Reports: Entertainment and Fandom

India market focus
A fandom and AI-forward online population

Hanna Kahlert

June 2025

YouTube

Facebook

Fandom

Online Indian consumers are expected to be early movers. They are high entertainment consumers, AI enthusiasts, and high spenders – especially on fandom. This report explores a population that is an early adopter, format-agnostic, mobile-first audience, with huge growth potential.

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AI futures
Culture wars

Ben Woods, Tatiana Cirisano, Hanna Kahlert, Mark Mulligan and Kriss Thakrar

May 2025

Apple

Spotify

Deezer

AI is transforming culture, entertainment, business, and society at a rate unprecedented in the digital era. Unlike previous tech, AI is evolving at the speed of computing, not the human brain. Delivering as quickly as it promises, AI is breaking the mould.

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2024 audio consumer profile
Habits, platforms, and personas

Laura Fisher

May 2025

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

This report presents MIDiA’s audio consumer survey data with a view to understand the global audio consumer.This report is a compilation of the most recent MIDiA audio data. Key data in this report: Platforms that podcast monthly listeners use to access their podcasts, Q4 2024, global Podcast monthly listeners main ways of discovering podcasts, Q3 2024, global Total number of audio subscriptions paid for per consumer, Q4 2024, global Average weekly hours spent listening to audiobooks vs.

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Flipping the script
Game IP transmedia needs to evolve

Rhys Elliott

May 2025

Amazon

Netflix

Xbox

The entertainment landscape is changing. As superhero fatigue sets in, game IP is now dominating screens, from HBO’s The Last of Us to the Minecraft movie. Unlike movie trends (Westerns, superhero movies), the game-to-movie trend is here to stay, as the games market is a cross-genre treasure trove of beloved IP and fandom, with new IP arriving frequently.

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Leveraging anime
A nuanced scene not a genre

Ben Woods

April 2025

Netflix

Content

Entertainment

Engaging younger audiences remains the entertainment industry’s biggest challenge. However, Japanese anime is achieving this by growing penetration with each new generation of consumers. Key to this success is its ability to dovetail with the fragmented nature of modern entertainment consumption to reach consumers in their scenes.

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Germany media consumption Q4 2024
Growth potential on all fronts

Mark Mulligan

April 2025

US

UK

France

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Data covered includes streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles, and much more. All data is from our Q4 2024 survey, fielded in US, Canada, Brazil,...

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UK media consumption Q4 2024
A mature market with niche growth prospects

Laura Fisher

April 2025

Streaming

Streaming Music

US

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Key data and insights: Time spent and weekly active users (by format and platform)for streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles and more. All data refers to the UK only (n = 1,000) except for ‘all-country average’ referring to the weighted average of all nine countries surveyed.

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Podcasts as a key information source
Implications for media companies

Rutger Rosenborg

April 2025

Media

Podcasts

Audience Insight

Podcasts have begun to rival traditional media as a key source of news and political information for podcast listeners, especially among millennials and Gen Z. To stay relevant, traditional media must innovate, while podcast companies can solidify their dominance.

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Cultural movements
A new take on mainstream for the fragmentation era

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

April 2025

Entertainment

mainstream

Cultural trends

Entertainment has become nichified, mainstream has become smaller, and audiences have fragmented. While this has been crucial to the rise of the long tail and the creator economy, there is a need for a new, fragmentation-era successor to mainstream. Building upon MIDiA’s work on scenes, in this report we make the case for cultural movements, the cultural pyramid, and how entertainment audiences operate in the fragmentation era.

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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.

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Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

Olivia Jones

March 2025

Streaming

Marketing

Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

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Scenes are the new markets
Why and how entertainment should go niche

Tatiana Cirisano

March 2025

Marketing

monetisation

Entertainment

In 2022, MIDiA introduced scenes as a new lens for marketing music. This report expands on the concept, reintroducing scenes – groups of people whose shared interests, aesthetics, values, behaviours, and vernacular have coalesced into a shared lifestyle – as a wider business strategy reset for all of entertainment.

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Streaming TV’s fight on social’s stage
Tactics for a short-form video future

Ben Woods

February 2025

Streaming

live

YouTube

Streaming TV and social platforms have long competed for audience attention but from separate lanes. Now, these roads are merging in the social platforms’ favour as the likes of YouTube and TikTok evolve into kaleidoscopes of entertainment content, from vlogs and music videos to live sport and TV series.

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MIDiA's gamer segmentation
Prioritise why – not just how – players engage with games

Rhys Elliott

February 2025

Amazon

Netflix

Gaming

The games landscape is more dynamic and interconnected than ever, demanding a deeper understanding of why players engage with games – not just how. We are proud to introduce MIDiA’s gamer segmentation, which focuses on motivations, attitudes, and underlying reasons behind gaming behaviours.

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The superfans of music superstars
Identity and cut-through

Olivia Jones

February 2025

Labels

US

Artists

Fandom is becoming the music industry’s golden goose, with labels focusing on building and monetising superfan bases for their top artists. However, superfan behaviours are changing in response to oversaturation and hyper-fragmentation. What once worked for measuring and monetising fandom will not work the same in the future.

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Audio’s entertainment value
Examining audio listeners’ cross-entertainment lives

Rutger Rosenborg

February 2025

music industry

Music streaming

Content

Typically, the marketing team for a games company or TV show would not be thinking of audiobooks and podcast listeners as a key consumer segment to address. Yet, podcast and audiobook listeners are digitally sophisticated and spend more time and money than the consumer average on most forms of entertainment – including games, music, and video.

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MIDiA Research global games forecasts 2025–2031
The market is mature, so double-digit growth is a fantasy

Perry Gresham, Mark Qi and Rhys Elliott

January 2025

US

Global

Gaming

Interested in ' MIDiA Research global games forecasts 2025–2031' ? Access the free version here . Recent years have been tough for the games market. Like many industries, gaming overextended itself following the black swan event that was the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Before and after podcasts
Mapping the podcast listener journey

Rutger Rosenborg

January 2025

US

UK

France

The global importance of video for podcasting extends into the unique market dynamics of the US, UK, France, Mexico, and Japan. Not only does this justify Spotify’s strategic video push, but it also indicates a need for other platforms to follow suit.

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What gamers really think about gen AI in games
Apathy, not outrage

Rhys Elliott

December 2024

Audience Insight

Game development budgets have spiralled out of control, leading game executives to cut costs and streamline their game development processes. It is no secret that generative AI (gen AI) is the tech industry’s current buzzword, but its potential is still disputed despite the hype.

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MIDiA's 2025 predictions webinar slides
It's social's stage now

Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Ben Woods, Rutger Rosenborg, Rhys Elliott and Olivia Jones

December 2024

Free Report

Spotify

YouTube

Twitch

MIDiA's expert analysts dive into our 2025 predictions for the music, social, video, audio, and games industries – and explain why we believe "it's social's stage now".

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