Blog: cultural insight

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

AI is impacting industry today; here is how it will affect culture tomorrow

Hanna Kahlert

29 Mar 2023

chat GPT

artificial intelligence

It is clear that AI is here to stay – and its impact on digital entertainment (and beyond) will be as tectonic as the emergence of the smartphone . Already, business developers are using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to write everything from product-centric poems about coffee machines to marketing plans and pr...

min read

Emerging market music cultures are shaping the global music industry

Srishti Das

13 Jan 2023

Scenes

cultural insight

emerging markets

The music industry's focus has slowly but steadily moved towards emerging markets in order to find the next billion music consumers. The first phase of this move saw major labels consciously pushing their music into new markets in the pursuit of creating new cultural moments.

min read

What Gamescom and PAX West tell us about games’ cultural relevance in the 2020s

Karol Severin

15 Sep 2022

conference

events

cultural insight

Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to present at both Gamescom in Cologne, and PAX West in Seattle. It has been a few years since I visited Gamescom. Back then, I wrote about how gaming has fully established itself as a cultural phenomenon and was edging towards the mainstream.

min read

Quick take: Gunna’s triumph over The Weeknd is all about moving the culture

Tatiana Cirisano

20 Jan 2022

Marketing

Music

Media and Marketing

For the past week, hip-hop Twitter was buzzing with debate. The Weeknd and Gunna both released surprise albums on 7thJanuary: Dawn FM and DS4EVER , respectively. So, whose album would come out on top? Though The Weeknd is the bigger household name, the two artists’ rollout strategies were remarkab...

min read

Why music underpins the culture of our ‘new normal’

Hanna Kahlert

22 Jul 2021

Music

Media and Marketing

Audience Insight

The recent UK DCMS committee findings on streaming – namely, that artists should receive a greater share of streaming revenues – is merely one facet of the growing pains of a music industry reshaped by streaming and having evolved, willingly or not, into a digital-first proposition.

min read

To the moon: The GameStop stock story reveals a dynamic shift in consumption culture

Hanna Kahlert

3 Feb 2021

Media and Marketing

content consumption

consumer trends

“Mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime loans, tranches… It’s pretty confusing right? Does it make you feel bored, or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do.

min read

Oracle and Walmart re-emerge to take on the future of a US TikTok

Hanna Kahlert

22 Sep 2020

Mobile content

Online video

TikTok

Since the announced US ban of ByteDance and WeChat in August, the future of the widely popular short-form social video app TikTok has been murky and vaguely chaotic. Two weeks ago, Microsoft and Walmart looked to be the partnership to take up the torch.

min read

Zombies and vaporwave: Consumer vibes in 2020

Hanna Kahlert

12 Sep 2020

Vapourware

synth wave

lofi

News has become culturally vital in 2020. In a year of global health, social and economic disruption, it now possesses a relevant edge to compete vigorously for consumer attention in a saturated content marketplace.

min read

How games continue to drive a cultural shift

Karol Severin

24 Jul 2020

Games

Gaming

cultural insight

The strides gaming has made in recent years regarding its cultural relevance are hard to ignore. Twenty years ago, consumers defined their cultural image through the music they listened to, the clothes they wore and the sports teams they supported.

min read

Seven Developments in Recorded Music in the 2010s (and the Songs that Defined them)

Zach Fuller

6 Nov 2019

cardi b

cultural insight

Drake

Decade retrospectives are almost doomed to fail. Assess the 60s in 1969 and you would have likely overweighed the influence of Grand Funk Railroad compared to The Velvet Underground. When it comes to the 70s, proto Hip-Hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash or the Post-Punk of Joy Division would hav...

min read

Streaming Needs to Worry About a Global Recession…But Perhaps Not as Much as Cable

Hanna Kahlert

27 Aug 2019

cultural insight

Media

Streaming

Last week MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan overviewed how , in a recession, discretionary expenditures are the first to be cut. Given the non-obligatory nature of subscriptions and the contractual shackles of cable, services like Netflix and Spotify would likely lose out quickly as consumers rush to minimise...

min read

Sports, Television, Music, Politics – Cultural Cohesion in a Climate of Division

Hanna Kahlert

8 Aug 2019

cultural insight

Entertainment

Media

History (so they say) repeats itself. While in some instances this might bring about the comfort of cyclical certainty, in others – as we near a new roaring 20’s with what looks to be thematic similarity to all the economic boom and political chaos of the last – this can prove, shall we say, d...

min read