Out of those three disparate models an effective middle ground can and should be found so that the streaming debate becomes one of free AND paid rather than free VERSUS paid. Then we will have the foundations for creating a market that enables subscriptions to thrive within their niche and for global audiences to be monetized like never before.

‘Awakening’ Now Available In Paperback

Regular readers will know that I recently published the Kindle version of my book “Awakening: The Music Industry In The Digital Age”.  Many of you have already bought it (thank you!) but some of you also wanted to know when the paperback edition was going to be available. Well you need wait no longer, you can buy the paperback version of ‘Awakening’ right now by clicking here.

If you are interested in the music industry then this is the book for you. Whether you are a label executive, music publisher, artist, songwriter, entrepreneur or simply interested in what you can learn from the music industry’s experience and want to know what the future holds then this is the book for you.

I wrote this book with three key objectives in mind:

1.    To provide the definitive account of the music industry in the digital era, as an antidote the distorted picture that is painted by the biased and often poorly informed extremes that dominate the industry narrative

2.    To help anyone in the music business better understand how the other parts of the industry work, what they think and what their priorities are

3.    To act as a primer for anyone wanting to build career or business in the music industry, so they know exactly what they’re getting in to, how the business works, the relationships, the conflicts and what’s been tried before.  I want to help people not waste energy making the same mistakes others have, and to also benefit from the insight and experiences of the super smart people I interviewed in the book

The book is full of data, analysis and interviews with more 50 interviews with the CEOs, senior decision makers, artists, managers, start up founders and other decision makers that have shaped the music industry over the last 15 years.  It includes chapters on every key part of the industry (labels, artists, songwriters, start ups, tech companies etc.) and is split into three sections:

1. How We Got Here
2. The Digital Era
3. A Vision For The Future

This really is the only book you need to read on the music industry’s digital transition.  But don’t just take my word for it, check out these 5 Star Reviews:

“I really enjoyed this book. It gives a wide view to music industry, consumption tendencies and much other useful information. Is a must for all of the music industry professionals.”

“Great book on today’s digital music business – how we got here, who did what and most crucially why they did it. There’s no shortage of firmly held opinions and theories about the music industry and how it has navigated its digital transformation and Mulligan’s book is an essential analysis of what’s actually been going on. Insightful, non-judgemental and very well researched and informed, if you want to understand today’s digital music business, read this book.”

And if you’re still not convinced, take a read of the sample chapters on Amazon.  ‘Awakening’ is also available on iTunes and Google Play.

I hope you find the book as interesting to read as I did writing it.

My New Book – Awakening: The Music Industry In the Digital Age

I am very excited to announce the launch of my book ‘Awakening’ which charts the rise of digital music and how it is changing the music industry. ‘Awakening’ is the definitive account of the music industry in the digital era. With exclusive interviews with the people who shaped today’s industry it tells the inside story of how the music business grappled with the emergence of an entirely new digital economy

The music industry is on the brink of an utterly transformative period of change that will result in the creation of an entirely new industry tailor made for the digital era. ‘Awakening’ presents the vision of how and why this change will come, what this future will look like and how the first steps on the journey are already being taken. The book includes interviews with 60 of the music industry’s leading figures, including globally successful artists and more than 20 CEOs (a full list of interviewees can be found at the bottom of the page). Alongside the insight from this unprecedented executive access, ‘Awakening’ uses exclusive consumer data, official market statistics, proprietary models and multiple additional data sources. In doing so it constructs an unparalleled picture of the new global music economy presented across 60 charts and figures.

All good stories start in the beginning. ‘Awakening’ deconstructs the failed state experience of the analogue era music industry with the definitive account of the music industry’s transition from booming $28 billion powerhouse to today’s much humbled $15 billion business. Music fans used to be told what to listen to when, where and how. In the new music industry the balance of power lies with the fans with themselves. The old music industry had the record labels at its centre, the new digital era industry will have the consumer at its core. The change will be generation defining and will transform forever what it means to be an artist and a fan. Livelihoods will be destroyed, others created, millionaires made, culture transformed. The change is already underway. ‘Awakening’ looks at each individual component of the music industry today and looks at each one is dealing with change and preparing for the future. From the superstar artist to the small independent label, from the pirate company CEO to the major label CEO, in the book I explore the incredibly varied picture of confusion and innovation, uncertainty and brilliance, fear and confidence. Most of all it is the story of a rebuilding, an Awakening of the new music industry.

The book has three sections:

• How We Got Here: A detailed history of the years up until the launch of the iTunes Music Store, exploring how Napster changed the music industry forever and how the industry responded, or rather didn’t
• The Digital Era: This section has 7 chapters, one for each of the key stakeholders (labels, artists, songwriters, pirates etc) and explores what the current market means to each of them
• A Vision For The Future: A vision for what the next music industry will look like and what needs to happen to enable this to take place

I was extremely fortunate to interview many of the most important figures in the music industry of the last 15 years, including CEOs of major record labels, CEOs of all the major streaming services and platinum selling artists. I’ve managed to get the inside track on exactly what was happening behind the scenes.  I personally learned a huge amount while writing this book and I am confident virtually every reader will do so too.

In short, once you have read this book you will know practically everything that there is to know about the digital music market and where it is heading!

For anyone interested in the music industry and the lessons it provides for all media and technology businesses in the digital era, this is the only book you will ever need.

The book is available now on Amazon and iTunes and Google Play.

Also 10% of net profits will go to the music therapy charity the Nordoff Robins trust.

If you are a journalist and would like a review copy please email me at mark AT midiaresearch DOT COM

People interviewed for this book

Adam Kidron             Founder and CEO, Beyond Oblivion
Alexander Ljung         Founder and CEO, Soundcloud
Alexander Ross        Partner, Wiggin
Alison Wenham        CEO, AIM
Axel Dauchez           CEO, Deezer
Barney Wragg          SVP Universal Music eLabs / Global Head of Digital, EMI
Ben Drury                 Founder and CEO, 7 Digital
Benji Rogers             Founder and CEO, PledgeMusic
Brian Message          Manager, Radiohead, Nick Cave / Chairman MMF
Cary Sherman          CEO, RIAA
Chris Gorman           Founder and CEO, MusicQubed
Cliff Fluet                   Partner, Lewis Silkin / Director 11
Daniel Ek                   Founder and CEO, Spotify
David Boyle              SVP Insight, EMI
David Byrne              Solo artist / Talking Heads
David Isrealite           CEO, MPAA
David Lowery           Camper van Beethoven / The Trichordist
Edgar Berger            President & CEO International, Sony Music Entertainment
Elio Leoni Sceti         CEO, EMI
Erik Nielsen               Manager, Marillion
Geoff Taylor              CEO, BPI
Gregor Pryor             Partner, Reed Smith
Helienne Lindvall       Award winning songwriter
Ian Hogarth                Founder and CEO, Songkick
Ian Rogers                 CEO, Beats Music / CEO TopSpin
Jack Horner               Founder Frukt
Jay Samit                   SVP, EMI / EVP & GM, Sony Corp America
Jeremy Silver            VP New Media EMI / Chairman musicmetric
Jim Griffin                   CTO Geffen Records / CEO, Cherry Lane Digital
Jon Irwin                    President, Rhapsody
Jonathan Grant          Above and Beyond / Founder, Anjunabeats Records
Justin Morey              Senior Lecturer Music Production, Leeds Beckett University
Keith Harris                Manager, Stevie Wonder / GM, Motown
Keith Thomas            Grammy Award Winning Producer and Songwriter
Ken Park                    Chief Content Officer, Spotify
Larry Miller                 COO, a2b Music / President Reciprocal
Liz Schimel                VP Music, Nokia
Lohan Presencer       CEO of Ministry of Sound Group
Mark Kelly                 Marillion / CEO, FAC
Mark Knight               Founder and Chief Architect, Omnifone
Martin Goldschmidt   Founder and MD, Cooking Vinyl
Martin Mills                Founder and Chairman, Beggars Group
Michael Robertson   Founder and CEO, MP3.com
Nenad Marovac        Partner, DN Capital
Oleg Fomenko          CEO, Bloom.fm
Paul Hitchman          Founder and Director Playlouder/ MD Kobalt
Paul Vidich                EVP, WMG / Director, Reverbnation
Peter Jenner             Manager Pink Floyd, Billy Bragg / MD Sincere
Peter Sunde              Founder, The Pirate Bay
Phil Sant                    Founder and Chief Engineer, Omnifone
Ralph Simon             EVP Capitol & Blue Note / Founder Yourmobile
Robert Ashcroft        SVP Network Services Europe / CEO PRS for Music
Roger Faxon             CEO, EMI
Scott Cohen              Founder, The Orchard
Simon Wheeler         Director of Strategy, Beggars Group
Sumit Bothra             Manager, The Boxer Rebellion, PJ Harvey
Tim Westergren        Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Pandora
Tom Frederikse        Partner, Clintons
Tony Wadsworth      Chairman & CEO, EMI Music UK & Ireland/Chairman BPI
Wayne Rosso           President, Grokster
Will Page                  Chief Economist, Spotify

Note: positions either refer to current position held by interviewee or key position held during the narrative of this book.

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We Need To Talk About Streaming (again)

Last night I participated in a Music Tank seminar on streaming music.  It was a vibrant and valuable debate with a healthy diversity of opinion.  Below are brief highlights of my opening keynote, including some exclusive data from record labels and from Spotify.

Streaming isn’t the paradigm shift, increased convenience of music access is

Streaming is no new thing.  Napster, Rhapsody, YouTube have been with us for many years.  What changed is that Spotify made it work with elegant simplicity, wrapped up in a consumer-friendly value proposition.  Of course Spotify had timing on its side too, coming to market once most of us already had broadband and at a time when a rapidly growing share of us were getting smartphones with data plans.  And of course timing is everything in business.

Timing aside though, we should be careful not to get hung up on the idea of streaming as an alternative format to the download.  It is not.  It is simply a different delivery mechanism for digital music, and when you factor in cached streams the distinction blurs further.  Streaming versus downloading is tech speak.  All music fans are interested in is being able to listen to the music they want, when they want, where they want.

Rebooting the conversation

Streaming music, and Spotify in particular, has been cause of much controversy and debate of late.  I’ll come on to some of the causes later but it is first worth taking stock of what we actually do and don’t know about streaming.

• What we know. Streaming is proving popular with consumers at a time when download growth is slowing. But many artists are not fully comfortable with the model and feel that they don’t get a fair enough deal.  A dynamic which is complicated by the fact there are many different types of artist deals.  Scale is key to streaming being successful (you don’t make money off dozens or hundreds of streams).
• What we don’t know.  We don’t know yet whether streaming cannibalizes sales.  Whatever data you see on either side of the argument we are simply too early in the evolution of streaming to draw conclusions.  There simply isn’t enough empirical data.  We need a few more years yet and even then separating cause from effect is challenging at best.
• What we suspect.  It is looking like streaming does help reduce the amount people use file sharing.  Again, the evidence isn’t definitive and there certainly isn’t sufficient evidence to suggest that the number of people using P2P etc is declining due to streaming, but intensity of usage perhaps.  Smaller artists don’t seem to do that well out of streaming.

 

Access based services are the first post-transition technology products

Any new technology looks more like what came before than what will come next.  After all we only have the past and present as our reference points. Thus when a new set of technologies emerge they begin with transition technologies.  The first car was a steam powered horse-less carriage (see figure 2).  It was a transition to the first internal combustion engine vehicle and it wasn’t until the 1950’s that we really started to see automobile form factors that had fully thrown off the horse drawn carriage heritage.  Digital music is no different.  The download was the steam powered horse-less carriage, a really useful transition tool to help us bridge the gap between analogue and digital, but just that.  Access based services are the first steps towards the internal combustion engine, services that leverage some of the unique capabilities digital presents, rather than just using the web as a delivery mechanism.  But it is still very early days, we are not even at the Model-T yet.

Putting streaming income into context

A number of record labels provided Music Tank with data illustrating the level of income across various platforms which can see here at aggregate level (see figure 3). This chart uses the income from a download as a base of 1 and then income from other sources as a multiple thereof, shown for labels and for artists.  Note that the artist data is 3^rd party licensing income only and does not reflect songwriter income etc.   The data suggests that an artist requires 80 streams to match the income from one download.  However data from artists suggests it is more than 200 streams.  And this rate varies massively depending on the nature of the deal an artist has struck with their label (e.g. whether they are paid on a share of net income basis or on points) and what share intermediaries such as distributors take.  It is also impacted by what deal the label has struck with a service.   One smaller label claims, somewhat dubiously, that the rate for them is closer to 2,000 times.  Whatever the exact rate (and there isn’t just one) you have to  stream a lot of music to get the same income as a download, but much, much less than a web radio stream or radio listens.  It take more than 5,500 national BBC radio listeners to generate the same income as one download in the UK

The labels’ take on streaming

Some record labels also provided Music Tank with some of their views on streaming and how they see it in the bigger revenue picture. Quickly summarized these are:

• Markets with a strong streaming sector also often have stronger overall digital growth
• Streaming is now growing more quickly than downloads
• Streaming can be 50% of an artist’s digital revenue in some markets
• Streaming consumers and download buyers do not strongly overlap
• Streaming subscriber ARPU is often higher than download buyer ARPU

Spotify’s take on streaming

Spotify also put some data on the table (see figure 4) showing how a major global artist’s catalogue fared following the release of their album the same day to stores as to streaming.  Obviously this data is positioned in the context of the cannibalization and ‘windowing’ debates (which I’ve contributed to here). The data doesn’t prove anything either way in terms of cannibalization (i.e. it could be interpreted as streaming activity does well when an album does well or it could also be viewed as lost buyer activity).  However it does make a compelling case for the degree to which an artist’s back catalogue can be significantly boosted on streaming following an album release. There are some well voiced concerns that streaming favours big name artists, the head rather than the long tail, but if it does then it appears to do a good job of mining the long tail of the head!

The potential of Spotify’s Developer API strategy: an API for Music?

In the last 6 months digital music has two developments of potentially seismic proportions that through their subtle brilliance many haven’t yet appreciated their actual importance.  One was Facebook’s content dashboard strategy.  The other was Spotify’s Developer API.  Of course APIs are no new thing, but if Spotify can reach a hundred million plus total users then its API has the potential of becoming a de facto API for music.   Allowing developers to skip seeking licenses from rights owners and using Spotify’s instead.  It is a crucially well timed move, coming just as investors are turning away from investing in services that require licenses (you may have noticed by now that impecable timing is one of Spotify’s strengths).  Investors have tired of funding license advances for services that often, as in the case of Beyond Oblivion, don’t even make it to market.  The labels still get their digital income but investors are left with a debt write off.  Index’s highly influential Saul Klein went as far as stating that he won’t even invest in  start-ups that require rights owner licenses.

Making the right comparisons

Crucial to the streaming debate is making the right comparisons.

• Streaming does not = a download
• Streaming does not = radio
• But Streaming does = (download + radio) ÷ ??

The exact balance is in flux but the conversation must recognize that a direct comparison with either is off the mark.  What we don’t yet know, and won’t for a couple of years, is whether streaming is pulling its users from green field and thus growing the market in a truly additive manner, or whether it is instead catalysing the organic digital transition, converting those consumers who would have gone digital anyway.  If it is the latter then questions about the income from streaming users compared to other digital customers becomes a more pressing one.  If it is the former then it frees us up to look at the scale picture with fewer reservations.  If these customers simply weren’t ever going to adopt a different digital service then we can start to discuss how low we can bring pricing to drive even great numbers.  The elephant in the room is that £/$10 is just too much for mainstream consumers.  It needs to be close to £/$5 to really break into the mainstream.  And you can only make that business case with genuine scale.

Conclusions

• It is too early to make conclusive judgements about streaming affecting sales or piracy in the near-to-mid term
• Long-term, music consumption will shift from ownership to access
• The streaming debate is clouded by conflicting artist statistics and concerns
• More artists need to be better sold the story by labels and by the services themselves, and some deals may even need revisiting.  Greater transparency is key and record labels have a big role to play here – there’s only so much services can do themselves
• Streaming is neither a radio replacement or a download replacement, it has some of the best of both

As for the legacy of streaming?  Streaming will help make Facebook the most important player in the digital music market by 2013.

Agile Music (the Midem Speech)

For those of you who weren’t able to make it to Midem last week here are the text and main graphics from my Midem Visionary Monday speech.

Agile Music: Artist Creativity and Music Formats In the Age of Mass Customization

Today I want to talk to you about a concept called Agile Music, a framework for understanding how artist creativity, industry business models and music products must all undergo a programme of radical, transformational change.

I’m going to start by outlining the catalysts for this change.

This time last year on this very stage I argued that the digital music market was at an impasse, that momentum was seeping out of the space at an alarming rate.  Unfortunately 2011 lived up to the pessimistic billing.  The market further consolidated around the Triple A of Apple, Amazon and Android and digital revenue growth remained stuck in single digit rates.

The simple fact is that the digital music market should be hitting hockey stick growth curves by now.  And don’t think that hockey stick growth curves only exist in the crazy minds of industry analysts, take a look at this chart: hockey stick growth rates are what the music industry itself used to be used be based on.

This chart also reveals a crucial fact: each time an analogue music format went into decline its successor was already firmly in the ascendency.  The same is patently not true of the digital products and their failure to generate a genuine format succession cycle is dragging the whole market down.

So we had a year once again defined by declining revenues.  And though streaming (especially Spotify) had a fantastic year, we saw the emergence of the debate over whether access based streaming services cannibalize ownership.  The third key trend of 2011 was the emergence of new ecosystems to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iTunes.  Ecosystems from Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, Android.

2011 also saw the first real stirrings of three key trends which will shape 2012: firstly, Social listening: a niche activity thrust into the mainstream by Facebook’s subtly brilliant content dashboard strategy. Open innovation, supercharged by age of the API and connected consumption, powered by increasingly ubiquitous connectivity.  These three trends are also the fundamentals of Agile Music.

And so, onto Agile Music itself.  The access / ownership debate is in fact just one part of a much wider transition in content consumption.  In the analogue era media consumption was characterized by ownership of linearly programmed physical formats that we leant back to consume.  In the digital age we lean forward, interact and value access.

A new generation of music formats is needed that are built for the digital age rather the current ones which essentially squeeze the analogue square into the digital circle.

But just in the same way that HD TV and 3D movies need new content, this new wave of products needs to be built upon an entirely new approach to artist creativity.

Analogue-era music formats shaped artist creativity.  In the 50’s artists recorded singles, in the 70’s 8 song albums, in the 90’s 14 song CDs.  In the 21^st century, well for some reason they’re still recording 14 song albums. When of course there is no music format reason for them to do so anymore.

The other big change is that artists now have at their disposal a much wider range of creative inputs into their music, such as fan forums, social networks, fan remix apps.  Inputs that should be harnessed in a structured manner rather than the ad hoc approach which currently dominates.  And don’t mistake these inputs for just being marketing opportunities, or tactics for boosting ‘engagement metrics’.  They are genuine windows of creativity that artists and their labels simply cannot afford to ignore.

This fan input comes in three key forms, what I call the three Cs of fan-fuelled creativity:  Customize, Create and Contribute.  The degree of fan participation ranges from modest on the left, to deep on the right, because of course all fans are not the same.

These three levels of fan engagement need embedding into the creative process , which you’ve probably realized by now, means a much deeper level of participation for the average artist. I’m not suggesting that everyone has to become Imogen Heap, but the needle certainly needs shifting further along the dial from where it currently sits.

Agile Music means embracing fan fuelled creativity; it means breaking free of the straight jacket of the 14 track album and releasing music when it is ready; it also means releasing some of it before it is ready, to let fans help shape the music .  Agile Music means allowing music fans to customize their music experiences, and for those music experiences to be dynamic and ever changing, free of the stasis of physical media formats.

But a vibrant future for music products and revenues can only occur with networked collaboration right across the music industry’s various value chains.  Artist, labels, developers, technology companies, telcos all need to pull together to create a generation of music formats that will be a genuine successor to the CD.  This collaboration is needed, and it is needed now, because what I am proposing here is merely verbalizing what consumers already expect.

And this is why the future of music products must be built upon a consumer centric Music Format Bill Of Rights, which can be defined by four key principles: Dynamic: they must always change and update with new content (the format stasis of the download and the CD need consigning to the history books); Interactive: empower consumers to participate in their music experiences; Social: music has always been social, now it is massively social and music products must place this at their core; Curated: the curation of dynamically updated music content will not only be part of the key value, it will become part of the creative construct itself.

Now the irony of these principles spelling that most physical of terms DISC is intentional, but make no mistake, these are the basic building blocks that any new music product must contain if it is to have any long term viability.

And to whet your appetite here’s a glimpse of what a DISC product should look like.  It looks a lot like an app experience and for good reason.  The future of music products will be app-like experiences.   . DISC products will leverage the potential of apps to deliver rich, curated streams of artist content incorporating everything from photos, interviews, games, outtakes, remix apps through to core music audio and video itself.  But the central value of DISC products will come from how they are out together. It won’t matter whether kids upload elements up to Rapidshare or Torrents, the value will lie in the uniquely curated context of the product, just as our favourite magazines and websites deliver a value as a whole which is much greater than the sum of their individual parts.

And not only do DISC products compete with piracy, they mitigate the access / ownership debate.   Because DISC products will be artist specific.  Music fans will buy DISC products for each of their favourite artists and then use streaming services for the rest, thus solidifying a complementary and additive role for streaming.  A fan will pay to get everything their favourite artist does for the next 18 months, delivered directly to all of their devices (and I do mean to all of their devices because we are in the per person age, not the per device age, and it is time for licensing practices to embrace this reality).

So to conclude:

– The paradigm shift in consumer behaviour is not just here to stay

– No single part of the music value chain can fix this on their own, and artists must play a more active role

– Music fans already expect D.I.S.C. experiences.  Don’t meet those expectations, exceed them

Now I know that a lot of this is easy enough for me to lay out here on stage but complex to implement.  However the stakes are high enough to justify the sizeable effort.    The next generation of music formats needs to be dictated by the objective of meeting consumer needs, not business affairs teams’ T&Cs.  It must be defined by consumer experiences not by business models.  The cart’ of commercial terms, rights complexities and stakeholder concerns must follow the ‘horse’ of user experience, not lead it.

Release Windows, the Cure for the Access vs Ownership Debate?

Back in early 2009 when I was at Forrester Research I wrote a report proposing that the Music Industry should adopt release windows.  It seemed to many something of an anachronistic concept, written just at the time with the Movie Industry – that bastion of release windows – was deeply engaged in a dialogue about compressing windows.  But now, with the growing debate over whether streaming services are cannibalizing CD and download sales, the idea is beginning to look highly relevant.  Because the simple fact is that a structured release window strategy for the music industry would do away with much of the access versus ownership debate once and for all.

Music products and services need segmenting into distinct windows

The basic structure of my release window argument was that music products and services should be segmented into tiers of priority and then each of those tiers be allocated a release window.  The tiering would work something like this:

• Window 1, week 1: CDs, downloads and premium subscriptions
• Window 2, week 3: Radio (excluding web-only radio)
• Window 3, week 4: Subsidized subscriptions and web radio
• Window 4, week 5: Ad supported streaming services

 

All of the new releases would go straight to Window 1 and be available there, and there alone, for a 2 week period, with terrestrial and digital radio coming after that.  This is a contentious point as radio is of course intended to act as a discovery and marketing tool but the time has come for the top tier of the music product pyramid to be held up as exactly that.  After all, why should passive music fans who don’t pay for music get to hear new songs as soon as those who pay 9.99 a month or buy downloads or CDs?  Users of free ad supported streaming services would have to wait a full 4 weeks before they get to hear the latest new music.

 

The problem with differentiating a free stream from a paid download is that there simply isn’t that much difference.  Release windows however, put clear blue water between the download and the free stream.

Coldplay is already pioneering the window strategy

Coldplay’s decision to keep ‘Mylo Xyloto’ off Spotify until album sales have peaked is effectively artist level windowing in practice.  The alternative strategy of just putting the odd track on there – such as Adele’s ‘Rolling In The Deep – treats streaming as a radio-like promo vehicle but if all artists did that then its promotional value would soon disappear as people would stop using streaming services.  A structured, industry level windowing strategy however would bring consistency and effective results.

 

Of course the windowing approach isn’t free of problems.  For example pushing radio to the second window will require a new approach to marketing music and a revision of assumptions of sales cycles.  However both of those things are already in effect happening, forced along by the current streaming status-quo, and of course unlicensed free music.  Windowing is an opportunity for record labels to take control of the situation and simultaneously protect music sales and define a long term, complementary role for streaming services.  The alternative is a prolonged and unproductive debate about cannibalization that will cause deep fault lines across the music industry and may ultimately kill off streaming all together.

 

 

The Music Format Bill of Rights

Today I have published the latest Music Industry Blog report:  ‘The Music Format Bill Of Rights: A Manifesto for the Next Generation of Music Products’.  The report is currently available free of charge to Music Industry Blog subscribers.  To subscribe to this blog and to receive a copy of the report simply add your email address to the ‘EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION’ box to left.

Here are a few highlights of the report:

Synopsis

The music industry is in dire need of a genuine successor to the CD, and the download is not it. The current debates over access versus ownership and of streaming services hurting download sales ring true because a stream is a decent like-for-like replacement for a download.  The premium product needs to be much more than a mere download.  It needs dramatically reinventing for the digital age, built around four fundamental and inalienable principles of being Dynamic, Interactive, Social and Curated (D.I.S.C.).  This is nothing less than an entire new music format that will enable the next generation of music products.  Products that will be radically different from their predecessors and that will crucially be artist-specific, not store or service specific.  Rights owners will have to overcome some major licensing and commercial issues, but the stakes are high enough to warrant the effort.  At risk is the entire future of premium music products.

D.I.S.C.: The Music Format Bill Of Rights

The opportunity for the next generation of music format is of the highest order but to fulfil that potential , lessons from the current digital music market must be learned and acted upon to ensure mistakes are not repeated.  The next generation of music format needs to be dictated by the objective of meeting consumer needs, not rights owner business affairs teams’ T&Cs.  It must be defined by consumer experiences not by business models.  This next generation of music format will in fact both increase rights owner revenue (at an unprecedented rate in the digital arena) and will fuel profitable businesses.  But to do so effectively, ‘the cart’ of commercial terms, rights complexities and stakeholder concerns must follow the ‘horse’ of user experience, not lead it. This coming wave of music format must also be grounded in a number of fundamental and inalienable principles.  And so, with no further ado, welcome to the Music Format Bill of Rights (see figure):

• Dynamic. In the physical era music formats had to be static, it was an inherent characteristic of the model.  But in the digital age in which consumers are perpetually online across a plethora of connected devices there is no such excuse for music format stasis.  The next generation of music format must leverage connectivity to the full, to ensure that relevant new content is dynamically pushed to the consumer, to make the product a living, breathing entity rather than the music experience dead-end that the download currently represents.
• Interactive. Similarly the uni-directional nature of physical music formats and radio was an unavoidable by-product of the broadcast and physical retail paradigms.  Consumers consumed. In the digital age they participate too.  Not only that, they make content experiences richer because of that participation, whether that be by helping drive recommendations and discovery or by creating cool mash-ups. Music products must place interactivity at their core, empowering the user to fully customize their experience.  We are in the age of Media Mass Customization, the lean-back paradigm of the analogue era has been superseded by the lean-forward mode of the digital age.  If music formats don’t embrace this basic principle they will find that no one embraces them.
• Social. Music has always been social, from the Neolithic campfire to the mixtape.  In the digital context music becomes massively social.  Spotify and Facebook’s partnering builds on the important foundations laid by the likes of Last.FM and MySpace.  Music services are learning to integrate social functionality, music products must have it in their core DNA.
• Curated. One of the costs of the digital age is clutter and confusion: there is so much choice that there is effectively no choice at all.  Consumers need guiding through the bewildering array of content, services and features.  High quality, convenient, curated and context aware experiences will be the secret sauce of the next generation of music formats. These quasi-ethereal elements provide the unique value that will differentiate paid from free, premium from ad supported, legal from illegal.  Digital piracy means that all content is available somewhere for free.  That fight is lost, we are inarguably in the post-content scarcity age.  But a music product that creates a uniquely programmed sequence of content, in a uniquely constructed framework of events and contexts will create a uniquely valuable experience that cannot be replicated simply by putting together the free pieces from illegal sources.  The sum will be much greater than its parts.

Table of Contents for the full 20 page report:

Setting The Scene

• Digital’s Failure To Drive a Format Replacement Cycle

Analysis

• Setting the Scene
• (Apparently) The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized
• The Music Consumption Landscape is Dangerously Out of Balance
• Tapping the Ownership Opportunity
• The Music Format Bill Of Rights
• Applying the Laws of Ecosystems to Music Formats
• Building the Future of Premium Music Products
• D.I.S.C. Products Will Be the Top Tier of Mainstream Music Products
• The Importance of a Multi-Channel Retail Strategy
• Learning Lessons from the Past and Present
• We Are In the Per-Person Age, Not the Per-Device Age

Next Steps

Conclusion

Megaupload: Another Mole Down The Hole

By utterly amazing coincidence, ahem, just as the US Congress is considering Sopa and Pipa, cloud locker service Megaupload gets closed down and its top executives arrested and refused bail.  The timing is of course important, but nature of the media industries’ latest scalp is even more intriguing.  Megaupload, along with Rapidshare, Filestube and other such services, has been more than a thorn in the side of media businesses, it has been making tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions of dollars of annual revenue by essentially sticking the middle finger up at copyright owners.

Megaupload’s closure has wreaked the wrath of the hacker community with Anonymous taking down various sites in retaliation.  But Anonymous’s anger is misjudged.  This is no blow against Internet Users’ rights, and Megaupload is no evangelist for the hacker community.  Napster’s Shawn Fanning thought he was changing the world, the Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde thought he was leading a revolution in copyright.  But Megaupload’s Kim Schmitz (aka Kim Dotcom) had no such ideals, for him it was all about the cash.  Just take a look at the opulent excess of his mansion and fleet of luxury cars with registration plates such as ‘Mafia’ and ‘CEO’.   Schmitz earned his wealth not just through advertising but also by charging users premium fees for better download speeds, thus charging people to download illegal content.

Megaupload et al are an interesting anachronism in the digital piracy landscape.  The overriding trend has been for piracy destinations to get more sophisticated and more difficult to tackle each time the media industries take a step forward.  Think darknets, encrypted P2P applications, anonymous networks etc.  Commercial locker services though are easy targets, typically with central servers and clearly defined commercial operations.  If anything, it is surprising that it has taken so long to get Megaupload taken down.

But as with any piracy victory for the media companies, the sweet taste of triumph will be short lived.  Close down one upload site and another one will arise.  In fact there are already alternative IP addresses for Megaupload circulating around Twitter.

So Megaupload’s takedown is simultaneously a landmark victory and just another furry head smacked downwards in the never ending game of digital-piracy-whack-a-mole.