Kriss Thakrar

Kriss is one of MIDiA’s consultants and music analysis contributors. His main areas of interest are creator tools, music sync, and rights.

The ghost of the 2000s lingers over the catalogue acquisition market

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Kriss Thakrar

23 Jun 2025

Product Strategy

music catalogue

Sign up here for MIDiA’s Masterclass webinar on catalogue investment, this Thursday June 26, 2025, with Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano. In the second quarter of 2025, a range of catalogue acquisition deals have broken the typical mould: Sony acquired Hipgnosis Songs Group from Recognition Musi...

min read

AI futures
Culture wars

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

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.

Music is losing a generation of young men

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Kriss Thakrar

31 Mar 2025

Key insights from this blog: Netflix’s hit Adolescence has renewed conversation around the radicalisation of young men, particularly in online spaces MIDiA’s research highlights that all entertainment is becoming increasingly gendered, with social media platforms displaying a growing gender gap ...

min read

Jersey club in Berlin | Behind the scenes and sounds of 2025

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Kriss Thakrar

29 Jan 2025

Audience Insight

Cultural trends

With one of the largest, most sonically-diverse catalogues of sounds and samples, Splice provides the music that makes the music for producers around the world. So trends in what users are searching for and downloading on Splice can tell us a lot about the sounds of the future.

min read

Splice x MIDiA Sounds of 2025

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Kriss Thakrar, Tatiana Cirisano, Samuel Griffin, Mark Qi and Olivia Jones

January 2025

Splice

Audience Insight

Splice is an engine powering producers across the world. With one ofthe largest, most sonically-diverse catalogues of sounds and samples, itprovides the music that makes the music for some of the most popularartists on the planet. Sabrina Carpenter’s hit “Espresso”, produced byJulian Bunetta, is a key recent example, with a sound pack by infl...

Streaming’s growth plan in the connection economy

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Kriss Thakrar

18 Sep 2024

Music streaming

Streaming clubs

During Universal’s Capital Markets Day, Universal Music Group (UMG) chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge cited some “fundamental facts” of the music business (per Music Business Worldwide ). These include the promise that “streaming will continue to propel many years of industry growth”.

min read

Billie Eilish delivered a superfan masterclass

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Kriss Thakrar

4 Jun 2024

While the industry standard for new releases has long been about scale and velocity, Billie Eilish, her brother Finneas, and Darkroom/Interscope, the labels behind their latest album Hit Me Hard and Soft , have delivered a masterclass in executing a superfan-focused release strategy.

min read

Apple is not the only one crushing the old music-making paradigm

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Kriss Thakrar

15 May 2024

music production

Apple is crushing it – literally. The new iPad Pro ad received widespread backlash for its controversial crushing of musical instruments to demonstrate what is ‘packed into’ Logic Pro on the iPad.

min read

We need ‘real’ artists for the return to reality

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Kriss Thakrar

1 May 2024

The big theme of MIDiA’s 2024 predictions is that ‘ the algorithm is not listening ’. A third of the way into the year, we are seeing more and more evidence that this is the case. The past few years have seen social media feeds become hyper-personalised to the point where algorithms now know u...

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Taylor Swift, The Black Dog, and the fan frenzy flywheel

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Kriss Thakrar

25 Apr 2024

A new Taylor Swift album is almost guaranteed to start a fan frenzy - the question is, what form will it take? Breaking Spotify records is a given, but digital consumption is not enough to satiate super fandom.

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Beyond the obvious
Building future-focused strategy

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling and Kriss Thakrar

February 2024

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...

Independent label survey
Playing the volume game

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Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

January 2024

Audience Insight

This report presents data from the 2023 MIDiA Research Independent Record Label survey The survey was fielded across three months in H1 2023, closing in May2023, with a sample size of 142 Topics covered in the survey include revenue by source, concerns...

MIDiA's 2024 predictions webinar
The algorithm is not listening

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Kriss Thakrar, Tatiana Cirisano, Perry Gresham, Kazia Rothwell, Ben Woods and Ashleigh Millar

January 2024

MIDiA analysts dive into our 2024 predictions, and why we believe the algorithm isn't listening. Watch the webinareither on YouTube or LinkedIn ....

MIDiA’s 2024 predictions report
The algorithm is not listening

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Kriss Thakrar, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano, Perry Gresham, Kazia Rothwell and Ben Woods

December 2023

Business Strategy

2023 was another year of change and disruption. 2024 will be even more defined by change than the years that preceded it. But much of this change will be defined by reaction more than action. The unintended consequences of years of innovation have resulted in environments where many consumers are getting further away from their wants and needs, not...

Patchwork / Fortnite

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Mark Mulligan and Kriss Thakrar

December 2023

Product Strategy

Read the case study …

The $100m+ in-game opportunity behind music producers

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Kriss Thakrar

15 Nov 2023

monetizing fandom

MIDiA’s latest forecasts predict that the video game industry will be worth over $300 billion in 2030, a figure that makes a minnow out of a music industry that will reach $87 billion in retail terms by 2030 .

min read

Identity and culture have killed genre in a scenes-driven industry

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Kriss Thakrar

31 Oct 2023

This year has seen a renaissance for jazz in popular culture, with artists like Laufey, DOMi and JD Beck, and Ezra Collective succeeding on commercial and critical levels. However, their successes also demonstrate one of the key dynamics driving the modern music industry: identity and culture are mo...

min read

There are no elite artists without elite artist development

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Kriss Thakrar

24 Oct 2023

artist development

Creator economy

A recent interview with Mariah the Scientist saw her speak about the struggle of performing for only the second time in front of a crowd at one of the world’s biggest festivals, Rolling Loud. She shared that she “wasn’t good at it”, “did not know what she was doing”, and ultimately suffe...

min read

Streaming is missing cultural moments, and superstars know it

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Kriss Thakrar

11 Oct 2023

In the modern music industry, a near constant supply of music is expected to succeed on streaming platforms . Drake is one of the best examples of this: since 2015 he has released an album every year, in addition to two collaborative albums, adding up to 200 tracks.

min read

Artist subscriptions are the superfan opportunity

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Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

August 2023

Business Strategy

Streaming is at a tipping point. Revenue growth slowed to 6.0% in 2022, labels want new royalty systems, consumption is commodified, TikTok is diluting cultural capital, creators are questioning effort ROI, and AI is here. Music rightsholders need their next growth driver.

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