Digital Reports from MIDiA Research

Label services vendor landscape
Rise of the atomised label

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Olivia Jones

May 2025

Labels

The label services sector has emerged as a way for independent labels to provide artists with best-in-class tools without having to build those tools in-house. This shift towards atomised labels has created a new opportunity for label service vendors to establish a stronghold in the music industry.

Pixels to playlists
Music preferences and behaviours of gamers

Rhys Elliott

March 2025

Innovation

Labels

US

The global games industry is a $236.9 billion behemoth. It now rivals film, television, and music combined in terms of revenues and is a cultural driver. Yet, for music companies, labels, and platforms, gaming represents more than a parallel market: it is agateway to the world’s most engaged, tech-savvy, and monetisable audience.

AI chatbots
The new conductors of entertainment

Ben Woods

March 2025

Creators

Digital

Entertainment

AI chatbots are intersecting our entertainment lives as the tech majors transform consumer devices into digital companions. Such moves are building upon the foundations laid by smart speakers and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to elevate chatbot engagement towards the mainstream.

The audio creator opportunity
Audio creator behaviours and monetisation potential

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Rutger Rosenborg

March 2025

Creators

Subscriptions

Spotify

Historically, YouTubers and TikTok influencers have received the lion’s share of mainstream attention as a creator class – but audio creators are increasingly active on the same digital platforms and operating within the same formats. As a result, the audio creator has become a jack of all trades, moving between copyediting, audio editing, and ...

The AI entertainment revolution
How artificial intelligence will reshape media consumption

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Hanna Kahlert, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

March 2023

Innovation

Creators

YouTube

2023 has been jump-started by rapid progression in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). From the launch of ChatGPT to AI-powered DJs, this technology is revolutionising common practices, impacting consumers, creators, and industry leaders alike.

Podcasts and radio
How radio can play by its own rules

Annie Langston

March 2023

Spotify

live

Radio

Radio set the stage for music streaming and podcasts, only to watch them take portions of its audience. However, there is a clear opportunity for radio companies to assert themselves in the podcast market, drawing on decades of programming expertise to retain audiences and find new ones.

Attention recession impacts on D2C growth

Richard Broadhurst

July 2022

Subscriptions

Streaming

Spotify

Weekly active user (WAU) penetration for the top streaming services is now slowing with quarter-on-quarter growth effectively flat for the leading subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. Peak attention is now clearly here for video. The looming attention recession, which is already impacting the wider digital entertainment landscape, will exa...

Social video
TikTok sets the pace

Richard Broadhurst

May 2022

YouTube

digital natives

Facebook

Social video is optimising lean-through engagement for digital natives, with simple editing features, filters, and music. Value for younger digital natives (those aged 16-19-years-old) lies in co-creation, sharing and liking. User-generated content (UGC) creation has contributed to the success of short-form video, as users seek to have an impact wi...

From social media to creator tools
The evolution of UGC

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Hanna Kahlert

September 2021

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Entertainment is suffering intense competition as audience attention time, already saturated before the pandemic, is hit by the gradual return of ‘in real life’ activities. A flurry of new propositions over the last year and a half, namely in streaming and social media, are competing on largely similar grounds – making differentiation ever mo...

2021 Predictions
The Year of the Immersive Web

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Alistair Taylor and Hanna Kahlert

November 2020

Spotify

Discovery

In this report MIDiA Research analysts present their predictions for what will be the big trends in digital media and tech across music, video, brands, marketing, games and sports in 2021 and beyond. Companies and brands mentioned in this report: Amazon...

US and UK Sports Fans
Reaching Digital Natives

Alistair Taylor

December 2019

YouTube

Amazon

revenue

Sports as a product is feeling the squeeze of the peak attention economy. Sports fans in the traditional sense are ageing, and appealing to a younger digitally-native audience is a fundamental issue that rights holders can no longer ignore. Sports rights holders have realised the importance of their virtual (gaming) counterparts, acknowledging that...

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

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Mark Mulligan

July 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.

Reports: Digital