Hanna Kahlert

Hanna is one of our expert analysts, helping drive MIDiA’s research into the future of digital entertainment. Her key areas of interest are cross-entertainment audience behaviour, the creator economy, and social platforms.

BlueSky benefits from X’s Brazil ban: a fragmenting social ecosystem is shaky ground for incumbents

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Hanna Kahlert
X has long been the social platform of ‘on the pulse’ news updates and cultural happenings. Its users over-index for using social platforms to keep up with news and culture (as outlined in our social platform user behaviour report ), and its high-profile posts often make it into the broader news cycle and dictate coverage and strategy.
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Instagram and the download-delete cycle: a cultural shift for social platforms

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Hanna Kahlert
Forget the tech-centric sci-fi future promised by the early 2000’s; the new aspiration is going offline. Analogue is the new ‘cool’, and it is not just about nostalgia. Audiences are searching for authenticity, connection, novelty, experience, and tangible ownership of the things they love, all of which are scarce now in an oversaturated digital environment .
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Social platform user behaviour
Q1 2024

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Hanna Kahlert
The social platform marketplace is mature, with user growth stabilising, and the established platforms now fiercely competing for shares of a finite amount of available time. This report analyses the behaviours of the audiences engaging with social platforms; including daily active use market shares, monetisation aptitude, social video time spent, and primary reasons for using the apps.
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The state of music AI
The consumer opportunity lies in modification, not generation

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Tatiana Cirisano and Hanna Kahlert
MIDiA previously predicted that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) would accelerate music’s “Instagram moment”, where consumers could create and remix music as easily and often as they post photos and videos on social media. However, just because everyone can do these things does not mean everyone will want to.
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Death of the town square
Social fragmentation and a decentralised digital future

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Hanna Kahlert
Social platforms have long ‘civilised’ the online world by providing common gathering grounds, but internal disruption and proliferating competition threaten this status quo. While the dominant players are unlikely to change substantially, competition, on-platform feature fragmentation, and algorithmic ‘filter bubbles’ will dilute social platforms’ common-ground value.
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Another Fake Drake? AI is decoupling artists and their voices (and there’s no coming back)

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Hanna Kahlert
Drake has had perhaps one of the most publicly up-and-down relationships with generative AI. There was the AI Drake music generator, which he was dead set against. Then there was ‘Heart on My Sleeve’, the AI-generated mix using the voices of Drake and The Weeknd by a creator known as ghostwriter, where Drake again expressed displeasure at the use of his voice.
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Sustainability from chaos
How today’s artists find sustainable success in a turbulent music industry

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Sophia Oleksiyenko, Fernanda Balzaretti and Ula Kalkyte
Success in the modern music industry has been transformed by the streaming era. Previous markers and methods, such as national charts and radio plays, have been replaced by streaming playlists and social platforms. Yet, while executives can look at high-level metrics across their portfolios, individual artists struggle with the increasingly personalised, algorithm-driven listening habits of audiences who predominantly listen to music in the background – and the resulting lack of formal benchmarks.
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