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.

MIDiA’s 2024 predictions report
The algorithm is not listening

Cover image for MIDiA’s 2024 predictions report
Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Kriss Thakrar, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano, Perry Gresham, Kazia Rothwell and Ben Woods
2023 was another year of change and disruption. 2024 will be even more defined by change than the years that preceded it. But much of this change will be defined by reaction more than action. The unintended consequences of years of innovation have resulted in environments where many consumers are getting further away from their wants and needs, not closer.
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Cutting loose the long tail in a rising culture of creative consumption

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Hanna Kahlert
Recent news of Spotify’s reported plan to introduce two-tier licensing represents a significant departure from the incremental shifts we have seen thus far. With developments like Deezer’s new streaming royalty model with Universal Music Group, to X’s premium subscription, the tension between platforms hosting content from an ever-growing pool of creators, and creator remuneration for that content, is at a breaking point.
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Does culture become a commodity, or do commodities become culture?

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Hanna Kahlert
More than three fourths of audiences believe that the music they listen to reflects who they are. This rises to more than four fifths of people aged 25-44. Music listening is also incredibly personal –roughly a third of people listen to playlists they curate themselves when exercising, hanging out with friends, working or studying, or just when they are out and about.
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Niche is the way forward: DSP’s need function, not features

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Hanna Kahlert
It has never been easier to become a music creator. But, it has arguably never been harder to remain one as a full-time career. There are a whole host of reasons behind this, not least of which is a streaming economy that has upended the role of music in the daily lives of audiences, and a host of creator tools (including generative AI) that lower the barriers to music creation, to the point where nearly anyone can step over them with ease.
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AI is the new digital ad industry… but the stakes are far greater

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Hanna Kahlert
Zoom has been making the news this week over its controversial new terms and conditions that now allow the service (in theory) to utilise user data to train its AI-assisted features. While the company has reassured the public that they need to opt into the usage, which is necessary to use its AI functions like generating transcripts, privacy concerns are still high.
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The X rebrand is Twitter’s Meta moment… but there’s already a Meta

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Hanna Kahlert
Meta’s launch of Threads has been the biggest challenger to Twitter’s social standing to date, with record-breaking uptake in its first weekend. However, Twitter still had an edge: an online culture that would be hard to regrow or replicate; existing creators and content ‘style’, and a brand reputation linked with critical cultural moments that the app played host to, from the US Trump election cycle to the theorising around Tiger King.
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The future is interoperability: Why Threads could beat Twitter through the Fediverse

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Hanna Kahlert
While Elon Musk has been posturing public beef with Mark Zuckerberg (challenging him to a cage match, practicing with former MMA champions, public callouts on Twitter, requesting very personal measurements), Zuckerberg has responded in a more traditional way (aside from his own training pictures) with the launch of Threads, Twitter’s biggest competitor to-date.
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