Reports: Music consumers

Consumer music behaviours are both stabilising and showing signs of coming change. Change that could be challenging for all music business stakeholders, especially with regards to fandom monetisation. This report presents data-focused visuals and impactful analysis of trends and anomalies that will inform your understanding of what is happening to today’s music consumer, why it is happening, and where these trends are heading.

This report presents key trends and analysis from MIDiA’s quarterly Music Brand Tracker survey, including places of listening, streaming music activities, radio, demographics, streaming app users, time spent listening and top streamed artists. Companies...

Midway through the streaming transition, consumer segmentation is more complex and nuanced than ever before. The traditional methods of segmenting by spending behaviour retain a core value, while those based on attitudes are most valuable for understanding streaming consumers.

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.

During the last decade Brazil underwent great economic advances, removing a considerable part of its population from poverty, placing them into the consumer market. Now, these Brazilian citizens aspire to smartphones and tablets in order to access digital content and services.

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.

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.