Mark Mulligan

Mark Mulligan is a music analyst and the founder at MIDiA Research. He is a long-term tech analyst and a leading digital thinker with more than 20 years of experience, working with leading global music, entertainment, and tech companies. At MIDiA, Mark focuses on the streaming and creator economies, as well as music business trends and market metrics such as forecasts and market shares.

This is not a blip

Mark Mulligan

26 Aug 2022

attention recession recession recession impact

When change happens it often takes the perspective of looking back years, or even decades, later to appreciate just how meaningful that change was. Other times, it happens so fast that it can be difficult to appreciate its magnitude because people become desensitised to the perpetual torrent of bad ...

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Re-creating the creator economy

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Srishti Das, Kriss Thakrar, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano, Annie Langston and Richard Broadhurst

18 Aug 2022

Apple Spotify YouTube

Streaming first democratised the means of consumption, then distribution, and now production. Though the promise of the long tail may not have materialised quite as expected, long-tail and mid-tail creators are now a central component of the digital-entertainment economy.

Re-creating the creator economy

Mark Mulligan

18 Aug 2022

Creator economy Creators creator economics

Everyone is a creator! Or so goes the dismissive put down of many a traditional media executive when talking about the creator economy. But regardless of what your perspective on the creator economy might be, there is no denying its meteoric rise.

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The attention recession meets the economic recession

Mark Mulligan

22 Jul 2022

attention recession recession cost-of-living crisis

We are living in uncertain times. The cost-of-living crisis is hitting consumers’ pockets, driven by rising fuel and food prices. The effects of the pandemic are still present, the global economy may be entering a recession, and the geo-political landscape is being increasingly shaped by conflict.

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MIDiA music forecasts: the new era of growth

Mark Mulligan

14 Jul 2022

music forecasts music revenues music industry

MIDiA has just published its latest music forecasts, available to clients in full here . Here are some of the highlights. 2021 was a huge year for the recorded music business with retail values up 23% to reach $51.

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How (and why) Billie Eilish won Glastonbury

Mark Mulligan

6 Jul 2022

live music fragmented fandom BBC

Glastonbury returned to great fanfare after the pandemic-enforced break, which meant it was the first one since 2019. The music world has changed a lot since then, with streaming getting bigger than ever and TikTok now established as a cornerstone of the music business.

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MIDiA Research 2022-2030 global music forecasts
The new era of growth

Mark Mulligan

5 Jul 2022

Business Strategy

This report presents the key figures, trends and drivers of MIDiA’s music forecast model. The figures presented in this report are both retail and labeltrade values and are in billions of US dollars – unless otherwise stated. An Excel file posted alongside this report provides complete country-level data, including DSP market shares and a detai...

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The future of music
The rise of a counterculture industry

Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

30 Jun 2022

Consumer behaviour Spotify Music creators

Music streaming and the attention recession have turned music into a background activity. Artists en masse are struggling to cut through the noise, realising that streaming is neither a place to build deeper relationships with fans nor to generate meaningful income.

Churn in the era of dynamic retention

Mark Mulligan

24 Jun 2022

Churn Video Music

Kantar, a survey vendor, has been getting some attention by passing off consumer data as an actual measure of subscribers and suggesting that the music subscriber base actually declined in Q1 2022. It said the same in Q4 2021, but 2021 was a spectacular year for music subscriber growth, with the glo...

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The attention recession
Post-peak behaviour

Mark Mulligan

22 Jun 2022

Spotify YouTube Netflix

The global pandemic created a temporary boost to the attention economy, with all forms of entertainment benefiting. As life began to return to normal, this newfound time quickly started to erode, causing growing pains for many entertainment companies.

Why Spotify’s TAM is only part of the story

Mark Mulligan

9 Jun 2022

TAM addressable audience Spotify

Spotify just held an investor day in which it ran through its vision for growth. Spotify has long touted the concept of its total addressable market (TAM), its path to a billion users and the role of emerging markets as the surest path to this figure.

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The Attention Recession
How inflation and the pandemic are reshaping entertainment

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

27 May 2022

Free Report

Video Music Games

With the recent announcement of the 0.2 million subscriber drop in Netflix’s Q1 2022 figures, and Spotify seeing slower paid user growth, MIDiA’s predicted attention recession has come into fruition. MIDiA’s in-house analysts take you through the key insights and trends of this new chapter and its implications across music, video, games, mark...

The Attention Recession: How inflation and the pandemic are reshaping entertainment

Mark Mulligan

25 May 2022

attention recession Attention economy Media and Marketing

Netflix and Meta were the canaries in the proverbial mine for the attention recession and it is looking increasingly likely that difficult times lie ahead. If the attention crunch was not enough on its own, it has been compounded by the perfect storm of headwinds: the cost of living crisis, rising i...

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How the iPod changed everything

Mark Mulligan

10 May 2022

ipod iPhone ipad

Apple just announced that it is finally ending production of the iPod . At 21 years of age, it outlived many of the dramatic changes it witnessed and triggered. In this age, dominated by streaming (and a vinyl resurgence), the iPod did not really have a place anymore, other than with its ever-dimini...

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Music industry earnings 2021: Riding the wave

Mark Mulligan

6 May 2022

Streaming Music Record labels live music

Universal music’s Q1 2022 earnings showed continued growth but a noticeable slowdown in streaming growth, with streaming revenues up 12% year-on-year (YoY) in USD term compared to a growth of 35% one year earlier.

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The attention recession has hit Spotify too

Mark Mulligan

27 Apr 2022

Video Music Media and Marketing

Spotify added two million subscribers in Q1 2022. Yes, this incorporates the impact of 1.5 million lost Russian subscribers and is set against Netflix having lost 0.2 million subscribers over the same quarter.

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Music industry earnings 2021
Riding the wave

Mark Mulligan

24 Apr 2022

Streaming Music Spotify Pandora

In this report MIDiA presents, contrasts and analyses headline financial metrics of 12 leading music industry companies across labels, publishers, streaming and live. The companies tracked represent more than half of total global music industry revenues across these sectors.

Forget peak Netflix, this is the attention recession

Mark Mulligan

20 Apr 2022

peak attention economy Peak Attention Attention economy

Forget peak Netflix, this is the attention recession Netflix’s Q1 2022 results caused a stir, with subscriber numbers down by 0.2 million from one quarter earlier. Some are calling this ‘peak Netflix’, but this is not a Netflix-specific issue.

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Fake artists are what happens when fandom dies

Mark Mulligan

7 Apr 2022

Music Cultural trends

The topic of ‘fake artists’ refuses to go away . For those who have been on Mars for the last couple of years, fake artists refer to artists who release under a streaming pen name but do not build any artist profile around the music.

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Did independents really do three times worse than the majors in 2021?

Mark Mulligan

22 Mar 2022

Music Business Strategy

Today, the IFPI released its estimates for the global recorded music market, with reported revenues of $25.9 billion. Last year, the IFPI estimated global revenues to be $21.6 billion (note that the IFPI retrospectively changes its historical figures every year, but you can see its actual 2020 figur...

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