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Blog: Business Strategy

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

The future of the music creator economy

Mark Mulligan

9 Jul 2026

Audience Insight Streaming Creators

AI is a black swan event for music, intertwining the futures of the creator economy and the music industry. The number of gen AI music monthly active users (MAUs) nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025, adding nearly nine times as many users as the global base of musicians over the same period.

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Social media first principles: What it takes to go beyond the algorithm

Hanna Kahlert

8 Jul 2026

Business Strategy Social media Creators

The formula for success on social platforms changes regularly, much to the frustration of emerging creators and marketers alike. This is a natural consequence of content saturation. The moment the code gets cracked and everyone follows the same rulebook, that rulebook stops delivering anything that ...

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Why now is the time for the creator right

Mark Mulligan

26 Jun 2026

Business Strategy Creators Artists

YouTube’s Lyor Cohen and the Recording Academy’s Harvey Mason Jr. recently penned an op-ed for Variety in which they made the case for the NO FAKES act being seen as the starting pistol rather than the finish line.

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Music subscriber market shares Q4 2025: The chess board is set

Tatiana Cirisano

15 Jun 2026

Business Strategy Spotify Streaming

Global music streaming subscribers grew 10.1% to reach 921.6 million in 2025, according to MIDiA’s just-published music subscriber market shares report . While growth slowed compared to 2024, it remained in the double digits, with the 1 billion subscriber landmark now firmly in sight.

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Atomised concentration: How streaming ensures the house always wins

Mark Mulligan

12 Jun 2026

Clients only

Business Strategy Streaming Artists

There is an apparent paradox in today’s streaming-dominated music market: major labels are losing share (on a distribution basis) yet long-tail indies are finding it ever harder to achieve scale. So, is the trend fragmentation or concentration? The perplexing answer is that it is both.

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K-pop fans are not “one size fits all”: Comparing fans in US and South Korea

Olivia Jones

4 Jun 2026

Clients only

Fandom Business Strategy Streaming

K-pop has had a banner year, with the genre earning multiple Grammy nominations,along with the massive success of Kpop Demon Hunters . As K-pop’s dedicated fans dominate the global stage, they are often seen as the definition of “superfans”, with artists and labels chasing similar levels of fa...

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Meta launches paid subscriptions: is the era of free social media at an end?

Hanna Kahlert

2 Jun 2026

Business Strategy Facebook Instagram

After months of testing, Meta has announced three new paid subscriptions: Instagram Plus, Facebook Plus, and WhatsApp Plus. Features will vary according to platform. Instagram Plus focuses on public signalling, analytics, and engagement: creating new follower lists, seeing who has re-watched stories...

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The creative generation wants its own soundtrack

Kriss Thakrar

21 May 2026

Clients only

Business Strategy Streaming Fandom

Most music fans are musically creative. This doesn’t necessarily mean they aspire to be artists or producers, but simply that they are engaged in at least one of the musical creativity behaviours tracked by MIDiA, such as producing music, learning or playing an instrument, writing music, performin...

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Instagram Instants hint at Meta’s changing aspirations

Hanna Kahlert

19 May 2026

Business Strategy Instagram Social media

As of May 13, Meta has announced the rollout of Instants: a new feature for Instagram that doubles as its own app. Instants are quick snapshots that can only be viewed by followers once and disappear after 24 hours.

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The three challenges YouTube must overcome to become TV

Ben Woods

13 May 2026

Business Strategy YouTube Streaming

YouTube’s case to be classed as TV in the eyes of advertisers is not bulletproof. TV advertising does not just buy reach and premium content. It buys into a regulated ecosystem built around measurement standards, brand safety, discoverability rules, and public-service obligations.

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Is AI the biggest threat to social platforms?

Hanna Kahlert

12 May 2026

Business Strategy Social media Social

Social media is becoming less social. You may have noticed this in your own life, as the endless scroll of short-form video becomes default. Users are more likely to turn to ‘social’ platforms for entertainment than to communicate with friends, according to MIDiA’s quarterly consumer survey .

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Answering questions from MIDiA’s "The State of AI and Music" webinar

Olivia Jones

7 May 2026

Business Strategy Spotify Streaming

Last week, MIDiA’s public webinar “The State of AI and Music” explored AI’s role in reshaping consumption, creation, and value in the music industry. For those who were unable to attend, a recording of the webinar is available here .

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From answers to influence: How AI is reshaping social platforms’ role in search

Ben Woods

5 May 2026

Clients only

Business Strategy Creators Content

AI is not only disrupting search engines but dismantling the way people search across the internet. MIDiA’s Q3 2025 consumer survey reveals that 52% of those who reported using generative AI leveraged these tools to find information.

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Teens are skipping release week – here’s why the music industry can’t ignore it

Tatiana Cirisano

30 Apr 2026

Clients only

Business Strategy Music music industry

The persistent growth of “catalogue” music listening is a familiar topic to the industry. In this context, the results of MIDiA’s Q4 2025 consumer survey may not seem so surprising. Just 24% of all consumers report listening to new music the week it is released, on at least a monthly basis, as...

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Multi-dimensionality in music isn’t new – but it’s overdue for a comeback

Olivia Jones

23 Apr 2026

Business Strategy Spotify Streaming

Multi-dimensionality in music – that is, engaging in ways beyond simply listening to a song – has existed for decades. In the vinyl era, fans could read liner notes and look at album artwork while listening.

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How the creator economy is changing traditional entertainment's discovery, distribution, and supply

Ben Woods

15 Apr 2026

Business Strategy Streaming Creators

The creator economy used to be an adjacent entertainment ecosystem to traditional entertainment. Those days are numbered – if not over already. Creators are now a foundational component in how traditional entertainment produces and distributes content at scale.

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Podcasting’s next growth frontier: tackling the unconverted

Laura Fisher

14 Apr 2026

Business Strategy Podcasts consumer

A lot of attention is being paid to the “rules of engagement” for podcasting: format preferences, video versus audio, and platform battles like YouTube versus Spotify. The industry is deeply focused on how and where audiences are consuming podcasts, and rightly so.

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Breaking the language barrier: AI’s next disruption in music

Adham Nazir

9 Apr 2026

Business Strategy Fandom Artists

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once proclaimed that music is a universal language. Ironically, perhaps the only part of this universal language that isn’t universal is language itself. In the streaming era, it may seem easier than ever for musicians to reach listeners around the world, a...

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From feeds to events: How content creators are reshaping TV strategy

Ben Woods

1 Apr 2026

Business Strategy Creators Content Creators

The playbooks for streaming TV services and creators are collapsing into one – but even so, misconceptions remain. Large parts of the traditional entertainment industry consider the engagement techniques in two lanes.

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How music’s ‘Instagram moment’ led to its fast fashion era

Kriss Thakrar

27 Mar 2026

Business Strategy music industry Music creators

The music industry is seeing unprecedented democratisation in both consumption and creation. Leading execs often point to the rise of consumer creation and the ‘Instagrammification’ of music as a growth engine.

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