Reports: Audience Insight

Paid content used to be one of the web’s backwaters. Change, however, is afoot, thanks to innovations such as app stores, tablets and media streamers. Music, video, games and books all compete for attention and wallet share on consumers’ connected devices.

The world’s largest music market continues to set the pace for digital music adoption among the large music markets. Tech savvy young Americans are increasingly embracing consumption over ownership models and in turn are helping change the revenue landscape.

Consumer music behaviour, tastes and attitudes vary dramatically. The ability to delineate discrete segments is crucial for targeting music services and for artist marketing. Over the last half decade the music industry has come to understand importance of consumer segmentation in understanding music fans and buyers.

The music industry has long placed supreme importance on the holiday season and it is a habit that dies hard. Release schedules are still geared towards the period and seasonal sales expectations, or least hopes, remain high. Yet gifting has been one of the biggest victims of the digital transition with digital gifting failing to capture the imagination of mainstream consumers.

Natives and Immigrants demarcate the digital world. While Digital Immigrants bear the baggage of their analogue era past, Digital Natives have only ever know ubiquitous connectivity and content availability. Consequently the digital music behaviour of Digital Natives evolves at a dramatic pace and markedly over indexes against the Digital Immigrants.