Reports

Cover image for AI futures

AI futures
Culture wars

Ben Woods, Tatiana Cirisano, Hanna Kahlert, Mark Mulligan and Kriss Thakrar

29 May 2025

Apple Spotify Deezer

AI is transforming culture, entertainment, business, and society at a rate unprecedented in the digital era. Unlike previous tech, AI is evolving at the speed of computing, not the human brain. Delivering as quickly as it promises, AI is breaking the mould.

2024 audio consumer profile
Habits, platforms, and personas

Laura Fisher

19 May 2025

Apple Spotify YouTube

This report presents MIDiA’s audio consumer survey data with a view to understand the global audio consumer.This report is a compilation of the most recent MIDiA audio data. Key data in this report: Platforms that podcast monthly listeners use to access their podcasts, Q4 2024, global Podcast monthly listeners main ways of discovering podcasts, Q...

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Social audiences are fragmenting
Social platform user profile

Hanna Kahlert

15 May 2025

YouTube YouTube Facebook

The social marketplace has been growing – but attention is a finite resource, as is consumer time. As a result, audience attention is fragmenting across many different apps, with the biggest – YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok –still dominating.

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Label services vendor landscape
Rise of the atomised label

Olivia Jones

13 May 2025

Innovation Labels Artists

The label services sector has emerged as a way for independent labels to provide artists with best-in-class tools without having to build those tools in-house. This shift towards atomised labels has created a new opportunity for label service vendors to establish a stronghold in the music industry.

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Flipping the script
Game IP transmedia needs to evolve

Rhys Elliott

9 May 2025

Amazon Netflix Xbox

The entertainment landscape is changing. As superhero fatigue sets in, game IP is now dominating screens, from HBO’s The Last of Us to the Minecraft movie. Unlike movie trends (Westerns, superhero movies), the game-to-movie trend is here to stay, as the games market is a cross-genre treasure trove of beloved IP and fandom, with new IP arriving fr...

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Music catalogue market 2.0
Bringing yesterday’s hits into the business of tomorrow

Tatiana Cirisano and Olivia Jones

6 May 2025

BMG Round Hill Music T-pain

The music catalogue acquisition market bounced back from a slightly cooled 2023 with a new fever in 2024. What is being bought is changing, however, as investors look to diversify their portfolios and uncover new growth pockets in an increasingly crowded market.

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Leveraging anime
A nuanced scene not a genre

Ben Woods

30 Apr 2025

Netflix Content Entertainment

Engaging younger audiences remains the entertainment industry’s biggest challenge. However, Japanese anime is achieving this by growing penetration with each new generation of consumers. Key to this success is its ability to dovetail with the fragmented nature of modern entertainment consumption to reach consumers in their scenes.

Cover image for Germany media consumption Q4 2024

Germany media consumption Q4 2024
Growth potential on all fronts

Mark Mulligan

28 Apr 2025

US UK France

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Data covered includes streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles, and much more. All data is from our Q4 2024 survey, fielded in US, Canada, Brazil,...

Cover image for UK media consumption Q4 2024

UK media consumption Q4 2024
A mature market with niche growth prospects

Laura Fisher

23 Apr 2025

Streaming Streaming Music US

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Key data and insights: Time spent and weekly active users (by format and platform)for streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles and more. All data refers to the UK only (n = 1,000) except for ‘all-country average’ referring to the weighte...

Cover image for The future of (US) TikTok

The future of (US) TikTok
Implications for the social marketplace

Hanna Kahlert

16 Apr 2025

Social Business Strategy TikTok

TikTok has played a significant role in digital culture over the last five years, driven largely by pandemic-era adoption and knock-on effects. From marketing strategies to viral trends, it has become inextricable from Gen Z culture. Yet it now faces risk of disruption in the US and possibly beyond as a result.

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Podcasts as a key information source
Implications for media companies

Rutger Rosenborg

11 Apr 2025

Media Podcasts Audience Insight

Podcasts have begun to rival traditional media as a key source of news and political information for podcast listeners, especially among millennials and Gen Z. To stay relevant, traditional media must innovate, while podcast companies can solidify their dominance.

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Cultural movements
A new take on mainstream for the fragmentation era

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

10 Apr 2025

Entertainment mainstream Cultural trends

Entertainment has become nichified, mainstream has become smaller, and audiences have fragmented. While this has been crucial to the rise of the long tail and the creator economy, there is a need for a new, fragmentation-era successor to mainstream. Building upon MIDiA’s work on scenes, in this report we make the case for cultural movements, the ...

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Breaking saturation
Music streaming pricing strategy

Tatiana Cirisano and Perry Gresham

8 Apr 2025

Labels Subscriptions Streaming

Nearly two decades into the streaming era, established subscription markets like the US are approaching saturation. While growth pockets for standard subscriptions remain, the next stage is about raising average revenue per user through both price increases and user segmentation.

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Pixels to playlists
Music preferences and behaviours of gamers

Rhys Elliott

28 Mar 2025

Innovation Labels US

The global games industry is a $236.9 billion behemoth. It now rivals film, television, and music combined in terms of revenues and is a cultural driver. Yet, for music companies, labels, and platforms, gaming represents more than a parallel market: it is agateway to the world’s most engaged, tech-savvy, and monetisable audience.

Cover image for Music subscriber market shares Q4 2024

Music subscriber market shares Q4 2024
Full stream ahead

Mark Mulligan, Tatiana Cirisano, Mark Qi, Olivia Jones and Laura Fisher

27 Mar 2025

music subscriber market shares Business Strategy

Streaming market metrics are bifurcating. Label streaming revenues were up in 2024, indicating a much anticipated slow down in revenue growth. Yet, at the same time, music subscriber growth was nearly double that of label streaming revenues for 2024. As is so often the case, there are many factors at play.

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AI chatbots
The new conductors of entertainment

Ben Woods

26 Mar 2025

Creators Digital Entertainment

AI chatbots are intersecting our entertainment lives as the tech majors transform consumer devices into digital companions. Such moves are building upon the foundations laid by smart speakers and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to elevate chatbot engagement towards the mainstream.

Cover image for Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024

Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

Olivia Jones

20 Mar 2025

Streaming Marketing Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

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The audio creator opportunity
Audio creator behaviours and monetisation potential

Rutger Rosenborg

14 Mar 2025

Creators Subscriptions Spotify

Historically, YouTubers and TikTok influencers have received the lion’s share of mainstream attention as a creator class – but audio creators are increasingly active on the same digital platforms and operating within the same formats. As a result, the audio creator has become a jack of all trades, moving between copyediting, audio editing, and ...

Cover image for Recorded music market shares 2024

Recorded music market shares 2024
Widening gaps

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

13 Mar 2025

Music revenue Streaming Spotify

After a buoyant 2023, recorded music revenue growth slowed again in 2024, the fourth year of alternating growth rates. It was a year of varied fortunes across both formats and labels, but perhaps most crucially of all, a growing divergence between label streaming growth and DSP growth.

Cover image for Scenes are the new markets

Scenes are the new markets
Why and how entertainment should go niche

Tatiana Cirisano

6 Mar 2025

Marketing monetisation Entertainment

In 2022, MIDiA introduced scenes as a new lens for marketing music. This report expands on the concept, reintroducing scenes – groups of people whose shared interests, aesthetics, values, behaviours, and vernacular have coalesced into a shared lifestyle – as a wider business strategy reset for all of entertainment.

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