Blog: Streaming - Page 13

When Facebook turned down the opportunity to buy the digital streaming rights to ten Thursday night NFL matches and instead chose to focus on rolling out its live video streaming feature through partnering with celebrities and super influencers it was clear that the world’s largest social media platform was making a strategic statement of intent.

Apple, Spotify and YouTube have all been grabbing the streaming headlines of late, albeit for different reasons. While these companies will continue to set the pace over the next couple of years (again, for different reasons) there is much more to the streaming market than these three.

On Fridayat Midem we launched our new report ‘Cross Border Listening: Borderless Hits And Curated Playlists’. MIDiA produced this report in conjunction with Midem for the 50th anniversary event and it includes exclusive data from Spotify and brand new MIDiA consumer data.

Tuesday’s media scrum around Spotify’s financials illustrate that whatever ground Apple and Tidal may have made in recent months, Spotify clearly remains the poster child / bellwether for streaming.

Music Aficionados are consumers that spend above average time and money with music. They represent just 17% of all consumers but a whopping 61% of all recorded music spending. These consumers shape the fortunes of the music business.

Against the backdrop of the first quarterly drop in revenue in 13 years and a sharp decline in China revenue, Apple Music at least had some good news in the shape of continued solid growth for Apple Music, hitting 13 million subscribers.

We are proud to announce a landmark MIDiA report: State Of The Streaming Nation: A Comprehensive Assessment Of The Global Streaming Music Market . If you are in any way involved with the streaming music market this report is an absolute must.

Pandora has made the news again with founder Tim Westergren stepping up to the role of CEO, replacing Brain McAndrews. These are certainly uncertain times for Pandora, once the stand out success story of digital music, at least from commercial terms if not always from a songwriter’s perspective.

The album has been under assault ever since Napster first gave consumers the ability cherry pick their favourite tracks and leave the filler behind. Apple formalised the process with the iTunes Store and in recent years streaming has hammered the nail in the coffin by supercharging the consumption shift towards playlists.

Last Thursday Variety reported that Facebook is considering bidding for the NFL streaming rights for Thursday night games. The National Football league is auctioning off the digital rights to stream 18 regular season games on OTT services (Non-Traditional-internet based video streaming services.

The BBC has launched a music app called, well, BBC Music . Available only in the UK, this native music app is one step on a well considered path for the BBC as it tries to carve out a role for itself in streaming era.

2015 was a big year for streaming music but it was a bigger deal for streaming video, generating $16 billion in revenue compared to $4.5 billion for streaming music. (Both figures are retail values). The contrast between the two streaming markets is pronounced: Streaming Video: Exclusives are a standard part of video services Streaming Music: Virtually all of the same 30 million songs are available everywhere Streaming Video: Rights are fragmented across a host of TV networks and studios Streaming Music: 3 labels account for the majority of rights Streaming Video: Subscribers are just as likely to be male or female and have relatively even age distribution Streaming Music: Subscribers are predominately male and under 45 Streaming Video: Services compete on price, content proposition and functionality Streaming Music: Services largely operate within the same price point and content Streaming Video: Video services are profitable (Netflix has a 32.

Vevo has long been in search of an identity. In fact you could make an argument that it has had an identity crisis since its inception as a music industry appendage/Trojan Horse superimposed on YouTube (with the latter having little say in the matter unless it was willing to kiss label relationships goodbye).

As much as we may be in the era of streaming, nearly half of recorded music revenue globally is still derived from physical sales, with the CD making up the vast majority of that. So, for all the understandable focus on how YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud & co are shaping the future of the music business, the humble CD buyer remains crucial.

Or rather the music industry just broke the chart’s back with YouTube, although it doesn’t realise it yet. And here’s why… It is normal when switching between old and new worlds to use equivalents, deutschmarks to euros, inches to centimetres, circulation numbers to unique visitors etc.

It has been an eventful few days for the digital music market with developments such as the launch of a whole new breed of unlicensed Spotify clones using the APIs of Spotify and YouTub e, and with Spotify raising another $500 million and targeting an IPO within 12 months.

This week looks set to herald the launch of video content on Spotify’s Android app with a video enabling update coming to the service’s iOS app coming later. Initially the video viewing functionality will be available to Spotify users in the U.

Korean messaging app company Kakao Corp has acquired a 76.4% stake in South Korean entertainment company Loen Entertainment for $1.6 billion , valuing the company at $2 billion. Kakao operates the mobile messaging app Kakao Talk which has around 50 million users, 39 million of which are in South Korea.