Demand Creation What’s the Next Big Growth Curve for Music?

Over the past            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. These innovations succeeded because they tapped into latent demand, often opening up new consumption windows for music content or formats that already existed, but were not aggregated or focused towards a particular audience. 

The biggest driver of new demand creation in the music business since the compact disc has been streaming, but as we head into the next decade the music industry is already witnessing a slowdown in streaming growth. With the industry still riding the wave of growth and excited about what’s next – be it new tech applications or next-generation services – we take a brief qualitative, analytical look at the industry’s previous success stories. Can they shed light on the formula for success in unlocking yet more latent demand? Do new opportunities for demand creation in music even exist as we head into the post-peak attention era? We look at which of the current crop of next-wave innovations in music is likely to succeed and how the industry should look to harness these as we head into the next decade. 

Companies and brands mentioned in this report: Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Bytedance, Facebook, Instagram, MTV, Viacom, Napster, Sirius XM/Pandora, Sony Walkman, Sony Music, Spotify, TikTok, Universal Music, Warner Music, YouTube