Reports: Spotify

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

State of the music creator economy
Post-lockdown growth

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Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano
The Covid pandemic created a unique catalyst for the music creator economy. More time on hands and more cash in pockets gave novices and veterans alike the opportunity to spend both more time and money making music. Though the pandemic was a peak, it also marked the start of a new era for the music creator economy across every one of its aspects, from revenue to creation to remuneration.
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Radio audiences
A window of opportunity

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston
Streaming claimed radio’s younger, music-focused audiences while podcasts are now beginning to do the same for older, spoken-word audiences. However, it is not yet determined that the impact needs to be as disruptive for radio companies. With radio audience declines slowing, and even experiencing a modest rebound, a window of opportunity exists for radio companies to become masters of their own destinies.
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Re-creating the creator economy

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Srishti Das, Kriss Thakrar, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano, Annie Langston and Richard Broadhurst
Streaming first democratised the means of consumption, then distribution, and now production. Though the promise of the long tail may not have materialised quite as expected, long-tail and mid-tail creators are now a central component of the digital-entertainment economy.
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Music IP as video content
Why music fandom is strategically important for D2C

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Tim Mulligan
Music rightsholders are keen to leverage artist IP in an increasingly competitive direct-to-consumer video landscape, where appealing to silver streamers is a strategic play to minimise churn in an era of peak video subscriptions. The monetisable emerging long tail of video streaming, combined with the transformation of music IP into a content asset, has created the opportunity for the leveraging non-music IP for video audiences to build a new revenue stream that is free from the pre-digital constraints of the music industry.
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Attention recession impacts on D2C growth

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Richard Broadhurst
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 exacerbate the greater underlying disengagement trends such as cancelling subscriptions that are starting to impact on video.
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Music creator survey, Q4 2021
Redefining success

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Tatiana Cirisano
As the barriers to music creation continue to lower, more creators enter the field, yet it is becoming harder than ever to earn a living through music, with a finite amount of revenue being split ever more ways. The majority of professional music creators do not earn meaningful income through their craft and must cobble together income from a diverse mix of sources to make ends meet.
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