Reports: Music creators

Headwinds are threatening the creator economy’s potential. Audience growth, social platform monetisation, and content saturation are creating friction that is leaving creators frustrated. Now, the red lights are flashing on the dashboard: the average weekly time consumers spend creating and producing content has fallen for the first time since 2021.

Today’s live music audience skews 45+, with rock concerts and theatres / concert halls dominating sales. Fandom is by far the strongest factor in purchasing tickets, eclipsing price, and location. So, despite challenges like inflation and scalping, most concertgoers plan to attend more or the same number of concerts going forward.

Social media has steadily integrated music, and music creation tools have steadily become more social. These trends are converging, accelerated by shifts in consumer behaviour and artificial intelligence (AI). The result could be a new set of music creation and re-creation tools, integrated within social platforms and geared towards casual consumers.

Over roughly the past decade, each stage in the evolution of the attention economy accelerated the pace of fragmentation and oversaturation in music, unearthing new challenges for each micro-generation of artists. With all these generations now competing in the same playing field, artist strategy depends strongly on the era in which they rose to prominence.

Music streaming and the attention recession have turned music into a background activity. Artists en masse are struggling to cut through the noise, realising that streaming is neither a place to build deeper relationships with fans nor to generate meaningful income.

Once upon a time, music software and hardware were distinct market segments, but now they are increasingly fusing into a network of hybrid creator tools ecosystems. Standalone hardware still has a vibrant future, but the real momentum lies with software, sounds, services and the hardware that supports them.

The emerging competitive dynamic between insurgents and incumbents is the catalyst for an unprecedented period of innovation in the music creator tools space. However, because this dynamic is underpinned by substantial institutional investment and strong market growth, the second order effect is the further fragmentation of an already congested and oversupplied marketplace.

The music creator tools space is undergoing a change that is simultaneously renaissance and transformation. The creator culture boom has driven an unprecedented degree of investment and investor interest. However, because the music creator tools space is a collection of diverse products and services, an underlying challenge has been how to identify exactly what the total addressable market (TAM) is.

The creator tools marketplace is creating a revolution in the culture and business of music. The third decade of the millennium represents the opening of a new chapter for the music business, with the means of production and distribution fully democratised.

Music production has traditionally been, at best, an adjacent industry to the recording business, and at worst simply a cost centre. That is now all changing. COVID-19’s disruption catalysed the already-rapid shift towards affordable production tools and the rise of a new generation of online platforms that are reimagining music production as SAAS-based communities.