Mark Mulligan

Mark Mulligan is a music analyst and the founder at MIDiA Research. He is a long-term tech analyst and a leading digital thinker with more than 20 years of experience, working with leading global music, entertainment, and tech companies. At MIDiA, Mark focuses on the streaming and creator economies, as well as music business trends and market metrics such as forecasts and market shares.

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BBC Sounds
BBC Sounds sets a blueprint for broadcaster podcast strategy

Mark Mulligan

9 Oct 2020

Spotify Home audio Digital audiences

Sounds is the BBC’s successor audio app to iPlayer Radio, combining live radio, on-demand programmes, music, and podcasts. Although it faced some resistance to the app initially – predominately from older audiences fearful of change – Sounds has quickly become the best performing broadcaster audio app across the markets that MIDiA tracks.

Why Rishi Sunak is both wrong and right

Mark Mulligan

8 Oct 2020

Music

Earlier this week the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunaksuggested that creatives such as musicians who had seen income dry up during COVID-19 should consider retraining for the new ‘opportunities’ the lockdown economy is generating.

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Independent Artists
Pathfinding Through a Pandemic

Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling

30 Sep 2020

Free Report

artist income Independent artists Music streaming

2019 was yet another stand-out year for independent artists, with revenues, streams and market shares all growing strongly. Then, along came COVID-19 and the world turned upside down. However, in lockdown many independent artists found new opportunities and the ability to innovate and create.

Independent artist creativity and innovation in the age of COVID-19

Mark Mulligan

30 Sep 2020

Music Independent artists indie artists

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the music industry upside down in many ways but among the direct artists community there have also been signs of resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. For these ‘unsigned’ artists, 2020 is both the best of times and the worst of times.

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So, how can artists and songwriters can get paid?

Mark Mulligan

25 Sep 2020

COVID-19’s decimation of the live music business coupled with the coming collapse in performance revenues due to closed shops, restaurants, bars and clubs mean that many (though not all) artists and songwriters are left with gaping holes in their incomes.

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MIDiA Research Artist Survey Q2 2020

Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling

18 Sep 2020

Independent artists charts music artists

This deck presents findings from MIDiA's Q2 2020 survey of music artists, assessing the impact on their careers in the wake of the coronavirus. It consists of 13 charts / graphs / table slides. The full report will be available in October 2020....

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Music Subscriber Market Shares 4.0
Subscriptions Decouple from Revenue

Mark Mulligan

18 Sep 2020

Subscriptions Streaming Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report with quarterly data from Q4 2015 to Q1 2020 and annual label trade revenue from full year 2015 to full year 2019 for 27 streaming services across 34 different markets.

Why Kanye West is the modern-day Prince

Mark Mulligan

18 Sep 2020

Music

Not ‘prince’ in the Machiavelliansense of the term – though there is an argument for that too – but as in the artist formerly known as. Back in 1992, Prince fought his label Warner Bros to get ownership of his rights and more creative control, struggling to get out of a deal he signed when h...

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Quick Take: Apple One – Recession Buster

Mark Mulligan

15 Sep 2020

Video Music Games

Apple officially announced its long anticipated all-in-one content bundle: Apple One. $14.95 gets you Apple Music, Arcade, Apple TV+ and 50GB of iCloud storage. A family plan retails at $19.95 and a premier plan includes 1TB storage, News and Apple’s new Fitness+ service.

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Why the struggle of small venues will affect the entire music industry

Mark Mulligan

11 Sep 2020

Prior to the dislocation caused by the pandemic, live music operated with a structure that gave artists a clear sense of where they were in their careers and where they could aim for next. Small clubs represented the starting point, before moving up a ladder of venue sizes to theatres, arenas and st...

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Take part in MIDiA’s electronic music producer survey!

Mark Mulligan

10 Sep 2020

MIDiA is currently fielding a survey aimed at electronic music producers. It takes about ten minutes to complete and there is a $/€/£50 voucher for every tenth participant. We will also send you a synopsis of the results.

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Post-Pandemic Programming
Surviving and Thriving in the Recession

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Alistair Taylor, Keith Jopling and Hanna Kahlert

9 Sep 2020

Apple Apple live

COVID-19 caused dislocation and disruption to the global entertainment business. Now, the recession and the prospect of further pandemic peaks have created an unprecedented outlook for entertainment companies. Many of the shifts that occurred during lockdown will define the new market dynamics.

Where did Disney and Live Nation’s missing $10 billion go?

Mark Mulligan

4 Sep 2020

In both economic and pandemic terms, we are in a relatively quiet period compared to the first half of the year. COVID-19 is at much lower levels in most countries and there are multiple sectors, such as housing and auto, that are reporting booms.

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Who will own the virtual concert space?

Mark Mulligan

28 Aug 2020

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’.

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Music Marketing
The Velocity Game

Mark Mulligan

24 Aug 2020

Spotify Spotify YouTube

Music streaming has become so central to the functioning of the record label business model that labels are becoming beholden to streaming service optimisation. A shift towards ever-larger numbers of new releases targeted at streaming success threatens to dislocate the underlying business model of bigger record labels and cause a disconnect between...

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Music Discovery
Streaming’s Growing Role

Mark Mulligan

24 Aug 2020

Streaming Streaming Music Spotify

Radio has long led music discovery and continues to do so today. However, streaming – both audio and video – are making up ground fast, especially among more engaged and younger music fans. These shifts in discovery come as music marketing strategy is placing an ever-greater emphasis on streaming.

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Spotify Q2 2020 Earnings
In the Shadow of COVID

Mark Mulligan

18 Aug 2020

Subscriptions Streaming Streaming Music

Spotify’s share price grew strongly in June 2020, with the markets responding positively to its podcast investments. However, while that increase was sustained throughout July, by mid-August the share price was heading back down to late-June levels.

What AWAL’s $100k artists mean for the streaming economy

Mark Mulligan

14 Aug 2020

Music

Kobalt’s AWAL division announced that‘hundreds of its artists have reached [the] annual streaming revenue threshold [of $100,000]’ . Make no mistake, this is major milestone for a record label that has around 1% global market share.

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Apple to launch subscription bundle – we called it!

Mark Mulligan

13 Aug 2020

Video Music Games

In MIDiA’s 2020 Predictions report published in December 2019 we predicted that tech majors would start creating subscription bundles, with Apple leading the fray. Lo and behold, news has just come out that Apple is working on ‘ Apple One’ – a multi-genre subscription bundle that will includ...

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Streaming’s remuneration model cannot be ‘fixed’

Mark Mulligan

12 Aug 2020

Music Streaming remuneration

The #brokenrecord debate continues to build momentum and new models such as user-centric are getting increased attention, including at governmental level in the UK. But as Mat Dryhurst correctly observes , there is a risk of the market falling into streaming fatalism; that the obsession with trying ...

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