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.

Amazon Music: The Dark Horse Comes Out Of The Shadows

Mark Mulligan

20 Oct 2017

Amazon amazon music unlimited Amazon Prime Music

MIDiA has just published a new report that analyses Amazon’s streaming music strategy and how this fits within the wider competitive landscape. Here are some highlights: Back in the days when online music meant online CD sales, Amazon was the king.

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Streaming Services Market Shares
Spotify Leads Across Most Markets

Mark Mulligan

16 Oct 2017

Subscriptions Streaming Music Subscriptions

This report includes the key findings of MIDiA’s Global Music Subscriber Market Share Model in which we present the subscribers, revenues and market shares of streaming services in more than 20 different countries. This report contains charts and analysis for 11 countries including consumer survey data, while the complete excel model is posted al...

What Spotify Can Learn From The Roman Slave Trade

Mark Mulligan

13 Oct 2017

age of enlightenment AWAL Believe Digital

OK, you’re going to have to bearwith me on this one, but let me take you back to 2nd century Rome… The Roman Empire was at the peak of its powers. Its borders stretched from Scotland down to Syria and across to Armenia, and throughout its dominions, Rome spread its culture, language, administrat...

Despacito Is About To Hit 4 Billion YouTube Views

Mark Mulligan

1 Oct 2017

despacito Latin America Luis Fonsi

In January Despacito became the second fastest music video in YouTube history to hit one billion views, taking just 97 days to do so. Now it is on track to hit four billion. In January Despacito was part of a succession of new music video consumption records that YouTube and Vevo are setting.

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Amazon Music
The Dark Horse Comes Out Of The Shadows

Mark Mulligan

25 Sep 2017

Streaming Streaming Music Music Subscriptions

Back in the days when online music meant online CD sales, Amazon was the king. Then, along came Apple with iTunes music store and Amazon saw the throne snatched from its hands. No sooner had Apple started to enjoy its reign that Spotify came along to usurp the throne.

Spotify, Netflix And Instagram Make Gains In Q2 2017

Mark Mulligan

19 Sep 2017

Amazon Apple Music candy crush saga

Since Q4 2016 MIDiA Research has been fielding a quarterly tracker survey across the US, UK, Canada and Australia to build a proprietary dataset that provides a unique insight into how digital consumer trends are evolving quarter-upon-quarter.

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Sonos @ 15

Mark Mulligan

8 Sep 2017

Alexa Amazon Amazon Echo

Sonos, granddaddy of the connected home audio marketplace, is now 15 years old. Sonos was a pioneer that was so far ahead of its time, it inadvertently found itself as one of the key early drivers of streaming subscriptions.

Is QQ Music Worth $10 Billion?

Mark Mulligan

7 Sep 2017

China Deezer IPO

Western appetite for the Chinese market has long been based upon accessing the 1.4 billion consumers. This has in turn impacted valuations of Chinese companies, particularly when eager western investors are involved.

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Quick Take: Spotify And Hulu Partner In The US

Mark Mulligan

7 Sep 2017

Amazon bundle hulu

Spotify just announced it is bundling in the Hulu No Commercials plan into its $4.99 student offering in the US. Given that the Hulu product retails at $7.99 and Spotify at $9.99, this is unmistakably a good value for money deal – even compared to the standard $4.

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Quarterly Digital Content Trends
Q2 2017

Mark Mulligan

31 Aug 2017

Streaming Streaming Music US

In this report, we present highlights of content trends from MIDiA’s Quarterly Brand Tracker, a survey fielded in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. This report explores how consumer behaviour evolved between Q4 2016 and Q2 2017 across music, video, games and social.

What’s In A Number: Can Streaming Really Be Worth $28 Billion?

Mark Mulligan

30 Aug 2017

goldman sachs lehman brothers Streaming

Goldman Sachs just made some headlines with its assessment that Universal Music is worth $23.5 billion and that the paid streaming market will be worth $28 billion in 2030 (up from $3.5 billion in 2016 and close to double the size of the entire recorded music business in 2016).

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Music Rights Disruption
The Transparency Agenda

Mark Mulligan

23 Aug 2017

music publishers Apple Spotify

Music rights have never been simple but now the complexity is reaching such a level that the digital music marketplace is beginning to buckle under the strain. With growing demand across the board for increased transparency, effectiveness and speed, the music rights landscape is facing an unprecedented period of innovation and disruption.

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TV Show Fandom Q2 2017
Measuring The Impact Of US TV

Mark Mulligan

15 Aug 2017

Streaming US UK

In our July report, TV Show Fandom: Measuring TV Shows’ Real Appeal , we introduced MIDiA’s quarterly Paid Content Brand Tracker by revealing a sneak peek of the data we track for more than 50 TV shows in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. In this report, we provide analysis of some of the top-level trends for the Q2 2017 edition of the MIDi...

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Content Piracy
Piracy Reinvented In The Streaming Era

Mark Mulligan

3 Aug 2017

Streaming Spotify YouTube

Piracy was one of the original driving forces behind the digital content marketplace. Without Peer-to-peer (P2P) we may never have had Spotify, iPlayer or Netflix, all of which were direct responses to the demand and behaviours created by piracy. Now as streaming drives both music and video revenues, P2P is less central a force than it once was.

The Three Eras Of Paid Streaming

Mark Mulligan

28 Jul 2017

3 ages of streaming 3 eras of streaming 3 phases of streaming

Streaming has driven such a revenue renaissance within the major record labels that the financial markets are now falling over themselves to work out where they can invest in the market, and indeed whether they should.

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TV Show Fandom
Measuring TV Shows’ Real Appeal

Mark Mulligan

21 Jul 2017

Streaming US UK

The TV industry is in a measurement crisis. Ever more, viewing is shifting from the linear schedule and leading streaming services are heavily guarded about their data, creating a measurement blind spot. Social behaviour and piracy activity provide an additional source of information, but not an alternative.

YouTube And Latin America Are Taking Over The World

Mark Mulligan

20 Jul 2017

1 billion streams 2 billion streams adele

Unless you have been on Mars for the last couple of days you will have seen the news that Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ has become the most streamed track in history with 4.6 billion streams. The figure includes a couple of versions of the track (ie the one include a certain Justin Bieber) but is a...

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How Soundcloud Could Transform Deezer’s Market Narrative

Mark Mulligan

4 Jul 2017

Access Industries Apple Music Artist discovery

News has emerged of Deezer being a potential buyer of troubled Soundcloud. This follows on from Spotify’s prolonged but ultimately abortive courting last year . Soundcloud was once a streaming powerhouse, with 175 million Monthly Active Users reported in October 2014.

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Guess Who Gen Z Prefers For Music: Spotify Or YouTube?

Mark Mulligan

29 Jun 2017

Gen Z millennials Spotify

It is still common to hear people talk about Millennials as if it is one amorphous group. In actual fact, Millennials are now 2 entirely distinct generations, not 1. In addition to the core Millennials we now have a new generation of younger consumers born on or around 2000.

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Quick Take: Tesla’s Streaming Ambition

Mark Mulligan

23 Jun 2017

auto electric cars elon musk

Reports have emerged that Tesla is looking to build its own streaming music service. In practice, this will most likely be a case of Tesla building a streaming service that operates solely for Tesla users, rather than competing head on with Apple and Spotify.

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