Music Discovery
Streaming’s Growing Role

Mark Mulligan

August 2020

Streaming

Streaming Music

Spotify

Radio has long led music discovery and continues to do so today. However, streaming – both audio and video – are making up ground fast, especially among more engaged and younger music fans. These shifts in discovery come as music marketing strategy is placing an ever-greater emphasis on streaming.

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Fortnite’s Party Royale provides sports untapped avenue for reaching digital natives

Alistair Taylor

19 Aug 2020

Universal platform

Fortnite

Epic Games

Burgeoning universal platform Fortnite’s ‘ Party Royale ’ is slowly becoming the gateway for rights holders to reach digitally native audiences. Party Royale, Fortnite’s ‘ experimenta l’ game mode has been a breakthrough for the platform ever since it was released.

min read

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Consumer Engagement
Building Sustainable Brands in 2020 and Beyond

Hanna Kahlert

April 2020

Marketing

YouTube

Netflix

Brands have an ongoing engagement problem. No matter how much data they use or how targeted they go, competition is fierce, consumer attention is saturated, and all usage comes at the expense of time spent elsewhere. With the ubiquity of advertising, brand choices are as much a personal statement by the consumer to their peers as a testament to trust and loyalty in a company.

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YouTube Music Curators
Media Assets or Next-Gen Labels?

Zach Fuller

December 2019

Spotify

Music publishing

YouTube

The rise of the YouTube channel curator was one of the defining stories in music throughout the 2010s, and yet in the era of global success stories such as Kondzilla and T-Series, their place in the music ecosystem is still being defined. YouTube points both towards the potential future of the label and essentially a new kind of visual media property.

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Consumer Ad Receptiveness
Apathy, Evasion and Engagement

Mark Mulligan

September 2019

Spotify

Marketing

Amazon

On-demand audiences expect to be able to control their digital experiences, and many have opted for the ad-free oases of streaming subscriptions. While traditional media might be losing audience share it is not giving up the fight, instead investing heavily in ad tech that improves targeting and advertiser agility.

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Artist Fandom
The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

Mark Mulligan

July 2019

Spotify

Artists

Taylor Swift

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via traditional music marketing. Instead of blowing a huge budget on carpet bombing TV, radio, and print, online artists and their teams are finding their exact audiences by focusing on relevance and engagement rather than reach and scale.

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The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

Mark Mulligan

5 Jul 2019

artist marketing

artist streams

Artists

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming-native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via the traditional music marketing.

min read

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Music Marketing
Niche is the New Mainstream

Mark Mulligan

May 2019

Streaming

Streaming Music

Spotify

Streaming personalisation and falling radio audiences are combining to rewrite the music marketing rulebook, ushering in a whole new marketing paradigm. Hits used to be cultural moments; artist brands built by traditional mass media. This fire-hydrant approach to marketing lacked both accountability and effective targeting.

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Four Marketing Principles for the Digital Economy
1.0

Georgia Meyer

March 2019

digital content

context

amazon studios

The ascent of the digital economy has resulted in a radical change of marketing principles, the consequences of which have not yet been sufficiently understood. This report outlines four marketing principles derived from the new rules shaping measurement, creativity, purchase behaviour and consumer agency in the digital economy.

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Marketing to Streaming Subscribers
Engaging with Social Stories and Smart Speakers

Georgia Meyer

October 2018

Spotify

YouTube

Amazon

The most valuable consumers to advertisers increasingly spend time with digital content that sits behind a paywall. Music and video subscribers are particularly valuable due to the influence they have amongst their peer groups and their propensity to be the first to try out new products and services.

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The Paywall Challenge
Locking Away Digital’s Most Valuable Consumers

Georgia Meyer

September 2018

Spotify

YouTube

SoundCloud

Music and video subscribers are the most influential amongst their peer groups and are some of the most valuable segments for advertisers and brands. The fact that they spend an increasing portion of their time behind ad-free paywalls, represents a growing challenge for marketers.

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India’s Digital Consumers
Race to Win The Next Billion Intensifies

Georgia Meyer

August 2018

Spotify

Google

Facebook

A large portion of the globe’s next one billion digital consumers are going to come online in India. These consumers are characterised by swift adoption of digital spending habits, having leapfrogged PCs and experiencing the internet for the first time via mobile phones.

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Advertising in China
Reaching the Most Digitally Savvy Consumers

Georgia Meyer

July 2018

emerging markets

music streamers

SVOD

Streaming, both music and video, are in the early follower phase of consumer adoption in China. While they are still niche consumer segments, their behaviours will become more widely adopted. Chinese consumers in these segments increasingly curate their content, including the extent to which they pay attention to the advertising messages they receive.

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India and China Media Trends 2018

Zach Fuller

May 2018

Streaming

Spotify

Saavn

China and India are undergoing significant change in their media industries. Both countries are viewed as two of the world’s potentially most lucrative economies for digital content, based upon their spectacular GDP per capita growth rate and their billion-plus respective populations.

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Making and Marketing an Artist
Streaming Rewrites the Rules, Again

Mark Mulligan

April 2018

Labels

Streaming

Streaming Music

Marketing is one of the core competencies of record labels. The rise of the internet and social media transformed label marketing strategies. Now streaming is turning everything upside down again. The new challenge this time round is that streaming is both a marketing tool and a revenue source.

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Facebook’s Instagram Problem
Building Media Strategy In A Fragmented Audience World

Mark Mulligan

February 2018

YouTube

Facebook

Facebook

In December 2016 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was embarking on a path to become a media company, but a media company unlike any other. More than one year on, Facebook’s metrics are revealing just how important this strategy is going to be for the company’s outlook.

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Gaming And Video Fandom Overlap
Cannibalisation Risks For Games And SVOD Releases

Karol Severin

December 2017

Stranger Things

mobile gamers

console owners

Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD), binge-watching and weekly usage of Netflix have penetrated the mainstream among gamers. Behind these propositions are companies with large marketing budgets and effective channels enabling them to reach their audiences.

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Fake News 2017
Social Media’s Coming of Age

Zach Fuller

January 2017

Facebook

Social media

new media

By reaching the apex of cultural ubiquity, social media is being forced to answer questions it never imagined it would need to. Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Co.’s original missions could not have comprehended the way in which their communications tools would construct world-views.

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YouTube Channel Growth
How Native Content Strategies Will Underpin Success

Tim Mulligan

March 2015

YouTube

10th anniversary viral stars

traditional media content producers

YouTube’s first decade established the video category that is still widely referred to as short form video, even though it is only music videos that any longer cling religiously to the few minutes format. Ten years on, YouTube’s channel hierarchy is emerging not just as the key navigation interface but also the foundation of a new content creator ecosystem.

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