Reports: Amazon Echo

With streaming music now in its mature growth stage in most leading music markets, differentiation will be key to unlocking further growth pockets. While this will likely require innovation in both product and licensing, there are already clear signs that the streaming services are developing userbases with distinct and varied behaviours and characteristics.

As audio consumption steadily grows from its post-lockdown spike, it is crucial to identify the core audiences who are maintaining their listenership as the attention recession is affecting entertainment. Millennial audiences demonstrate a steady listenership to emerging audio formats while younger listeners have yet to reach consumption potential.

The data in this report is taken from MIDiA’s Q1 2021 consumer survey. The full data from this survey and all the preceding quarterly surveys are available, along with data visualisation tools and dynamic segmentation, on MIDiA Fuse. The countries covered in this report are US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Brazil, South Korea.

Music and video subscribers are the most influential technology and brand advocates amongst their peer groups and are therefore the most valuable users for advertisers and brands to reach. They are consuming progressively more content behind paywalls, which, as predominately ad-free spaces, represents a growing challenge for marketers.

Games used to be isolated from other media activities. This has all changed with the rise of the attention economy, and the shift of gaming devices from purely consoles, to smartphones now supporting other media formats. This dynamic opens a floodgate of opportunities for media and entertainment companies, tech majors, telcos and brands alike to create cross-entertainment collaboration and marketing opportunities.

Despite being far from the mainstream at 9% penetration, voice control activity has established itself firmly in certain pockets of the digital entertainment landscape, be it among music subscribers in terms of entertainment or among Snapchat users within social media.

The most valuable consumers to advertisers increasingly spend time with digital content that sits behind a paywall. Music and video subscribers are particularly valuable due to the influence they have amongst their peer groups and their propensity to be the first to try out new products and services.

This is part of MIDiA’s data snapshot series in which we spotlight curated consumer datasets. Figure 1: The Digital Home is Becoming Increasingly Sophisticated Household Ownership of Digital Technology, Q1 2018 The ‘digital home’ was a term that rose to prominence in the mid 2000s as the first generation of home router centred devices started to come to market at scale.

Music and video subscribers are the most influential amongst their peer groups and are some of the most valuable segments for advertisers and brands. The fact that they spend an increasing portion of their time behind ad-free paywalls, represents a growing challenge for marketers.

Mobile and PC gamer penetration declined slightly in the UK between Q4 2016 and Q4 2017. Meanwhile, console ownership did not grow either, attesting that the market is constrained by the impending peak in the attention economy. It is becoming harder to compete for attention and engagement, precisely at the wrong time.

Connected voice-control devices epitomised by the Amazon Echo have transformed from being mere curiosities of consumer electronic R&D divisions, into becoming positioned as the next hardware paradigm. With impressive growth since its November 2014 release via Amazon Prime’s US customer base, the Echo and subsequent competing voice control device releases by Google and Apple are competing for influence in the home and to shape how people experience digital content there.