Blog: UGC

It has long been a recurring strategy for social platforms to borrow one another’s successful features – to the benefit of the incumbents, and the difficulty of new players trying to break through.

After more than half a year of contradicting statements, lawsuits, countersuits, and bad memes, Elon Musk finally owns Twitter. Act one: taking a photo with a sink in the Twitter HQ, and captioning it “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”.

As we move into an autumn that is haunted by the cost-of-living crisis, entertainment propositions are being forced to increasingly compete for what is left of the pandemic-driven entertainment boom of attention and spend.

TikTok has filed a US trademark for TikTok Music , building speculation on whether the platform is gearing up to launch a streaming service. It already has the tools at its disposal with Resso, its streaming service for emerging markets.

The music industry has grown at a record rate , led by streaming and boosted by an influx of an increasingly relevant revenue source: non-DSP streaming (via platforms such as TikTok and Twitch). This growth is an indicator of a major shift in music that will define it going forward, both culturally and as a business.

The gap between creation and consumption is closing. Entertainment behaviours no longer follow simple dynamics of viewing or listening. Increasingly, they comprise a variety of activities from sharing with friends, to using basic creator tools to interact with and create new aspects within other entertainment formats.

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.

Kanye West has released the Donda Stem Player, a handheld remixing speaker that can interact with music, as a way to create a personalised experience with his new album. However, this is not just an interactive speaker for consuming Kanye’s new musical project - it is a creator tool to remix any recording, as shown by a video of the device splitting Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On into distinct parts.

MIDiA recently explored the concept of the social studio and the more sophisticated tools for creation that are being embedded in social media platforms. It did not take long for this to go from concept to reality with Facebook’s Sound Studio announcement.

Digital natives – be they classified as millennials or generation Z – have always had the term “instant gratification” associated with them. This is a reflection of the way technology has shaped and moulded every aspect of their daily lives and interactions.

The word on the street is that the deals labels have struck with Facebook for its forthcoming music service have been done on a blanket license basis (i.e. a flat fee) with no reporting. This was reported by Music Business Worldwide and has been confirmed to me by various well-placed third parties: “One controversial element of these agreements is, we hear, that these are ‘blind’ checks: effectively, advances that are not tied to any kind of usage reports from Facebook.

YouTubers have become some of the biggest reach content creators out there. The likes of Marcus Butler, Zoella and Pewdiepie are living proof that it is completely possible today for a single YouTuber to supersede the reach of large traditional content creators and their programmes for a fraction of the budget.