Reports: Business Strategy

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Cover image for The Mobile App Funnel

The Mobile App Funnel
Benchmarking The Mobile App Customer Lifecycle

Karol Severin

7 May 2015

Freemium subscription trials user acquisition

App companies lose users and revenue right across the user acquisition and retention process. Thus as the global app market grows the amount of lost revenue accelerates also. MIDiA’s app funnel analysis reveals just where on the customer life cycle users are lost, why they go and provides industry averages to benchmark against for freemium apps ...

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Fighting Free With Free
How YouTube Usurped BitTorrent

Mark Mulligan

17 Apr 2015

Streaming free free Streaming

Ever since Napster raised its head in 1999 the music industry has been fighting a rear guard action against free. BitTorrent picked up Napster’s baton and ran with it, begetting music industry’s cartoon villain The Pirate Bay. Now though free has both changed and achieved far greater scale through licensed streaming services.

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Radio’s Streaming Disruption
How Streaming And Smartphones Disrupt Radio Audiences

Karol Severin

12 Mar 2015

Streaming UK Sweden

Along with TV, radio is one of the most pervasive media platforms on the planet. It is also still one of the key drivers of music discovery. But things are changing. Historically Radio broadcasters had their audiences protected in the safe confines of dedicated devices and direct competition was thin on the ground.

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YouTube Disruptors
The Companies That Aim To Challenge YouTube In Its Second Decade

Tim Mulligan

10 Mar 2015

YouTube Taylor Swift traditional media content producers

YouTube’s supercharged success over the last decade shows signs of having created a monopolistic mindset in the company that leaves it ripe for disruption. Its runaway success as both a content discovery platform and an end destination for video consumption, paradoxically also means it is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success.

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YouTube Channels
How YouTube Stars Build Engaged Audiences

Tim Mulligan

5 Mar 2015

YouTube traditional media content producers YouTube Channels

With 1 billion monthly users, YouTube is the third most popular online destination globally making it the world’s de facto pure play video destination. A whole generation has grown up with YouTube as their preferred video content destination, most often bypassing traditional TV brands.

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Apple Subscriptions
How Lightning Could Strike Twice For Apple

Mark Mulligan

3 Mar 2015

Subscriptions Streaming music downloads

Apple’s 21st renaissance all started with music, with the iPod. With the succession of successful products that followed, Apple perfected its early follower model, waiting for others to establish markets and for them to bleed out on the cutting edge of innovation before sweeping in to dominate.

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The Aficionado Impact
How Super Fans Changing Spending Patterns Are Dragging Down Music Sales

Mark Mulligan

12 Feb 2015

superfan consumer behavior Consumer behaviour

Total revenue growth in streaming heartland markets in 2012 and 2013 painted a strong picture for the streaming era. But by 2014 much of that growth had transformed into decline. Neither trends provide definitive evidence for the case for streaming but both point to the wafer thin margins between growth and decline in the music market.

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The App Bubble Burst
The Coming App Economy Correction

Karol Severin

5 Nov 2014

US UK France

In May 2014 we warned about potential risks of the Superstar App Economy. Too few apps were taking most of the revenue. Investors funded huge marketing and development budgets in a bid to create mega hits, but in the process raised the barriers to entry.

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Unlocking YouTube
How YouTube’s Music Key Will Impact Subscriptions

Mark Mulligan

16 Oct 2014

consumer behavior Consumer behaviour Subscriptions

YouTube is the globe’s leading digital music service but it delivers comparatively little back to the music industry in direct revenue. Even the one billion dollars paid out in Content ID revenues only represents $0.14 for each of its one billion users per year, since the launch of Content ID in 2007.

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Global Digital Music Services Benchmark
The Digital Music Marketplace

Mark Mulligan

5 Sep 2014

Subscriptions Streaming Music Music Subscriptions

The global digital music industry may only be growing steadily (5% in 2013) but beneath the headline number is a richly varied picture of different services, diverse regional growth rates and competing business models. To better understand this marketplace, MIDiA Research conducted a Global Music Services Tracker.

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The Streaming Effect
Assessing The Impact Of Streaming Music Behaviour

Mark Mulligan

15 Aug 2014

Subscriptions Streaming Music Music Subscriptions

Streaming has arrived and is here to stay, that much is clear. What is not is how it will impact existing music revenue streams. Though neither a business model nor a product, streaming is the lens through which the irresistible force of the shift from ownership to access is best understood.

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Content Connectors
How the Coming Digital Content Revolution Will Change Everything

Mark Mulligan

12 Aug 2014

Subscriptions Apple Spotify

Content Connectors, devices such as Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast, Amazon Kindle Fire TV and Roku, are set to transform the way in which mainstream consumers interact with digital content. Current adopters of these devices are the most valuable paid content consumers across all content genres, not just the video for which Content Connectors are b...

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Global Music Forecasts 2014 to 2019
The Shift To The Consumption Era

Mark Mulligan

16 Jul 2014

Subscriptions Music revenue Streaming

2013 was the recorded music industry’s 14th successive year of revenue decline. The prolonged death rattle of the CD continues to drag the global market down with it and things just got worse with the paid download entering its own tailspin. Streaming and Subscriptions are the great hope and are growing at unprecedented rates.

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The App Superstar Economy
Dissecting the Global App Store Marketplace

Karol Severin

16 Jul 2014

US UK France

Accelerating smartphone and tablet adoption around the world is supercharging an already buoyant app store economy. A combination of Apple’s tightly integrated ecosystem and Google’s aggressive marketing strategy are helping propel apps further into consumers’ consciousness.

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The Death of the Long Tail
The Superstar Music Economy

Mark Mulligan

14 Jul 2014

music sales Music revenue Artists

The 21st century decline in recorded music revenues continues to send shockwaves throughout the music industry and although there are encouraging signs of digital-driven growth, the impact on artists is less clear. The concentration of the majority of recorded music revenue around a small share of musical works has led to the emergence a Superstar ...

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The Superstar Artist Economy
Artist Income and the Top 1%

Mark Mulligan

12 Jul 2014

Music revenue live music live

Since the advent of piracy artists have been told that they need not worry about declining music sales because their core business is making money from live and merchandise. At a headline level, macro music industry revenues appear to support the argument, but those numbers give little indication of the income that actually flows back to the artist...

Cover image for Decoding the Digital Consumer

Decoding the Digital Consumer
An Analysis of the Digital Music Behaviour of UK Consumers

Mark Mulligan

17 Dec 2013

Consumer behaviour Music consumers Subscriptions

10 years after the launch of the iTunes Store and 5 years after the launch of Spotify, digital music remains a largely niche sector, with the notable exception of YouTube. Despite a decade of contraction the CD remains the most pervasive music product while radio is the dominant consumption platform.

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