Entertainment is suffering intense competition as audience attention time, already saturated before the pandemic, is hit by the gradual return of ‘in real life’ activities. A flurry of new propositions over the last year and a half, namely in streaming and social media, are competing on largely similar grounds – making differentiation ever more difficult. Audiences are responding to these demands on their attention by changing their preferences to the scarce and novel, which favours creation and other ‘lean-in’ behaviours. Meanwhile, on the creator side, new tools are simplifying the process of going from casual creator to fully-fledged independent artist. The space between the two is narrowing, introducing new opportunity for social media and digital entertainment alike to step into this creative ‘white space’. This is the early onset of a new era of user-generated content (UGC).

Companies and brands mentioned in this report: Apple, Apple Arcade, BandLab, Discord, Facebook, FL Studio, GarageBand, Google Stadia, Instagram, Myspace, Netflix, PlayStation Now, Roblox, Snapchat, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube