Taylor Swift Reports from MIDiA Research

MIDiA’s 2025 predictions
It’s social’s stage now

Cover image for MIDiA’s 2025 predictions

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

December 2024

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

The creator economy reshaped entertainment in the first half of the 2020s and social wasthe big winner, now positioned at the centre of the entertainment economy. In 2025 wewill see the second-order effects begin to play out, set against the backdrop of attentionsaturation, content commodification, and increased focus on profit.

Music merchandise demand
Who, what, and where

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Tatiana Cirisano

October 2024

Consumer behaviour

cds

Spotify

The music merchandise market has transformed, with significantly more artists selling merch and more product variety than ever before. The traditional line between “hard” and “soft” merch is blurring as new generations buy vinyl as a collectible keepsake, rather than a consumption format.

Return to live
Post-pandemic music fans

Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

July 2023

Consumer behaviour

live music

Music creators

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.

Web 3.0 is here
Navigating the new culture of digital entertainment

Hanna Kahlert

May 2023

Spotify

YouTube

Netflix

AI has already hit entertainment at the industry level – and the impacts on audience culture will not be far behind. A variety of AI tools are now readily available on ‘fremium’ tiers at a consumer level. Companies may be looking towards what the new world of web 3.

Music’s Instagram moment
The social music creation revolution

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Tatiana Cirisano

March 2023

Consumer behaviour

Apple

Spotify

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.

Social 2.0
Social media’s survival of the fittest, and how marketers fit in

Ashleigh Millar

December 2022

YouTube

Netflix

Facebook

The history of social media has long been defined by continual evolution and iteration, but now shifts across the value chain are becoming more substantive, heralding a new era. Social platforms themselves are changing, and so too are the attitudes, expectations, and behaviours of their users, with audiences’ appetites for carefully curated, heavily edited posts turning sour, and their thirst for authentic, participatory content growing stronger.

A field of all levels
Strategizing music’s attention economy

Tatiana Cirisano

November 2022

Consumer behaviour

Music creators

Record labels

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.

Social media marketing is becoming its own cultural moment

Hanna Kahlert and Ashleigh Millar

October 2022

Spotify

YouTube

Facebook

Audiences are changing the ways they interact with entertainment, as well as how they respond to advertising and marketing designed to promote it. Audiences are increasingly creative and engage in lean-through behaviours, are less tolerant of ads, and want more authenticity in their digital social lives.

Fandom drivers
From fan psychology to NFT demand

Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin, Srishti Das and Tatiana Cirisano

January 2022

superfan

Spotify

merchandise

Fandom is entertainment’s growth currency, yet it remains both under-valued and poorly understood. While other entertainment currencies can be accurately measured (number of streams, number of sales, number of views, etc.) it is only the effects of fandom that can be quantified (number of likes / shares, merchandise sales, etc.

Recovery Economics
Music, Games, Live Streams and the Future of Concerts

Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin and Keith Jopling

May 2020

live music

live

Artists

In April 2020 Travis Scott’s Fortnite event pulled in 27 million players. While this was happening, the global artist community was scrambling to plug the income and engagement gap caused by COVID-19’s cessation of live music, by turning to live streaming.

Insurgents and Incumbents
How the 2020s Will Remake the Music Business

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Mark Mulligan

January 2020

Creators

iTunes

Spotify

As it enters the third decade of the millennium, the recorded music business is in rude health. Revenues are about to enter the second half of a decade of annual growth, streaming is booming, and investment is pouring in. Simultaneously, the fundamentals of the business are changing, from artist and songwriter careers through music company business models to audience behaviour.

Artist Fandom
The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

Mark Mulligan

July 2019

Spotify

Artists

Taylor Swift

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via traditional music marketing. Instead of blowing a huge budget on carpet bombing TV, radio, and print, online artists and their teams are finding their exact audiences by focusing on relevance and engagement rather than reach and scale.

YouTube Disruptors
The Companies That Aim To Challenge YouTube In Its Second Decade

Tim Mulligan

March 2015

YouTube

Taylor Swift

traditional media content producers

YouTube’s supercharged success over the last decade shows signs of having created a monopolistic mindset in the company that leaves it ripe for disruption. Its runaway success as both a content discovery platform and an end destination for video consumption, paradoxically also means it is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success.

Reports: Taylor Swift