Reports: viacom

Over the past 40 years the music industry has seen highs and lows, mirroring the careers of many of the legacy artists the industry plays host to. The most spectacular successes in the music business, from the Sony Walkman to MTV, to iTunes and Spotify – have all generated demand for music in entirely new ways.

Ten years on from the credit crunch, the global economy could be poised to enter another economic recession. Many of the underlying causes of the credit crunch remain in place, due to governments lacking the appetite for the structural reform required to right the faults in the global financial system that catalysed the slowdown.

Playlists are swiftly becoming the lingua franca of the music streaming economy. While most closely associated with Spotify, playlists are now central to streaming as an entire sector. While playlists may not yet have become the dominant use case for streaming music in the way that binge watching is for video, they are transforming how audiences consume music and are becoming the key tool by which streaming services can differentiate in a commodified and highly-competitive market.

The effects of music streaming having supplanted both the download and the CD as the mainstream format for recorded music (accounting for 50% of total recorded revenue in 2018) are being keenly felt across the music publishing industry. The DNA of streaming consumption (playlists, lower mechanical royalties, less revenue on average for superstar catalogue) has firmly shifted the goal posts in market influence, meaning the position to drive the overall publishing market is increasingly up for grabs.

The video advertising landscape is slowly moving away from both being broadcast TV based and being primarily driven by developed markets. The transition is picking up pace, with TV advertising declining by an average 3% per year from 2017 to 2023. In the meantime, over-the-top (OTT) ad revenue will increase by 10.

Home entertainment primarily consisting of DVD, Blu-ray and Electronic sell-through (EST) was a necessary content delivery experience. It enabled the movie business to participate in the first stages of the shift to digital at the turn of this millennium.

Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have spurred a scripted drama renaissance and, in doing, so have trigged a content licensing arms race. Traditional TV networks have had to increase their spending to compete with these new streaming TV networks.

In our July report, TV Show Fandom: Measuring TV Shows’ Real Appeal , we introduced MIDiA’s quarterly Paid Content Brand Tracker by revealing a sneak peek of the data we track for more than 50 TV shows in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. In this report, we provide analysis of some of the top-level trends for the Q2 2017 edition of the MIDiA Brand Tracker.

The TV industry is in a measurement crisis. Ever more, viewing is shifting from the linear schedule and leading streaming services are heavily guarded about their data, creating a measurement blind spot. Social behaviour and piracy activity provide an additional source of information, but not an alternative.

Following the release of its first earnings call since the March IPO, Snapchat creator Snap Inc has seen its stock price drop by 22% to $17.95, its lowest price since going public. The price fall reflects Wall Street’s reticence in taking the long-term view when It comes to tech stocks.

In the cord-cutting era TV networks are having to think about what life beyond the traditional pay-TV ecosystem might look like. With SVOD services snapping up audiences in their millions, operators are busy focusing on higher ARPU users and demanding more rights from networks but with tightening budgets.