Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) August 23rd 2019

Taylor Swift, pre-sale love: Taylor Swift tends not to adhere to prevailing industry trends. As a millennial artist with a strong Gen Z following, streaming should rightly be the core of her recordings career. Having started her career very young in the album era, however, she and her fans still love album sales. So, on the eve of her first UMG album ‘Lover’, she has hit one million pre-sales– which is kind of spectacular in the post-album era. Add this to BTS helping push South Korean sales into growth, and we have an emerging trend: pop acts mobilising young fanbases on a global scale to buy albums as a gesture of fandom. 

Apple TV+, on its way: Apple confirmed plans to launch its video subscription service by November, part of a drive to reach $50 billion in service sales by 2020. Services represent 21% of Apple’s revenue and it is making a big deal of transitioning to being a services business. A cynic might argue that of course Apple would say this when iPhone sales are dipping below 50% revenue. While wearables are booming, there is no iPhone successor on the horizon, so services need to drive mid-term growth.

Korn, brutal mosh pit: Nu-metal veterans Korn have announced they are doing virtual gigs in MMO games AdventureQuest 3D and AQWorlds. The band have had characters made of them and they promise a ‘brutal mosh pit’ and an ‘unforgettably brutal, monster-filled virtual rock concert’ – as well as the opportunity to take selfies backstage with the band. Making in-game concerts work is no easy task (look at how long it has been since Marshmello’s Fortnite ‘gig’). But the potential is clear, and they will get easier to do.

Google, privacy fightback: Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy has risen in the agenda. Companies that don’t rely on advertising (Apple in particular) have been able to leverage this to position privacy as a product. Google can’t afford to be a passive observer, as advertising is 83% of its revenue ($33 billion last quarter). Its Chrome team has thus proposed a ‘privacy sandbox’, which aims to deliver accurate targeting for advertisers without compromising user privacy. Blocking cookies can reduce publishers’ ad revenue by half, so Google needs a privacy-friendly version of targeting, fast.

PAOK, licensing brinkmanship: Greek Super League football club PAOK will stream its first match of the season on itsown OTT platform because it hasn’t yet got a licensing deal with national broadcaster ERT. Sports licensing is in an unusual place right now. On the one hand, traditional broadcasters are seeing audiences decline while having to spend more on drama to compete with Netflix (so less to spend on sports), while on the other new streaming players are increasing their spend. Expect more speed bumps like this along the way.

Big Machine (Inadvertently) Just Did a Promo Ad for Label Services Deals

The sales of Taylor Swift’s former label Big Machine Records to Scooter Braun has resulted in an ugly spat that has been played out very publicly. First Braun enthused about acquiring a ‘brilliant’ company and the global ‘opportunities’.Then Swift responded with an open letter saying that Braun had ‘stripped her of her life’s work,before Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta responded saying he had given her the ‘opportunity to own her masters’. The feud clearly has some distance to run but the issues of ‘who got what text message when’ are not the big deal here, the real deal is the big deal.

Whether she likes it or loathes it, Taylor Swift’s catalogue is Big Machine’s asset

Late last year Swift left Big Machine to sign a long-term deal with Universal Music that was most likely a label services deal. At the time she said it was ‘incredibly exciting’ to own her masters. But, however good her UMG deal might be, she is now in a position whereby her recordings are being sold to someone she’d much rather not have ownership of them. In her post she calls this a ‘worst case scenario’. From Big Machine’s perspective, it simply couldn’t sell the company without having either Taylor Swift or her recordings on its balance sheet. Without one of those, the company’s value would have been much lower. Swift may not like the feeling of being someone else’s asset but that is the very nature of what happens when an artist signs a traditional label deal.

Artists now have unprecedented commercial choice

Back in the early 2000s the Beatles wentto court to try to regain ownership of their master recordings because of a dispute with their label. Fast forward to now and we have another massive pop act angered at not having control of their own creation. At one level the world has not changed much, but on another it has done so, and dramatically so. The fact that Swift signed a label services type deal with UMG shows just how much more choice artists have with the type of deals they sign, whether that be label services, joint ventures, distribution deals or combinations of all three. Artists have never been so empowered and so educated. Nor have they ever had so many commercial options, from doing direct distribution with a CDbaby or Amuse, a label services deal with an AWAL or BMG or simply going direct to fans with platforms like Bandcamp.

Big Machine just highlighted the downside of traditional label deals

By allowing the dispute with Swift to become so public, Big Machine has just inadvertently done a promo campaign for label services deals. The more that the media is awash with stories like this, the more that artists will be considering their options. This does not however mean that all artists will be turning down traditional masters deals in favour of label services deal. A label services deal normally means trade-offs. A record label is going to get less, so in return it is going to give less back. Artists have to balance out factors such as smaller advances, lower royalty income, higher risk and bearing costs. For an artist that has spent years building to the point of signing a deal, a fat advance and guaranteed marketing spend will often be a more appealing prospect. Especially when you consider that successful artists will expect recording income to be just a minority of their total music income.

Artists increasingly use labels to build their own artist brands 

In this context, the record label becomes a marketing asset to the artist, a tool with which to become famous enough to ensure that all the other income streams (live, merch, publishing, brand partnerships etc.) kick in. In this era of empowered artists, more artists will be making an informed decision that matches their priorities. If they prioritise creative independence and control, then label services will make most sense. If they value building a large-scale audience fast, they may opt for a traditional label deal. Or they’ll take something in the middle. The bottom line is that there is no standard approach anymore. Any artist signing a deal now that finds themselves five years from now complaining about not having control of their masters will, to put it bluntly, only have themselves to blame. It will have been their choice.

Creator Support: A New Take on User Centric Licensing

User-centric licensing (i.e. stream pay-outs based on sharing the royalty income of an individual user split across the music they listen to) has stimulated a lot of debate. I first explored the concept of user-centric licensing back in 2015and stirred up a hornet nest, with a lot of very mixed feedback. The big issue then, as now, was that it is a very complex concept to implement which may well only have modest impact on a macro level but may also have the unintended consequence of worsening income for smaller artists. Fans of smaller artists tend to be more engaged listeners who generate a larger number of streams spread across a larger number of artists. The net result could be lower average income for smaller indie artists, and higher income for mainstream pop acts who have listeners with lower average streams spread across a smaller number of artists. Since then, Deezer has actively explored the concept and it continues to generate industry discussion. It is unlikely there will ever be consensus on how user-centric licensing should work, but the underlying principle of helping artists earn from their fans remains a valid one. So, here is an alternative approach that is both pragmatic and far simpler to implement: creator support. A new way to solve an old problem.

Creator support is gaining traction across the digital content world

In the on-demand world, monthly streaming income for creators can be both modest and unpredictable. Amuse’s Fast Forward,YouTube’s channel memberships and Patreon are illustrations of how the market is developing solutions to give content creators (especially artists, podcast creators, YouTubers and Twitch streamers) an effective way to supplement income. But it is Epic Game’s ‘Support-A-Creator’ model that provides the best example of an alternative to user-centric licensing. Epic Games enables Fortnite players to choose a favourite creator to support (which typically means YouTube and Twitch Fortnite players). Epic Games then contributes the equivalent of around 5% of all in-app purchases that the gamer makes to that creator.

How creator support can work for music streaming

Using Spotify and a selection of artists as an illustration, here is how a creator support approach could work for streaming music:

• All Spotify subscribers get given the option to ‘support’ up to two of their favourite artists
• For each artist that a subscriber supports, 1% of the record label royalties derived from that subscriber’s subscription fee goes directly to the artist, regardless of how many streams that user generates
• The label of each artist then pays 100% of this ‘support’ income

To illustrate how creator support can work, we created a model using Spotify and a selection of diverse artists. We assumed that 75% of Spotify subscribers support an average of 1.5 artists. In the above chart we took five contemporary frontline artists across major labels and label services, and we assumed that 10% of their monthly Spotify listeners support them. Factoring the different types of deals and royalty rates these artists have, as well as the ratios between average monthly streams and monthly listeners, there is an intriguing range of revenue impact that creator support delivers. For Taylor Swift (on a major deal, but one in which she held the negotiating whip hand), Lauv and Rex Orange Country (both on Kobalt label services deals) the creator support income is between 18% and 22% of their existing streaming royalties from Spotify. For Billie Eilish and Circa Waves, both on their first major label deals, creator support income would represent a much larger 78% and 65% of streaming royalties. The rate is higher for Billie Eilish as she has a higher streams-to-listeners ratio.

Artists get paid more with minimal impact on the wider royalty pot

Putting aside the irony that this approach would help put many major label artists more on par with what label services and independent artists earn from streaming, the clear takeaway is that creator support can be an effective way of fans ensuring that some of their streaming spending directly benefits their favourite artists. Because we have structured the model to be just 1% per artist (rather than Fortnite’s 5%) the net impact on the total label royalty pot is minimal. Applying the above assumptions to Spotify’s 2018 label payments, the royalty pot (and therefore per-stream rates) would reduce by just 1.13%, meaning that non-supported artists would feel negligible impact.

We think the creator-approach model enables labels and streaming services to deliver on the ambition of user-centric licensing without the complexities and unintended inequities. But perhaps most importantly, it helps put artists and fans closer together, bringing the pledging model to the mainstream.

Let us know what you think. Also, we’ve added the excel model to this post for you to download and test your own assumptions against it.

MIDiA Research Streaming Creator Support Model 4 – 19

Taylor Swift, Label Services and What Comes Next

Taylor Swift has done it again, striking a deal with UMG that includes a commitment from the world’s largest label group to share proceeds from Spotify stock sales with artists, even if they are not recouped (ie haven’t generated enough revenue to have paid off the balance on their advance so not yet eligible to earn royalty income). This follows Swift’s 2015 move to persuade Apple to pay artists for Apple Music trials. That Swift has influence is clear, though whether she has that much influence is a different question. Let’s just say it served both Apple and Universal well to be seen to be listening to the voice of artists. But it is what appears to be a label services part of the deal that has the most profound long-term implications, with Swift stating that she is retaining ownership of her master recordings.

The rise of label services

The traditional label model of building large banks of copyrights and exploiting them is slowly being replaced, or at the very least complemented, by the rise of label services deals. In the former model the label retains ownership of the master recordings for the life time of the artist plus a period eg 70 years. In label services deals the label has an exclusive period for exploiting the rights, after which they revert to full ownership of the artist. Artist normally cede something in return, such as sharing costs. Companies like Kobalt’s AWAL and BMG Music Rights have led the charge of the label services movement. However, Cooking Vinyl can lay claim to being the ‘ice breaker’ with its pioneering 1993 label services deal with Billy Bragg, negotiated between his manager Pete Jenner and Cooking Vinyl boss Martin Goldschmidt. It may have taken a couple of decades, but the recording industry has finally caught up.

Major labels in on the act

The major labels remain the powerhouses of the recorded music business in part because they have learned to embrace and then supercharge innovation that comes out of the independent sector. Label services is no exception. Each of the major labels has their own label services division, including buying up independent ones. Label services are proving to be a crucial asset for major labels. The likes of AWAL and BMG have been mopping up established artists in the latter stages of their careers, with enough learned knowledge to want more control over their careers. By adding label services divisions the majors now have another set of options to present to artists. This enables them to not only hold onto more artists but also to win new ones – which if of course technically what UMG did with Swift, even though it had previously been Swift’s distributor. As with all new movements, examples are often few and far between but they are there. The UK’s Stormzy is a case in point, signing a label services deal with WMG before upgrading it to a JV deal between WMG’s Atlantic Records and his label #MERKY. For an interesting, if lengthy, take on why Stormzy and WMG took this approach – including the concept of secret ‘Mindie Deals’ that allow more underground artists maintain some major label distance for appearances’ sake, see this piece.

The early follower strategy 

In August 2018UMG’s Sir Lucian Grainge called out the success of UMG’s label services and distribution division Caroline, noting it had doubled its US market share over the previous year. UMG was already not only on the label services deal path but had identified it as a key growth area and wanted the world – including investors – to know. UMG has stayed ahead of the pack by pursuing an early follow strategy of identifying new trends, testing them out and then throwing its weight behind them. Before you think of that as damning with faint praise, the early follower strategy is the one pursued by the world’s most successful companies. Google wasn’t the first search engine, Apple wasn’t the first smartphone maker, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, Amazon wasn’t the first online retailer.

What comes next

The label services component of the UMG deal was actually announced by Taylor Swift herself rather than UMG, writing:

“It’s also incredibly exciting to know that I own all of my master recordings that I make from now on. It’s really important to me to see eye to eye with a label regarding the future of our industry.”

While this might betray which party feels most positive about this component of the deal, the inescapable fact is that other major artists at the peak of their powers will now want similar deals. Label services success stories to date had been older artists such as Rick Astley, Janet Jacksonand Nick Cave as well as upcoming artists like Stormzy. Now we will start to see them becoming far more commonplace in the mainstream.

But perhaps now is the time. Catalogue revenues are going to undergo big change in the coming years, as MIDiA identified in our June 2018 report The Outlook for Music Catalogue: Streaming Changes Everything. Deep catalogue is not where the action is anymore. For example, 1960s tracks accounted for just 6.4% of all UK catalogue streams in the UK in 2017, while catalogue from the 2000s accounted for 60.4%, according to the BPI’s invaluable All About the Music report. So, by striking a long-term label services type deal, UMG secures Swift’s signature and can still benefit from the main catalogue opportunity for the first few releases without actually owning the catalogue.

Label services have come a long way since Billy Bragg’s 1993 deal and Taylor Swift has just announced that they are ready for prime time.

Penny for the thoughts of Bill Bragg having paved the way for the queen of pop’s latest deal….

Understanding ’15’: How Record Labels And Artists Can Fix Their YouTube Woes

The artist-and-labels-versus-YouTube crisis is going to run and run, even if some form of settlement is actually reached…the divisions and ill feeling run too deep to be fixed solely by a commercial deal. What’s more, a deal with better rates won’t even fix the underlying commercial problems. Music videos under perform on YouTube because they don’t fit YouTube in 2016 in the way they did YouTube in 2010. The 4 minute pop video was a product of the MTV broadcast era and still worked well enough when online video was all about short clips. But the world has moved on, as has short form video (in its new homes Snapchat, Musical.ly and Vine). Short videos are no longer the beating heart of YouTube viewing and quite simply they don’t make the money anymore. This is why music videos represent 30% of YouTube plays but just 12% of YouTube time. If record labels, publishers, performers and songwriters want to make YouTube pay, they need to learn how to play by the new rules. And to do that they need work out what to do with ‘15’.

There Is A Lot More To YouTube Revenue Than Some Would Have You Think

The recorded music industry gets radio, and it is beginning to get streaming. Both are all about plays. Each play has, or should have, an intrinsic value. They are models with some degree of predictability. But YouTube does not work that way, which is why the whole per stream comparison thing just does not add up. In MIDiA’s latest report ‘The State Of The YouTube Music Economy’ we revealed that YouTube’s effective per stream rates (that is rights holder revenue divided by streams) halved from $0.0020 in 2014 to $0.0010 in 2015.

Sounds terrible right? And make no mistake, there is no way to spin it into a good news story. However, it didn’t fall because of some nefarious Google ploy. It fell because of many complex reasons (all of which we explore in the report) but the 2 biggest macro causes were:

• YouTube pays out as a share of ad revenue (55%) not on a per stream basis. So when the value of its ad inventory goes down (due to factors such as more views coming from emerging markets with weaker ad markets) the revenue per stream goes down too. This is something the labels can do little about, though an increased revenue share will soften the blow as YouTube globalizes.
• YouTube serves its in-stream video ads (the most value ad format) on a time-spent basis, not on a per-video basis. Our research found that the average number of video ads per hour of viewing comes out at about 4. That means if you have 15 minute videos (like many YouTubers do) you will get a video ad every play. But if you have 3 or 4 minute pop videos you may only get 1 video ad for every 4 or 5 plays. Which means 4 or 5 times less video ad revenue. In fact, our research revealed that just 26% of music video views have video ads. This is the underlying issue the industry needs to address, and unlike global ad market dynamics, this is something it can indeed fix.

The 15 Scale

This is where the magic number 15 comes in. Right now music video sits in the same 3-4 minute slot it has done so ever since MTV said it wanted videos that length. Yet video consumption is now polarized between the 15 second clip on lip synch apps like Musical.ly and Dubsmash and 15 minute YouTuber clips. Falling in between these two ends is revenue no-mans land. As I have written about before, labels and publishers need to figure out how to harness the 15 second clip as an entirely new creative construct and shake off any old world concepts that this is actually anything about marketing and discovery. It is consumption, plain and simple…it just happens to look unlike anything we’ve seen before.

At the opposite end of the 15 scale labels and artists need to start thinking about what 15 minute formats they can make. Think of this as a blank canvas – the possibilities are limitless. For example:

• 3 track ‘EP’ videos interspersed with artist narrative and reportage coverage
• Live sessions (recorded by, and uploaded by labels so they get revenue as well as publishers)
• Mini-documentaries such as ‘the making of’s
• On-the-road features

15 Minutes Does Not Have To Break The Bank

And before you cry out ‘but this stuff will cost so much more to make’, it doesn’t have to if more is made out of current assets and processes. For example, ensure that one of the support crew has a handheld camera to film some shoulder footage for reportage. The whole thing about YouTube is that it doesn’t have to be super high production quality, in fact the stuff that does best patently isn’t. YouTube videos that work best are those that are an antidote to the old world of inaccessible glamour. If you really want to do things on the cheap, simply splice three music videos together into a single long form video (e.g. tag 2 older tracks onto the new single). Doing so will nearly treble the video ad income.

And before you think this isn’t what audiences want, ask Apple about ‘The 1989 World Tour LIVE’ and Tidal about ‘Lemonade’.

And (yes another ‘and’) if you can’t get your head around the inescapable need for a completely new music video construct, just think about it this way: 15 minute videos will make you 5 times more video ad revenue. This really is a ‘no brainer’.

Back To The Future

As a final piece of evidence (not that it is needed), cast your mind all the way back to 1982, to Michael Jackson’s landmark video ‘Thriller’. A 13:42 video that is widely recognized as one of the all time music video greats that has also racked up 330 million views on Vevo. So you could say the case for 15 minute video was already made a quarter of a century ago (thanks to MIDiA’s Paid Content Analyst Zach Fuller for pointing that one out).

The 4 minute music video is dead, long live the 15 minute music video.

For more detail on our ‘State Of The YouTube Music Economy’ report check out our blog.

You can also buy the 25 page report with 8 page data set here.

Why Streaming Doesn’t Really Matter For Adele

The outstanding success of Adele’s single ‘Hello’ has stoked up the already eager debate around whether Adele’s forthcoming ‘25’ album is going to be a success.  Indeed some are asking whether it is going to ‘save the industry’. One of the aspects that is getting a lot of attention is whether the album is going to be held back from some or all of the streaming services.  The parallels with Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ are clear, especially because both Swift and Adele are strong album artists, which is an increasingly rare commodity these days. But the similarities do not go much further.  In fact the two artists have dramatically different audience profiles which is why streaming plays a very different role for Adele than it does for Swift.

Lapsed Music Buyers Were Key To the Success Of ‘21’

Adele’s ’21’ was a stand out success, selling 30 million copies globally.  Core to ‘21’s commercial success was that the album touched so many people and in doing so pulled lapsed and infrequent music buyers out of the woodwork.  The question is whether the feat can be repeated? In many respects it looks a tall ask.  We’re 4 years on since the launch of ‘21’ and the music world has changed.  Music sales revenue (downloads and CDs) have fallen by a quarter while streaming revenues have tripled.  And the problem with pulling lapsed and infrequent buyers out of the woodwork is that they have receded even further 4 years on.  In fact a chunk of them are gone for good as buyers.

But beneath the headline numbers the picture is more nuanced (see graphic).  Looking at mid-year 2015 consumer data from the US we can see that music buyers (i.e. CD buyers and download buyers) are still a largely distinct group from free streamers (excluding YouTube).  While this may seem counter intuitive it is in fact evidence of the twin speed music consumer landscape that is emerging.  This is why ‘Hello’ was both a streaming success (the 2nd fastest Vevo video to reach 100m views) and a sales success (the first ever song to sell a million downloads in one week in the US).  These are two largely distinct groups of consumers.

Streaming A Non-Issue?

As a reader of this blog you probably live much or most of your music life digitally, but for vast swathes of the population, including many music buyers, this is simply not the case.  Given that the mainstream audience was so key to ‘21’s success we can make a sensible assumption that many of these will also fall into the 27% of consumers that buy music but do not stream.  The implication is thus that being on streaming really is not that big of a deal for ‘25’ one way or the other.  Whereas Taylor Swift’s audience is young and streams avidly, Adele’s is not.  That is not to say there aren’t young Adele fans, of course there are, but they are a far smaller portion of Adele’s fan base than Swift’s.

60% of 16-24 year olds stream while just 20% buy CDs.  Compare that to 40-50 year olds where 34% stream and 43% buy CDs.  These are dramatically different audiences which require dramatically different strategies.  Audio streaming is unlikely to be a major factor either way for Adele, neither in terms of lost sales nor revenue.  Unless of course she ‘does a Jazy-Z‘ or ‘does a U2’ and takes a big fat cheque from Apple to appear exclusively on Apple Music.  But I’d like to think she’d like to think she’d have the confidence of earning sales the real way.

The Importance Of The Digitally Engaged Super Fan

What unites Swift and Adele is that they are both mass market album artists and as such are something of a historical anomaly.  Swift bucked the trend by making an album targeted at Digital Natives shift more than 8 million units.  Adele will likely also buck the trend.  But paradoxically, considering the above data, in some ways it will be a harder task for Adele.  Swift has a very tightly defined, super engaged fan base that identifies itself with her.  Adele’s fanbase is more amorphous and pragmatic.  You don’t get ‘Adelle-ettes’.  Swift was able to mobilise her fanbase into music buying action like a presidential candidate with a passionate grassroots following and big donors.  The importance of digitally engaged super fans is the secret sauce of success for digital era creators.  It is the exact same dynamic that ensured UK YouTuber Joe Sugg was able to leverage his fanbase to give his debut book ‘Codename Evie’ the biggest 1st week sales for graphic novel EVER in the UK this year.

If Adele and her team do pull off a sales success with ‘25’ they will owe a debt of gratitude to that 27% of consumers.  While the odds are against it being quite as big as ‘21’ (simply because the market is smaller) it still has every chance of being a milestone event that will out perform everything else.  But do not mistake that for this being ‘Adele saves the music industry’.  Album sales are declining.  Success from Taylor Swift and Adele are (welcome) throwbacks and they are most certainly not a glimpse into the future.

Making YouTube Pay: YouTubers Versus Bands

This is the second in a series of YouTube generation posts. See the first one here.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Generation Edge – the under 16 millennials – and how they are driving an entire new subculture of YouTube stars that throw the traditional fandom rulebook out of the window. One of the intriguing paradoxes (or at least apparent paradoxes) is how a generation of native YouTube stars can create both vast audiences and revenue while for music artists YouTube is simply a place to build awareness and probably lose net revenue due to YouTube streams cannibalizing paid streams. So how can the model both be broken (for music) and yet buoyant for native YouTuber creators?

PewDiePie And Taylor Swift

Compare and contrast the biggest earner in music with the biggest earner on YouTube.   Taylor Swift netted $39.7 million in 2014, compared to $7.4 million for PewDiePie. Seems like a slam-dunk for music right? Except when you start digging a little all is not quiet what it seems. Swift’s numbers are gross revenue so include the revenue earned by everyone else (record labels, promoters, ticket agencies, venues etc.). Let’s say she earns a third of that income which would equate to $12 million (and before anyone suggests it should be higher given her relationship with her label Big Machine ¾ of her revenue came from live in 2014). So suddenly the difference doesn’t look quite so big. Then consider that PewDiePie’s $7.4 million refers just to his YouTube ad revenue and doesn’t take into account his live appearances income or his merch revenue. And, perhaps most importantly, the cost of earning that income was negligible. PewDiePie’s audience is right there on YouTube and his videos are home made. The cost of production, distribution and marketing are close to non-existent. The exact opposite is true of breaking a release like Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’. It’s no secret that most big labels lose money on lots of their bigger front line releases, relying upon a few massive successes and the steady income from back catalogue to pay the bills.

10 Billion Views And Counting

PewDiePie just passed 10 billion views three weeks ago and has 39.9 million subscribers – that’s one for every (gross) dollar that Taylor Swift earned in 2014. Anyway you look at it, those numbers are big. Game Of Thrones, which can lay claim to being one of the mainstream media success stories of the moment, has clocked up around 700 million total views globally over the course of 5 series. And while traditional media apologists will argue that you cannot compare a PewDiePie view with a GoT view try telling a PewDiePie subscriber that their viewing is somehow less worthwhile because it is more than weekly and doesn’t come from a traditional TV set.

Taylor Swift of course also has a pretty hefty YouTube / Vevo presence too, with 16.5 million subscribers and 6.3 billion views. But while she has 20 videos available PewDiePie has nearly 2,500. And therein lies one of the key differences. PewDiePie lives on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. His focus is making content regularly for his audience and engaging directly with them. YouTubers typically make multiple videos every week and often multiply that across multiple different channels. Try squeezing that in around touring, recording, writing sessions, media work etc. Swift, unlike many big pop artists, also knows how to do the native YouTube thing too and has had her own, non-Vevo, YouTube channel since 2006, posting 136 videos there to date. But in stark contrast to her Vevo channel Swift has just 1.4 million YouTube channel subscribers. So even one of the most YouTube-centric of pop artists that also happens to be one of the biggest pop acts on the planet right now simply doesn’t have the time, positioning nor content to compete with a shouty gamer from Sweden.

YouTube Is Generation Edge’s Destination Of Choice

So where does all this leave artists and YouTube. Unless bands want to ditch the guitars and start doing Minecraft commentary videos, becoming a full-on native YouTube creator simply isn’t feasible for most artists. But there absolutely is middle ground between the dominant focus on seeing YouTube simply as a marketing channel for music videos, and the native creator route. Part of the solution is seeing YouTube for what it actually is. It is not a video platform, or a marketing platform, it is one of the most important destinations for Millennials of all ages, especially Generation Edge. It is at once a social network, a TV network, a fun place to hang out, a discovery destination, a place where they can simply be themselves and feel connected. YouTube is all of that and more. In fact the breadth and depth of content means that it is everything to all people.

The Value Of An Authentic Voice

Treating YouTube simply as a marketing channel not only underplays its potential but it also completely misses what it means to your target audience. PewDiePie, Zoella, Stampy, Michelle Phan are all so successful because they speak directly with their YouTube audiences in an authentic voice that communicates that it is the here and now that matters. That it is about the moment not simply an attempt to try to get the viewer to go somewhere else to do something else. Authenticity is a priceless commodity and native YouTube creators have it in spades. That is the currency of the YouTube generation.

Taylor Swift, Streaming And The Changing Tide

Taylor Swift made big waves over the weekend with her open letter to Apple protesting it should pay for its 3 month free trial.  Her voice was just one more following protests from across the indie community of which Swift and her label are both members. But it turned out that her voice was the loudest and Apple’s Eddy Cue swiftly announced a u-turn on Apple’s free trial pay outs. This is just one more twist in the much bigger streaming story but it does highlight some interesting dynamics, not least of which is how Swift’s worldview differs from many of her contemporaries.

Taylor Swift’s Sales Outlook Is Surprisingly Old School

As paradoxical as it may sound for such a digitally savvy artist as Taylor Swift, she is in fact from the old school when it comes to recorded music.  Swift started her career so early – she signed her first label deal when she was just 14 years old – that she is effectively further into her recording career than most successful 30 something artists.  So she is an album era artist who, with her label Big Machine, managed to build a long-standing successful music sales career.  Streaming, with all of its substitutive impact on sales, does not fit well with the Swift / Big Machine model.   In many respects Swift’s recorded music worldview has more in common with artists of Coldplay’s generation than it does hers.  The contrast with successful contemporary mainstream pop artists is stark. The take of Ed Sheeran (who is just one year younger than Swift) on the role of recorded music is “I’m in the music industry to play live. That’s why I make records” while Calvin Harris (currently romantically linked with Swift) is famously a co-owner of streaming platform TIDAL.  Both of those artists have been supremely successful on Spotify and neither has a decade of platinum selling albums behind them.  For them, streaming is simply how it is and they are learning how to make that work.

Streaming Is Fundamentally Substitutive

None of this is to belittle the hugely disruptive impact of going from a sales model which guaranteed up front revenue to an access model where revenue is fractionalised over many years.  In the sales era a purchased album generated $10 of gross revenue whether it was listened to once or a thousand times.  In a streaming service an album that is listened to once generates $0.10 and only reaches $10 when listened to a hundred times.  If you are a superstar artist you can probably swallow the near term pain because a) your streaming volumes are in the billions so the pennies add up and b) you make the majority of your money from playing live.  If you are a smaller artist the outlook is bleaker for getting through the transition period i.e. until streaming services are big enough to ensure a high tide rises all boats.

Live Is Where The $$ Are For Superstars

Interestingly for Swift, for all her sales success, live is also where she makes her money.  She ranks as the highest earning artist on Billboard’s top earners list with $39 million but $30 million of that came from live.  She explains in her post that “[I] can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows” and that she is raising her voice for “the new artist or band that has just released their first single”.  This may well be the case but she is also very much doing this for her label Big Machine Records (which doesn’t get to benefit in any truly meaningful way from Swift’s live revenue).   Swift’s rise to prominence and continued success is intrinsically linked to that of her label Big Machine Records and it is fully understandable why she has been so perfectly aligned with Big Machine’s stance on streaming.  But it is a position nonetheless.

Apple Doesn’t Need Any Commercial Bail Outs To Launch Apple Music

None of this though detracts from the core issue at stake here, namely Apple not paying for a 3 month free trial.  Apple is in the business of selling music in order to sell hardware.  Apple’s primary concern is not what % of iTunes sales become substituted by free trials (near term) and subscriptions (long term) but instead how it helps them gain and retain device buyers. Swift, Big Machine and the rest have very good reason for being very cautious with Apple’s streaming strategy.  Apple is the leading source of digital music sales and accounted for approximately $2.8 billion of music sales revenue in 2014, or 40% of all digital music revenue.  If Spotify messes up a free trial the labels risk slowing the rate of new streaming revenue growth.  If Apple messes it up the money that keeps the lights on is at risk.

Apple doesn’t need any financial assistance in launching Apple Music (it does after all have $178 billion in cash reserves) but it does need careful attention from labels and artists alike to ensure it gets the strategy right. Whatever the outcome though the streaming transition is an inevitability and Taylor Swift is no more able to hold it back than King Canute was able to hold back the tide.

Streaming Report Card 2014

2014 was the year streaming broke through to mainstream consciousness, not because of the marketing prowess of Spotify but because Taylor Swift decided to withdraw her content from the Swedish streaming heavyweight and other freemium services. It was a mixed year of momentous achievement and intensifying controversy, which makes it an opportune moment for an end of term report card.

Growth – 8/10

No complaints here. Impressive growth for both paid and free streaming with a likely combined annual growth of about 50% and total subscribers getting to about 35 million. Although there are some signs of slowdown this is to be expected as much of the addressable audience for the 9.99 price point is reached. In fact the growth slowdown was less pronounced than expected in some markets. If it hadn’t been for the fact that download sales for the year will be down about 10% this would have been a 9/10.

Transparency – 2/10

Two years ago I asked the CEOs of 10 leading streaming companies what the coming years would hold. Unfortunately for 5 of them it meant looking for a new job. One thing most were in agreement on however was the need to introduce far greater transparency for artists. Two years on and the issue is every bit as problematic. For the most part the discontent has been voiced by smaller artists or those later in their careers, but not by frontline artists in their prime. Until last week that is, when Ed Sheeran told the BBC that it is ‘fact’ that labels are holding money back from artists. Some time soon, some time very soon, labels are going to have to get on top of this if they want the model to work.

Platform – 5/10

I had high hopes for Spotify’s app platform, it looked like it was heralding the dawn of the ‘music platform’ that the digital market has needed, well, forever. Unfortunately label wrangling ensured that Spotify was not able to get the deals to allow app developers to monetize their apps so the venture was effectively still born, save for the highly credible efforts of some traditional media brands, such as the BBC, Now! And Deutsche Grammophon who didn’t have to worry about making money from the apps. Luckily the streaming companies haven’t given up on the ‘streaming as a platform’ vision and a host of integrations with the likes of Bandpage and PledgeMusic have the potential to help artists transform streaming cents into digital dollars.

Pricing – 3/10

I’ve been banging the pricing drum for so long the stick has broken. Unfortunately there was pitifully little progress in 2014, with label fears of cannibalising 9.99 dominating thoughts. On the plus side there is a huge amount of negotiating activity taking place right now and that should bear fruit in 2015. Expect Apple to try to get to market with the same 7.99 that YouTube’s Music Key is currently in market with (and expect that short term promotion for YouTube to eventually become permanent). And if 7.99 is the new 9.99 then prices will have to cascade. 4.99 will be the new 3.99, 3.99 will become 2.99 and so forth. And there remains the super urgent need for PAYG pricing leveraging in app payments. I predicted pricing innovation in 2012 and 2013 and it didn’t happen. Here’s to third time lucky.

Global expansion – 6/10

Deezer had already set a great precedent for rolling out into a vast number of global territories and Spotify played an admirable game of catch up in 2013 which continued with another five new countries in 2014. Rdio’s acquisition of Indian streaming service Dhingana was another interesting move.  Meaningful revenue is yet to follow in these Rest of World markets though – the US and Europe accounted for more than four fifths of global streaming revenue in 2014.  But the foundations have been laid and that in itself is an important step worthy of credit.

Sustainability – 4/10

The ripple effects of Taylor Swift’s windowing antics will be felt throughout 2015 with countless other big artists and their managers already making it very clear to labels that they want to do the same. The sooner Spotify can agree to having the free tier treated as a distinct window the sooner the streaming space can start rebuilding.   The whole ‘changing download dollars into streaming cents’ issue continues to haunt streaming though. And with streaming services struggling to see a route to operational profitability the perennial issue of sustainability remains a festering wound. The emerging generation of artists such as Avicii and Ed Sheeran who have never known a life of platinum album sales will learn how to prosper in the streaming era. The rest will have to learn to reinvent themselves, fast, really fast.

Overall Streaming gets a 6/10 for a year that saw huge progress but also the persistence of perennial problems that must be fixed for the sector to succeed.

Why It Is Time To Make YouTube Look Less Like Spotify And More Like Pandora

2014 has been a dramatic year for the music industry and may prove to be one of its most significant. The brief history of digital music is peppered with milestones such as Napster rising its head in 1999, the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, Spotify in 2008. The 2014 legacy looks set to be more nuanced but equally important: it is the year in which streaming started to truly transform the music industry. The significance though lies in how the music industry is responding. With download sales tumbling, royalty rates still being questioned, and Taylor Swift’s hugely publicised windowing, the music industry is taking a long hard look at what role streaming should play. Spotify and Soundcloud will find themselves in the cross hairs, but there is also a case for redefining YouTube’s remit too.

Don’t Throw Out Freemium With the Windowing Bathwater 

Swift’s windowing move centred around free streaming. If Spotify had been willing to treat the free tier as a separate window from its paid tier, the odds are it would have got ‘1989’. Spotify’s argument that weakening the free tier could affect their ability to convert is logical. But ultimately the purpose of the free tier is to persuade people to pay to stream, not to deliver a fantastic free experience. I first made the case for windowing back in 2009 and I remain convinced it will be crucial to long term success.

By playing an all-or-nothing negotiating game freemium services risk being left with the latter. And it would be a tragedy if freemium got thrown out with the windowing bath water. Windowing will quite simply make free tiers more palatable. Windowing can drive huge success. Look at Netflix: with 50 million subscribes gloably Netflix has the traditional broadcast industry running scared yet is far more heavily windowed than Spotify – how many new movies do you find on Netflix?

One Rule For YouTube Another For The Rest

But the core problem is that Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. While Swift windowed Spotify her videos stayed on YouTube and Vevo. Unless YouTube is treated with a similar approach to other free services then any windowing efforts will simply drive more traffic to YouTube rather than drive more sales or subscriptions. 5 years ago a YouTube stream could be seen as driving sales, now a YouTube stream drives another YouTube stream.

Among the Top 10 fastest growing YouTube channels (in terms of views), half are music. More people are streaming more music on YouTube than ever. The reason YouTube remains untouchable has much to do with the fact labels still see it as a promotional vehicle despite the fact it has become a fully fledge consumption platform. Without doubt YouTube plays the discovery role for youth that radio does for older generations. But it is also the end point for youth.

Time For A New Role For YouTube

So what is the solution? Simple. If YouTube is the radio equivalent for youth, make it look and feel more like radio, not like Spotify premium with video. Instead, make YouTube look like Pandora with video. If YouTube is all about promotion then swap out unlimited on demand mobile plays for DMCA compliant stations. Let any user search and discover a new song but once they have discovered it the next few music videos are automatically selected related videos.

I remember Beggars’ Martin Mills quoting music industry veteran Rob Dickens:

‘If you play what I want when I want I’ll accept it is promotion. If it is what you want when you want it is business.’

That is at the core of what makes a streaming service additive versus substitutive. This is why Pandora stands out as a complement to ‘sales’ revenue and why YouTube no longer can. If YouTube’s core value to the music business is still discovery then this approach is how that role can be protected without damaging the ability of subscription services to proposer.

Do Not Conflate Music Key With YouTube

Now of course, YouTube has its own subscription service too in the form of Music Key, which is great: YouTube is a hugely welcome addition to the subscription market. But this does not mean YouTube music videos should be free on demand to all. Only 3% of UK and US consumers say they would pay for Music Key (and consumer surveys typically over report on intent to purchase).   Instead, YouTube’s free on demand music videos should be only available for users that register for Music Key. This would be Music Key’s freemium base, not the entire installed base of YouTube users.

With on demand free music it is all about the conversion path: how many of those consumers that listen for free are likely to pay. With YouTube’s 1 billion users it is a tiny per cent so there is little business rationale for letting them take the Ferrari out for a test drive when they are only ever going to get the bus.

Is 9.99 too expensive for most free music users? Of course it is. Should PAYG options be added in to the mix? Yes, absolutely. But none of those will work unless the music industry takes a consistent and fair approach to freemium.

Turning YouTube into a video enabled Pandora is clearly a controversial proposal and it will have huge opposition. It may even cause some meaningful disruption in the mid term, but unless equally meaningful change is made the music industry will remain locked on course to a future in which subscription services will never be able to realise their full potential.