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.

Facebook The Media Company: If It Looks Like A Duck

Mark Mulligan
Yesterday Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally confirmed that Facebook is a media company , not a traditional one, but a media company nonetheless. This is something we've been thinking about a lot at MIDiA, so much so in fact that we have just publishedan entire report on the subject: "Facebook The Media Company: If It Looks Like A Duck" The report forms part of MIDiA's new Paid Content service, which we will be telling you more about early in the new year.
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Next Steps For Telco Music
The Revenue Or User Dilemma

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Mark Mulligan
Streaming’s early fortunes were intimately tied to telco music strategy, with the streaming services eager to piggy back telcos’ much larger marketing budgets and telcos equally keen to pursue marketplace differentiation and brand kudos. Telco music bundles are delivering more revenue and users than ever before but their relative role in the streaming economy has lessened.
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YouTube Reaches $4bn In Music Industry Rights Payments

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Mark Mulligan
YouTube just reported that it has paid $1 billion to ‘the music industry’ over the course of the last 12 months. That takes its cumulative payments (since 2007) up to $4 billion. The year-to-date payments for $900 million are a 22% on the full year payments made in 2015 – the year in which labels started going for YouTube’s jugular because they felt it was not paying its fair share (ie the value grab / value share).
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MIDiA Research Predictions 2017
The Year Of The Platform

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Karol Severin, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller
As we correctly predicted, 2016 was the year video ate the world. 2017 is going to be shaped by the battle for consumer attention through formatting and distribution wars. VR is likely to cede further ground to AR, bots will become established, while messaging apps add to their dominant position (even though user growth will slow).
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We're Hiring!

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Mark Mulligan
We'vebeen fortunate enough to have had a good 2016 at MIDiA Research and we're now planning for an even better 2017. To this end we're hiring for two new positions in our London office: Production Manager / Content Editor Account Executive Details of these tworoles are listed below.
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Spotify User Profile
An Increasingly Mainstream Yet Digitally Sophisticated Audience

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Mark Mulligan
Spotify is the poster child of streaming music, having done more than any other company to grow the segment and to prove the freemium business model at scale. It has built an active user base that outshines any other freemium music service, and through tactics such as telco bundles and pricing discounts continues to squeeze every last drop of opportunity out of the $9.
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Quick Take: Amazon Music Unlimited Comes To The UK

Mark Mulligan
Amazon announced the anticipated launch of Amazon Music Unlimited in the UK today. For my full take on Amazon Music Unlimited see my previous post here. Make no mistake, Amazon are taking this launch seriously, with a coordinated PR campaign and press release quotes not only from Amazon’s head of streaming music Steve Boom but also from Jeff Bezos himself.
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How Spotify Can Become A Next Generation “Label”

Mark Mulligan
One of the themes my MIDiA colleague Tim Mulligan (the name’s no coincidence, he’s my brother too!) has been developing over in our online video research is that of next generation TV operators. With the traditional pay-TV model buckling under the pressure of countless streaming subscriptions services like Netflix (there are more than 50 services in the US alone) pay-TV companies have responded with countless apps of their own such as HBO Go and CBS All Access.
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