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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Recession Impact
How an Economic Downturn Could Reshape Digital Media

Alistair Taylor, Amanda Stears, Karol Severin, Keith Jopling, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller

29 Oct 2019

Apple Spotify Amazon

Ten years on from the credit crunch, the global economy could be poised to enter another economic recession. Many of the underlying causes of the credit crunch remain in place, due to governments lacking the appetite for the structural reform required to right the faults in the global financial system that catalysed the slowdown.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) October 28th 2019

Mark Mulligan

28 Oct 2019

Take Five Business Strategy

SiriusXM, podcast marvel: SiriusXM has struck a multiyear deal with Marvel to create exclusive podcasts , illustrating that traditional radio companies still have the potential to be the major players in podcasts.

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Smart Speakers and Headphone Market Shares
Expanding Streaming’s Addressable Base

Mark Mulligan

25 Oct 2019

Apple Beats Spotify

The rise of digital pushed music out of the home stereo and into the earbud. Over recent years this has created a booming market for headphones, but speakers are fighting back – driven in large part by tech majors using smart speakers as a Trojan horse for expanding into the home.

How music publishers are driving a full stack revolution

Mark Mulligan

14 Oct 2019

full stack music Music publishing Music

Music publishing catalogues are gaining momentum fast as an asset class for institutional investments, with transactions ranging from large catalogue mergers and acquisitions (M&A) through to investment vehicles for songwriters’ shares such as the Hipgnosis Fund and Royalty Exchange.

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) October 14th 2019

Mark Mulligan

14 Oct 2019

Take Five Business Strategy

Fortnite black hole: In what may be the most audacious global games marketing stunt ever, Epic Games killed off Fortnite in Sunday’s end-of-season event , which one million people viewed live on Twitch.

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Music Publishing
A Full-Stack Revolution

Mark Mulligan

9 Oct 2019

Spotify Music publishing Pandora

Tencent’s bid for 10% of Universal Music Group has set a new high-water mark for what risks becoming an overheated music rights mergers and acquisitions (M&A) sector. However, investment appetite remains strong and catalogue supply constrained, so there will be plenty more activity before the inevitable contraction.

Abbey Road 50 years on: The two worlds of music listening

Mark Mulligan

7 Oct 2019

abbey road midia index niche is the new mainstream

Half a century after it first after it first topped the charts, The Beatles’ Abbey Road is back at the summit of the UK charts (per the BBC ).With the anniversary editions of the album retailing for between $20 and $100, the impact on Universal Music’s revenue will be even more pronounced than t...

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) October 7th 2019

Mark Mulligan

7 Oct 2019

Take Five Business Strategy

Streaming pricing, emerging questions: Music Business Worldwide raised the question of why streaming is discounted in emerging markets when BMWs and Amazon Echoes are not. There are many layers to this, but the key one is – who is going to pay? High income urban elites can afford Western prices; t...

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) September 27th 2019

Mark Mulligan

30 Sep 2019

Take Five Cultural trends

Music licensing hubs: Monokrome launched its Rights Hub, contractual rights and file management platform for rightsholders, while Soundfeed put its label sub-licensing platform into open beta .Fragmented fandom sees streams more widely shared among middle class artists which means more small rightsh...

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Consumer Ad Receptiveness
Apathy, Evasion and Engagement

Mark Mulligan

30 Sep 2019

Spotify Marketing Amazon

On-demand audiences expect to be able to control their digital experiences, and many have opted for the ad-free oases of streaming subscriptions. While traditional media might be losing audience share it is not giving up the fight, instead investing heavily in ad tech that improves targeting and advertiser agility.

Have we reached peak tech?

Mark Mulligan

27 Sep 2019

investment tech tech investments

In last week’s Take Five I highlighted a Vox story which reported that over the last year the number of companies using terms like ‘tech’ or technology’ in their documents is down 12%.This is an early indicator of a much more fundamental concept – we may have already reached peak in the te...

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Music Consumer Behaviour Q2 2019
Fragmentation and Disruption

Mark Mulligan

26 Sep 2019

Music consumers iTunes store Spotify

This report presents key trends and analysis from MIDiA’s quarterly Music Brand Tracker survey, including places of listening, streaming music activities, radio, demographics, streaming app users, time spent listening and top streamed artists. Companies...

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) September 22nd 2019

Mark Mulligan

22 Sep 2019

Amazon, hi-def bet: Amazon has launched its long-slated Amazon Music HD service, delivering lossless FLAC files to a new HD streaming tier. Amazon is betting on its older, higher-income user base to care more about quality than Spotify users.

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The Future of Music: A Vision of Post-Format

Mark Mulligan

18 Sep 2019

adele Artists Edison

Formats have shaped and dictated the evolution of recorded music. The constraints that formats set have, in turn, become the creative frameworks within which music has operated. Now, in the internet era, formats are becoming a thing of the past – and yet the way in which music is made and distribu...

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) - September 16th 2019

Mark Mulligan

16 Sep 2019

apple bundles apple device portfolio apple hardware

Spotify – small step, big step: Spotify has announced that it is ac quiring musician marketplace company Soundbetter. Back in July, Spotify halted its artist direct offering. Some quarters viewed that as the end of Spotify’s disruptive label-competitor strategy.

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Songwriters Aren’t Getting Paid Enough and Here’s Why

Mark Mulligan

10 Sep 2019

cmos Drake Google

Music Business Worldwide recently ran a story on how Apple has proposed a standard streaming rate for songwriters, with Google and Spotify apparently resistant. Of course, Apple can afford to run Apple Music at a loss and has a strategic imperative for making it more difficult for Spotify to be prof...

How Technology Is Radically Reshaping Politics

Mark Mulligan

6 Sep 2019

alternative facts Boris Johnson brexit

As I write this, the UK is in the midst of a potential constitutional crisis following the UK government’s proposed changes to political norms in order to push through Brexit. In some ways this is what you get when a country only has a part-written constitution and never quite got round to phasing...

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Spotify Q2 2019 Earnings
Mature Markets Still the Engine Room of Growth

Mark Mulligan

29 Aug 2019

Subscriptions Streaming Streaming Music

Q2 2019 was another solid quarter for Spotify, adding the same number of subscribers it typically does in promotional quarters. Core metrics such as churn and average revenue per user (ARPU) all moved in the right direction, but Spotify remains out of contract with two major label partners and needs emerging markets’ subscriber growth to start pi...

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

Mark Mulligan

23 Aug 2019

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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.

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Why Spotify and Netflix Need to Worry About a Global Recession

Mark Mulligan

23 Aug 2019

economic downturn entertainment spend global recession

A growing body of economists is becoming increasingly convinced that a global recession is edging closer. The last time we experienced a global economic downturn was the 2008 credit crunch. Although the coming recession will likely be a bigger shock to the global economy, it nonetheless gives us a b...

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