Keith Jopling

Keith was MIDiA’s consulting director and music insights contributor. With 15+ years of experience in media and technology space, his coverage mainly deals with broader music trends and solving context business problems.

Sustainability from chaos
How today’s artists find sustainable success in a turbulent music industry

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Sophia Oleksiyenko, Fernanda Balzaretti and Ula Kalkyte
Free Report
Audience Insight
Success in the modern music industry has been transformed by the streaming era. Previous markers and methods, such as national charts and radio plays, have been replaced by streaming playlists and social platforms. Yet, while executives can look at high-level metrics across their portfolios, individual artists struggle with the increasingly personalised, algorithm-driven listening habits of audiences who predominantly listen to music in the background – and the resulting lack of formal benchmarks.
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Beyond the obvious
Building future-focused strategy

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling and Kriss Thakrar
Product Strategy
Business strategy has long been demarcated across sustaining and disruptive innovation. In the digital realm the latter has had the upper hand, but as digital enters a slower growth phase, sustaining innovation is back in favour. Yet this is also a period of dramatic value chain shifts and is thus exactly the period when companies should instead be pursuing disruptive, future-focused strategy.
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The music industry obsesses over artist performance statistics – where are label performance statistics?

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Keith Jopling
Streaming Music
music industry
Music
One of the watchwords in labels recently has been a focus on the ‘value proposition’ for artists, and it is easy to see why. In the streaming and social age, where independent self-releasing artists can get their music out into the world without a label, why should they sign to one at all? Up until even recently it was clear, for both majors and for indies.
min read
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The industry’s narrative is not always the same as the artist's narrative: Redefining success for independent artists

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Keith Jopling
Streaming
Creator economy
Marketing
Last weekend, there was a fascinating quote from Maseo of hip hop legends De La Soul in the UK Guardian: “On our second album, we learned the importance of controlling the narrative. I learned early on that a hit record can hurt your entire body of work if you let the industry control your narrative”.
min read
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Radio audiences
A window of opportunity

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston
Streaming Music
Spotify
Radio
Streaming claimed radio’s younger, music-focused audiences while podcasts are now beginning to do the same for older, spoken-word audiences. However, it is not yet determined that the impact needs to be as disruptive for radio companies. With radio audience declines slowing, and even experiencing a modest rebound, a window of opportunity exists for radio companies to become masters of their own destinies.
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Artists survey 2022 - MIDiA asks music creators: how will you grow your audiences, earnings and career?

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Keith Jopling
Music streaming
Content Creators
creator tools
As the music industry continues to debate the many pros and cons of ‘the streaming era’ (while enjoying the unprecedented industry growth that it has brought), the spotlight can sometimes move away from those artists and songwriters who make a living from music but are not the big stars or household names that we know and read about in the news.
min read
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Growth from transparency
Reframing the value of music through creator rights

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Srishti Das and Kriss Thakrar
Free Report
Creators
Streaming
Business Strategy
The music industry has been through an unprecedented period of change over the past five years.Innovations in live streaming, games, user-generated content (UGC), digital art, and trading of rights represent welcome new opportunities for music creators - opportunities that will require creators to adapt in order to take full advantage.
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