Who will own the virtual concert space?

2020 will go down as a rough year for many artists, largely because of the income they lost when live ground to a halt. Unfortunately, the live music sector is still going to be disrupted in 2021 and it may take even longer for the sector to return to ‘normal’. In fact, we could see the bottom of the live sector thinned out as the smaller venues, agencies and promoters do not have the access to bridging finance that the bigger players have. So, smaller artists may find the face of live permanently changed for them in a way that larger artists do not. Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: live music is not going to be the same again, and the innovations in virtual and streamed events are not simply a band-aid to get us through tough times. Instead, they are the foundations for permanent additions to the live music mix. The big unanswered question is, who is going own the live-streamed and virtual concert sector?

Bringing it all together

One of the most important things digital tech does is to bring things together. The smartphone is a perfect example. 20 years ago people switched between phones, calendars, diaries, computers, maps, phones, music players, DVD players etc. Now these are all in one device. Streaming did the same to music, taking radio, retail, music collections and music players and putting them together into one unified experience. Until now, live music was not subject to streaming’s great assimilation process. But COVID-19 changed all that. Live used to be separate because it required logistical assets like buildings, ticketing operations, relationships etc. The last few months have shown us that the virtual live sector can operate entirely independent of the traditional sector’s frameworks – which is one of the reasons so much innovation and experimentation has happened. Sure, lots of the early stuff was scrappy and of patchy quality, but is through mistakes that we learn the right way forward. Thus, we have new companies like Driift emerging to bring a more structured and professional approach to a fast-growing but nascent sector.

Disruption is coming

The big traditional live companies right now may be most concerned about whether the still-dormant venues are looking at the new ticketing models being deployed with the likes of Dice and wondering whether they can rethink their entire way of doing business when they reopen. While that may trigger what could prove to be the biggest-ever shift in the live business, the virtual part of the business is where the money is flowing right now: Melody VR bought pioneering but struggling streaming service Napster, Scooter Braun invested in virtual concert company Wave and Tidal bought seven million dollars’ worth of access into virtual concert ‘space’ Sensorium. Virtual reality (VR) spent much of the last couple of years in the trough of disillusionment but now COVID-19’s catalysing impact may see it starting to crawl onwards and upwards. Prior to COVID-19 VR was a technology searching for a purpose. COVID-19 has created one. This is not to say that all of VR’s prior failings no longer matter – they do – but it at least has a set of music use cases to build on. VR can now realistically aspire to be a meaningful component of the wider virtual event sector.

Streaming+

It is no coincidence that streaming is playing a key role. Nor is it just the smaller streaming services at play – Spotify has built the tech infrastructure for live events, while Apple is introducing artificial reality (AR) into Apple TV+, so it is not too big a leap to assume Apple Music AR experiences will follow. Live was the last major component of the music business that streaming could not reach, and that is all about to change. The value proposition for music fans is clear: why go to multiple different places for all your favourite music experiences when they can all be in one place? Think of it as Streaming+. Whatever the future of live is going to be, we can be certain about one thing: it will never be the same again.

The Music Industry’s Next Five Growth Drivers

The risk with trying to imagine what the future might look like is to simply think it is going to be a brighter, shinier version of today. At this precise moment in time, this has perhaps never been truer.

The COVID-19 lockdowns were a seismic shock to the economy, one which will take months, possibly years to recover from. Entertainment consumption patterns have been transformed, with some need states becoming void states in an instant, while new ones have filled their place.

Whether COVID-19 goes for good in the coming months or whether it is with us for years to come, some behaviour patterns have changed for good, creating new opportunities, many of which (e.g. virtual events) have yet to be properly monetised. So at a time when it seems that the whole world is creating music forecasts, it is now the time to think about what comes next rather than just predicting how big the long established revenue streams will get.

With streaming growth slowing and creators feeling short changed, it is time to think about what plan B is, for the sakes of both the industry and the creator community.

At MIDiA we are currently compiling our music industry forecasts with a lot of detailed work being put into estimating how COVID-19 and the coming recession will impact a revenue growth. We’re modelling everything from ARPU, churn, net adds, and disposable income patterns through to store closures. We’re confident that this new methodology will make our already reliable forecasts even better (for the record our 2019 subscription forecasts with within 4.5% of the actual figures).

We’re also going to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and over the course of the year forecast some new revenue streams for which a comprehensive set of historical data does not exist. This means our chances of making incorrect calls is higher, but we’re doing it because we think it is crucial to start trying to frame what the future landscape will look like.

Here are the five emerging revenue sectors that we think could collectively be the music industry’s next growth driver

1. Contextual experiences: Two big lockdown winners have been mindfulness / meditation apps and online fitness training. With it looking likely that consumers will be spending more time at home and away from public places for some time to come, the opportunity for these categories is twofold: 1) build audience now, 2) establish behaviour patterns that will outlive lockdown.

   Music is often a core part of these but it is not always licensed. The example of artists and rightsholders making music available to fitness trainer Joe Wicks illustrates the point. To date, streaming services have provided the soundtrack to such activities with contextual playlists (chill, study, workout). But it is of course far better for the context itself to deliver the music. We expect the next few years to see categories like online wellness and fitness to eat into the time that people were previously using streaming for the soundtrack. Instead of bring your own music, the trend will be the context will bring it. UMG’s Lego partnership is a case in point.

2. Creator tools: There is an increasingly diverse mix of tools for music creators, including production, collaboration, sounds, reporting, mastering and marketing. The vast majority of the millions of independent artists will spend much more on creator tools than they will ever earn from their music. The revenue opportunity is clear, but there is more to it than that.

   Artist distribution platforms built a role as top of funnel tools, helping labels find the next big hit. But the music creation itself, enabled through online SAAS tools is in the fact the real top of funnel. Anyone who can establish relationships there does so before they release music. Right now, Spotify looks better placed to capitalise on this opportunity than labels. But labels should be paying close heed. Just in the way that distribution platforms came out of nowhere to become an established part of the label toolkit, so will artist tools. Simply put, creator tools will become part of what it is to be a music company.

3. Virtual events: As we wrote about earlier this week, there is a huge opportunity to make virtual events (live streaming, listening sessions, avatar performances) a major income stream. The sector is in desperate need of commercial structure and product tiering, but it can happen. A freemium model with free, pay to stay, premium and super-premium tiers will enable this fast-growing sector to be more than a lockdown stop gap.
4. Fandom: Regular readers will know that MIDiA has long argued that phase one of streaming was monetising consumption and that phase two will be about monetising fandom. Tencent Music Entertainment already does a fantastic job of this with live streams, virtual gifts and virtual currencies. So do K-Pop artists and Japanese Idol artists. Now is the time for western social and streaming platforms to wake up to the opportunity. Virtual merch, artist badges, premium chat, artist avatars—there are so many opportunities here waiting to be tapped.
5. Social music: As an extension of fandom, the fact that the vast amount of music-centred social activity on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok has not yet been properly monetised is a gaping hole of opportunity. TikTok will be crucial. As my colleague Tim Mulligan wrote, TikTok is having its ‘Snapchat moment’, trying to identify what commercial route it will take. I’d go even further and frame it as a YouTube or Facebook moment. Both those platforms went on to massively expand their remit and build diversified business models.

   TikTok clearly has momentum that far exceeds that of previous similar apps. It can either choose to just carry on being good at one thing or instead become the next big social platform, growing as its audience ages. Just like Facebook did. TikTok now is where YouTube was back in the late 2000s. If rights holders can establish an entirely new monetisation framework then TikTok could become the biggest single driver of future revenue.

As with any future gazing, the odds are that not all of these opportunities will transpire, but what is clear is that the current dominant format is not enough on its own. Rights holders and creators alike need new future revenue streams to offset the impact of slowing revenue growth and royalty crises.

The last time the music industry had one dominant format and no successor was the CD and we all know what happened then. The music industry is not about to enter a decade of freefall this time, but it is at risk of stagnating, especially as its leading music service is now so eager to diversify away from music that it offers a podcaster more money in one deal than most artists will ever earn in their lifetime from it. Let’s make this next chapter of the industry’s growth about innovation, growth, new opportunities and fresh thinking.

The Future of Live

The almost total cessation of live music has sent shockwaves throughout the wider music industry. Though live companies are clearly at the epicentre, labels and streaming services are the in the blast radius too as the gaping hole left in most artists’ income is causing them to question their other income sources, streaming especially – with both labels and DSPs in the sights.

Finding both near- and mid-term fixes for live are therefore crucial for the wider music industry and artist community. There is a big opportunity here that goes far beyond lockdown era. This is more than the future of games and music, it is in fact an alternative future for live music. It is the ultimate lockdown legacy.

MIDiA’s latest subscriber report ‘Recovery Economics: Music, Games, Live Streams and the Future of Concerts’ has just been published and subscribers can read it here. In this blog post I am going to highlight some of the key themes.

Live streaming’s teething pains

From a value chain perspective, Lockdown came too early for live streaming; it is under-developed, under-monetised, under-licensed, under-professionalised. Unfortunately, the live-streaming surge is showing all the signs of a goldrush with a lack of clear structure and the first signs of artist backlash, with some artists feeling that some platforms are relying on them to build their audiences while performing for free.

Furthermore, quality is patchy and artists are becoming concerned with the impact on their brand image. Saturation is another Achilles heel: with traditional performances saturation is negated by artists moving from one city to another. Live streaming has no geographical constraints so the effect of multiple performances is analogous to playing repeated concerts in the same small town.

Virtual concerts, not live-streamed concerts

Arguably the biggest single mistake the music industry made with music streaming was to think of it as a format rather than a paradigm. As a consequence, the (western) streaming services lack differentiation and true feature innovation. We must think of the live opportunity as something that goes beyond live streams. Live streams are just one part of the mix. The true opportunity is virtual experiences, that can range from 100 attendee super-premium intimate sessions, through mass scale ad-supported YouTube streams, to avatars performing in games.

If we start this journey thinking narrowly, the scale of opportunity will be constrained. And right now, the industry needs to get as many virtual event innovations going as it can, because it will have to continue to carry the baton for live for some time yet.

In a best case scenario COVID-19 recedes later this year and we have a small number of limited capacity concerts happening before year end. Alternatively, we may see recurring waves of COVID-19 denting consumer confidence with fewer people wanting to go to concerts even if they could. Either way, artists are not going to get most of their live revenue this year.

It is this post-lockdown opportunity that virtual events need to meet. But there is a lot of work yet to be done. The biggest problem to fix is monetisation.

Fans pay around 80 times more per minute for a real-world live performance than they do for listening to music on paid streaming services. The value exists in the shared moment. The problem with live streaming in its current manifestation is that it is abundant and is delivered in a ubiquitous format that is implicitly low value. If this sector is to become a serious income stream for artists then we have to stop giving it all away for free. What is needed is a sophisticated freemium monetisation model that can cater both to large free audiences and better monetise fans.

A set of principles for virtual events

There is also a lot more that can be fixed. Here are some meta principles that virtual events should adhere to:

• Scarcity (fewer gigs, geo-restricted – Laura Marlin has just announced geo-restricted live streams – let’s make that the trailblazer not an isolated initiative)
• Better production qualities
• More sophisticated monetisation (freemium, pay-to-stay, super premium / VIP etc)
• More sophisticated segmentation of types of shows (not all live streams are the same, but we currently only have a one-size-fits all product
• Better platform segmentation (e.g. big tech platforms can play the role of stadiums and arenas while off-portal destinations like artist apps can host smaller, scarcer, super-premium events)
• Better discovery (the equivalent of the TV EPG needs creating for virtual concerts, Bandsintown has made a decent start but much more needs to be done)
• Better alignment between what artists want and what the platforms want

The birth of a new industry

COVID-19 will likely be a mid- to long-term part of life, so the traditional live sector will face a ‘cost of confidence’ as portions of artists and fans alike will initially stay away. Virtual concerts (live streaming and generative virtual performances) can become an important component of the live music sector as it builds out of lockdown. But it will not get there without concerted efforts to fix the problems that currently define this nascent sector.

A new virtual concert value chain is starting to emerge that traditional live companies are not – yet – well embedded in. The future market will be one defined by both incumbents and insurgents. The big live companies will bet big on virtual but we’ll also see new types of companies like virtual booking agents and avatar agencies. The whole concepts of what a concert is and what a venue is, can be turned on their heads. Fortnite’s Party Royale island is now hosting regular live streamed concerts. With 350 million users, Fortnite can lay claim to being arguably the biggest capacity venue on the planet. This may be the birth of an entire new ecosystem.

Recovery economics

The lockdown lag will create a whole new set of economics across all industries. Driving a recovery during this transition period will require innovation and a willingness to downplay old ways of doing things. For music it will be about exploring new income streams to recast a new music business. The first step is for live streaming to have a product refit that delivers a genuine value exchange for fans if it is to ever get out of its free / charity / tip cul-de-sac and become a genuine income stream of scale.

If you are not yet a MIDiA client and would like to learn how to get access to this report then email stephen@midiaresearch.com

If you are a client and would like to talk to us about the themes covered in the report then schedule an enquiry via enquiries@midiaresearch.com