Blog: Innovation

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.

AI narration: hope or hindrance to audio creation?

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Laura Fisher

8 May 2025

Cultural trends

The conversation around AI narration has awakened a historic tension, one that emerges at the dawn of every technological epoch. The tension is not just about the capabilities of AI itself, but the gnawing uncertainty of what it means for humans.

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The music industry wants solutions. But do listeners see problems?

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Tatiana Cirisano

17 Apr 2025

Business Strategy

Music streaming

Key takeways from this blog: The music industry’s next phase of growth depends on solving real problems faced by multiple stakeholders – not just one group in isolation Areas like live music demand, fan engagement, and discovery offer clues about where meaningful overlaps might exist MIDiA spotlights potential solutions that could create value for artists, listeners, labels, and platforms alike History is full of examples of products that failed because they were "solutions without a problem”.

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Hold or twist? The music industry’s innovation dilemma

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Mark Mulligan

20 Nov 2024

streaming growth

As Clayton Christensen identified in The Innovator’s Dilemma, there are two types of innovation: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation is what companies do to enhance existing business models, while disruptive innovation is typically driven by new entrants – insurgents looking to make markets by turning established ones upside down.

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Beyond the obvious: Building future-focused strategy

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Mark Mulligan

11 Oct 2024

Business Strategy

Business strategy has long been demarcated across sustaining and disruptive innovation. In the digital realm, the latter has had the upper hand, but now, as digital enters a slower growth phase, sustaining innovation is back in favour.

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Bifurcation theory | How today’s music business will become two

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Mark Mulligan

18 Apr 2024

Bifurcation theory

future of music

One of things we pride ourselves on at MIDiA is helping the marketplace peer over the horizon with disruptive, forward-looking ideas and vision. We have a long track record of doing this (you can find a list of report links at the bottom of this post).

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The future of entertainment innovation lies in exclusive experiences, not content

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Hanna Kahlert

15 Jun 2022

Media and Marketing

In the age before digital engagement went mainstream, entertainment had clear access channels and multiple price points. Video was able to rely on movie tickets, (expensive) TV sets, and the individual purchases of cable subscriptions, video tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and their associated equipment; the closest equivalent to subscriptions were Blockbuster or Netflix DVD rental memberships.

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How relevant are awards in the age of Spotify Wrapped?

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Keith Jopling

12 Jan 2022

Are awards ceremonies relevant in today's entertainment landscape? The widespread boycott by major movie stars of this year’s Golden Globes is more than a temporary protest and will lead to a major period of re-evaluation for award shows in film, music and across all entertainment formats.

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Content proliferation is remaking entertainment categories and giving rise to experiential consumption

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Hanna Kahlert

23 Sep 2021

Media and Marketing

The attention economy reaching saturation was a disruptive force in entertainment long before the coronavirus pandemic. Too much competition for too little time meant that audience engagement was increasingly hard to grab and harder still to retain.

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Facebook just got into social music; the industry should take note

Cover image for Facebook just got into social music; the industry should take note

Hanna Kahlert

12 Aug 2021

social music app

Facebook has just rolled out a new option to share clips of music videos to its Stories , which will be fully available to users by August 16th. The move has two main sets of implications. On the music side, we (should) have known that social music will be the next stage of innovation for the industry essentially since TikTok started rocketing users to stardom overnight, as meanwhile young people – digital natives who tend to be hyper-social – started to pick up instruments at unprecedented rates .

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Why DAZN is adapting to German consumer nuances with linear and digital bets

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Alistair Taylor

22 Oct 2020

DAZN’s recently-established position as the ‘Netflix of sport’ has been a hard fought one, requiring extensive rights investment in order to carve out a compelling proposition. In the markets where it has the best rights it has experienced the strongest adoption, with the converse equally true.

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Verizon Media announces platform to ‘evolve’ live streaming experience

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Alistair Taylor

16 Sep 2020

Verizon Media announced a series of new Media Platform improvements in a press release today (16th September), intended to ‘evolve the live streaming experience’. These features are all aimed at increasing fan engagement following COVID-19’s detrimental impact on the overall viewing spectacle of live sports.

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Wanda Sports Group’s financials highlight long-term impact of live hiatus

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Alistair Taylor

3 Sep 2020

Wanda Sports Group’s (WSG) Q2 financials highlight a significant decline in revenues on account of “the broad effects of COVID-19 mitigation efforts”. WSG reported a second successive quarter of decreasing revenues , following its disappointing Q1 results which saw a 26% year-on-year (YoY) decline attributed to losses within the Chinese company’s spectator sports and mass participation divisions.

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Fortnite’s Party Royale provides sports untapped avenue for reaching digital natives

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Alistair Taylor

19 Aug 2020

Universal platform

Burgeoning universal platform Fortnite’s ‘ Party Royale ’ is slowly becoming the gateway for rights holders to reach digitally native audiences. Party Royale, Fortnite’s ‘ experimenta l’ game mode has been a breakthrough for the platform ever since it was released.

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Return of the fan: COVID-19 thwarts fan pilot sporting events amid regional spikes in cases

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Alistair Taylor

6 Aug 2020

Just when sports fans thought it was safe to go back into the water, COVID reared its ugly head once more. UK fan pilot sporting events were all set to start allowing fans back into arenas and attend live events, but government restrictions have now been re-imposed to limit the spread of coronavirus, crippling any chances of normality resuming in the near-term.

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Innovation via Free-to-air Highlights Missed Opportunity to date for the EPL

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Alistair Taylor

24 Jun 2020

Sporting rights

Following live sports’ hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, the English Premier League (EPL) saw two of the top three most-watched matches in league history occur last weekend. The previous record of 4.

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Music Streaming Needs a New Future

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Mark Mulligan

12 Jun 2020

While doing some research on the Chinese streaming market I came across this fantastic UX tear down of Xiami Music . I recommend you read it in full. The day before I found this–also must-read–article on Beyoncé’s streaming strategy ,which explains how she uses different platforms to segment her fanbase (Tidal – super fans, Spotify engaged fans, Netlix, passive fans).

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MIDiA's Recovery Economics principles for competing effectively post lockdown

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Dara Jegede

11 Jun 2020

covid-19 impact

If you missed our webinar on how media and entertainment will evolve post lockdown and how companies should adapt, the recording is available below. MIDiA analysts present in this webinar how the entertainment industries can plan not to simply bounce back, but to rebuild their value propositions and supply chains to adjust to the realities of the new normal.

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Premier League Acknowledges Priorities Have Changed During Lockdown

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Alistair Taylor

11 Jun 2020

artificial crowd noise

The English Premier League (EPL) is set to return to screens next Wednesday, over three months since the last fixture graced our screens. Considering the pandemic enforced-postponement has deprived sports fans of any live content since early March, the return of the EPL is big news for sports – even if the viewing spectacle is going to be inherently different.

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The Music Industry’s Next Five Growth Drivers

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Mark Mulligan

22 May 2020

The risk with trying to imagine what the future might look like is to simply think it is going to be a brighter, shinier version of today. At this precise moment in time, this has perhaps never been truer.

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Bundesliga Offers Reality Check for What to Expect of Sport Post-COVID-19

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Alistair Taylor

21 May 2020

Football (via the Bundesliga) finally returned to screens last weekend, not only serving starved sports fans with content during lockdown, but more importantly demonstrated what we can expect live football to look like in the coming months.

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