Reports: monetisation

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.

Podcasts alone will struggle to monetise via subscriptions, leaving advertising as podcasts’ key source of revenue for the foreseeable future. However, podcasts do attract high-earning, high-spending audiences, which are often hard to reach with conventional advertising.

Investments from major audience platforms in audio infrastructure, such as hosting platforms and advertising, kickstarted the growth of the podcast market. With the basic infrastructure now in place, it is time for the major platforms to focus on growing the format by expanding listenership and user experience.

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 within social media ecosystems through creating and sharing unique experiences.

With content now a more difficult proposition in itself to sell directly, the overall experience becomes, for many, their central core monetisable proposition. We have already seen this development in the online world which is characterised by the transition from sales to consumption.

In the old world, there were clear demarcations between media types, bordered with proprietary media and playback devices. However, different entertainment forms now exist in more interdependent ecosystems than they did in the analogue era, with all-in-one app stores blurring the boundaries and turning media consumption into an amorphous whole where content types compete directly with each another for both time and money.