Blog: social music

In 2020, TikTok users proved their power for turning songs into hits. Tracks associated with dance challenges, memes and other TikTok trends regularly cracked the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, and major labels entered bidding wars to sign the previously unknown artists behind TikTok smashes, such as Powfu (of “Death Bed”) and Jawsh685 (of “Laxed [Siren Beat]”).

After years of relative stability, music consumption is shifting, with the DSP streaming model beginning to lose some ground as illustrated by the major labels growing streaming revenue by 33% in Q2 2021 while Spotify was up by just 23%.

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 .

The pandemic-defined 2020 was an outlier year across digital entertainment, with the extra 12% of time consumers spent with entertainment boosting everything, including music. One of the effects was that streaming grew more than it would have otherwise, delaying the inevitable slowdown in streaming revenue growth.

In recent days we have seen three major developments that, collectively, are a potential pivot point for social music: 1. TikTok close to a US-entity buyout by Microsoft to avoid potential sanctions, following hot on the heels of an India blackout 2.

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.

The IFPI has reported that global recorded music revenues have hit $19.1 billion, which means that MIDiA’sownestimatespublished in Marchwere within 1.6% of the actual results . This revenue growth story is strong and sustained but the market itself is undergoing dramatic change.

Facebook recently secured licensing deals with music rightsholders in India , an important step in what has thus far been an underwhelming social music strategy since first inking rights deals in June 2018.

No sooner had the ink dried on Facebook’s new social music offering, that Snapchat fights back with a Pandora partnership built on its ‘unFacebook’ privacy centred app developer platform Snapkit.

Facebook has announced its long mooted move into music. As widely anticipated the service offering focuses on using music to add context to social experiences. The official blog outlines two key use cases: Adding music to videosDoing live stream lip syncs in Facebook Live videos For now the roll out is limited, which will give Facebook the opportunity to hone the service and learn from the behaviour of a relatively narrow user group.