Product Strategy | MIDiA Research

Is the catalogue acquisition market betting tomorrow's success on yesterday's metrics?

5 Apr 2022

The music industry spent $5.3 billion on music catalogue acquisitions in 2021, according to MIDiA's most recent market report , not counting another $6.7 billion that was invested into music companies or music catalogue acquisition funds.

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The future of music consumption is (re)creation

Kriss Thakrar

4 Apr 2022

Creator economy

social music

creator tools

The music industry has grown at a record rate , led by streaming and boosted by an influx of an increasingly relevant revenue source: non-DSP streaming (via platforms such as TikTok and Twitch). This growth is an indicator of a major shift in music that will define it going forward, both culturally ...

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Spotify’s Loud and Clear is about fandom, not royalties

Tatiana Cirisano

24 Mar 2022

Streaming Music

Spotify

Streaming Royalties

Spotify has updated its Loud & Clear website exploring how it pays royalties to rightsholders, and it claims that more artists are earning income on the platform than ever before. Many in the music industry will spend today picking apart these claims, and they will be right to do so.

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What the music industry can learn from play-to-earn gaming

Tatiana Cirisano

16 Mar 2022

Fandom

Social media

creator tools

Should entertainment fans be compensated for their fandom? Play-to-earn (P2E), a newly popular school of thought in the gaming space, says yes. People usually play video games for pure enjoyment, but in the attention economy , entertainment companies must give people reasons — not just ways — to...

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Why TikTok is primed to become the next-generation music company

Tatiana Cirisano

10 Mar 2022

TikTok

Social media

Creators

By now, TikTok’s impact on popular music is well-established. The platform routinely catapults songs to hit status, and it has become a regular part of digital marketing campaigns. But behind the scenes, something deeper is happening.

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Kanye’s Stem Player release is a real-time experiment in superfan targeting

Tatiana Cirisano

23 Feb 2022

monetising fandom

Music streaming

Superfans

Never one to follow tradition, Kanye West has announced that his next album, Donda 2 , will not be available on streaming services. Instead, he will release it exclusively on the Stem Player (a handheld speaker allowing creators to remix any recording that he launched in August 2021).

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Unpacking music royalty investment NFTs

Tatiana Cirisano

26 Jan 2022

Streaming Music

cryptocurrency

NFTs

Last Thursday, a Royal NFT drop allowing fans to purchase a share in the streaming royalties of two Nas songs sold out within minutes. The drop was delayed by a week after high demand crashed Royal’s site, signaling potential for the concept of fans and artists co-owning music rights.

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How relevant are awards in the age of Spotify Wrapped?

Keith Jopling

12 Jan 2022

Streaming

Netflix

Spotify

Are awards ceremonies relevant in today's entertainment landscape? The widespread boycott by major movie stars of this year’s Golden Globes is more than a temporary protest and will lead to a major period of re-evaluation for award shows in film, music and across all entertainment formats.

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The next evolution of direct-to-fan will be fan-to-fan

Tatiana Cirisano

10 Jan 2022

d2c

Fandom

creator tools

Last month, we wrote about creator burnout and the need for more sustainable paths toward financial stability for artists. The abundance of creator platforms has opened the door for anyone to share their music, but it has also turned artists (and other creators) into 24/7 content creation machines w...

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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.

2022 will be a reckoning point for cultural value in digital entertainment

Hanna Kahlert

5 Jan 2022

NFT

Niche

publishing

The turn of the year has kicked off with a bang for digital entertainment – well in keeping with the 20’s so far. $2.2 million worth of ape jpegs have been stolen . Vinyl sales were reported to have reached a 30-year record .

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Formula One’s rise of the creators shines a ray of hope on the future of the sport

Srishti Das

22 Dec 2021

Formula One

Super Max

Creator economy

Last week marked the end of an eventful year for Formula One with the tight championship fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. The hue and cry over the International Automobile Federation (FIA) regulations was a popular point of discussion among motor sports fans around the world.

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How SZA is building a model for fan base advisory boards

Tatiana Cirisano

20 Dec 2021

Social media

Engagement

fandom insight

Earlier this month, SZA scored her highest-charting solo single with the breakup track ‘I Hate U’. Perhaps the more interesting milestone for us is that ‘I Hate U’ marks the second time she has reached new career heights by using her fans as an advisory board for single releases, following �...

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A red-hot cultural movement (Taylor’s Version)

Ashleigh Millar

23 Nov 2021

Fandom

music fans

Streaming

Here at MIDiA Research, we like to take a deep dive into fandom culture and the effect it has on industry progress and strategy. As of late, we have focused on the success behind tribal fandom (a skill that has somewhat been mastered by the K-pop genre – note the BTS A.

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Tribes are the future of fandom (and that may or may not be a good thing)

Mark Mulligan

12 Nov 2021

Fandom

Tribes

Media and Marketing

At MIDiA, we spend a lot of time exploring the fan economy and how new forms of fandom are redefining media businesses. The most significant underlying dynamic is the fragmentation of fandom: the dynamic whereby we move ever further from mass-reach media, where everyone is exposed to the same conten...

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Adele’s success will be best measured in cultural impact – not sales

Mark Mulligan

15 Oct 2021

adele

30

Streaming

Adele is something of an anomaly in the modern music business, a throwback to how things used to be. These days even the biggest artists struggle to get mainstream attention for their new releases in a flooded market that is defined by more releases than ever before, and the ‘always on’ artist w...

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The impact of culture on content: Why Squid Game is a bigger hit than Bond

Hanna Kahlert

14 Oct 2021

Fandom

James Bond

Squid Game

Earlier this week MIDiA highlighted how the format of content is gradually eroding , so much so that a TV series, like Squid Game , can reach bigger audiences and generate more conversation than the decades-old fandom hit series, James Bond .

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Content proliferation is remaking entertainment categories and giving rise to experiential consumption

Hanna Kahlert

23 Sep 2021

Media and Marketing

Fandom

Digital

The attention economy reaching saturation was a disruptive force in entertainment long before the coronavirus pandemic. Too much competition for too little time meant that audience engagement was increasingly hard to grab and harder still to retain.

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The oncoming fandom crisis

Mark Mulligan

10 Sep 2021

music fans

Music fandom

Fandom

The Chinese authorities’ crackdown on fandom represents the first major growing pain for the global fandom economy. Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) will likely be the bellwether of this shift, with two thirds of its revenues coming from non-music (i.

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The games universe is driving the rise of global football fandom

Srishti Das

3 Sep 2021

FIFA

football

English Premier League

Sport is built on the pillar of fandom, with a global network of passionate fanbases who are driven by different sporting cultures across the world. Football is a prime global example of this, with multiple popular leagues and tournaments spread out over the year.

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