Reports: Business Strategy

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

MIDiA Research 2025-2032 global music forecasts
Recalibration

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Mark Mulligan, Tatiana Cirisano, Perry Gresham and Mark Qi

June 2025

Global

Business Strategy

global music forecasts

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 label trade values, and they 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...

The fandom eclipse
How fan content is competing with IP

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Tatiana Cirisano and Ben Woods

June 2025

superfan

YouTube

Netflix

Fan-made content is evolving from a support act to a fully-fledged competitor to entertainment IP. This is creating tension between IP holders and the fan community. Both parties want the IP they love to thrive in a saturated entertainment landscape. This report will unpack whether entertainment IP holders should view fan content creation as an opp...

International success for local language artists
A strategic playbook

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Laura Fisher

June 2025

UK

France

Spotify

The music industry is undergoing a paradigm shift. Success once required artists to fit the traditional industry model where anglicisation and relocation to traditional hubs like Los Angeles, New York, or London were prerequisites. Streaming platforms have democratised access, enabling artists to achieve international fame while remaining culturall...

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.

Label services vendor landscape
Rise of the atomised label

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Olivia Jones

May 2025

Innovation

Labels

Artists

The label services sector has emerged as a way for independent labels to provide artists with best-in-class tools without having to build those tools in-house. This shift towards atomised labels has created a new opportunity for label service vendors to establish a stronghold in the music industry.

Flipping the script
Game IP transmedia needs to evolve

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Rhys Elliott

May 2025

Amazon

Netflix

Xbox

The entertainment landscape is changing. As superhero fatigue sets in, game IP is now dominating screens, from HBO’s The Last of Us to the Minecraft movie. Unlike movie trends (Westerns, superhero movies), the game-to-movie trend is here to stay, as the games market is a cross-genre treasure trove of beloved IP and fandom, with new IP arriving fr...

Music catalogue market 2.0
Bringing yesterday’s hits into the business of tomorrow

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Tatiana Cirisano and Olivia Jones

May 2025

BMG

Round Hill Music

T-pain

The music catalogue acquisition market bounced back from a slightly cooled 2023 with a new fever in 2024. What is being bought is changing, however, as investors look to diversify their portfolios and uncover new growth pockets in an increasingly crowded market.

The future of (US) TikTok
Implications for the social marketplace

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Hanna Kahlert

April 2025

Social

Business Strategy

TikTok

TikTok has played a significant role in digital culture over the last five years, driven largely by pandemic-era adoption and knock-on effects. From marketing strategies to viral trends, it has become inextricable from Gen Z culture. Yet it now faces risk of disruption in the US and possibly beyond as a result.

Breaking saturation
Music streaming pricing strategy

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Tatiana Cirisano and Perry Gresham

April 2025

Labels

Subscriptions

Streaming

Nearly two decades into the streaming era, established subscription markets like the US are approaching saturation. While growth pockets for standard subscriptions remain, the next stage is about raising average revenue per user through both price increases and user segmentation.

Music subscriber market shares Q4 2024
Full stream ahead

Cover image for Music subscriber market shares Q4 2024

Mark Mulligan, Tatiana Cirisano, Mark Qi, Olivia Jones and Laura Fisher

March 2025

music subscriber market shares

Business Strategy

Streaming market metrics are bifurcating. Label streaming revenues were up in 2024, indicating a much anticipated slow down in revenue growth. Yet, at the same time, music subscriber growth was nearly double that of label streaming revenues for 2024. As is so often the case, there are many factors at play.

The audio creator opportunity
Audio creator behaviours and monetisation potential

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Rutger Rosenborg

March 2025

Creators

Subscriptions

Spotify

Historically, YouTubers and TikTok influencers have received the lion’s share of mainstream attention as a creator class – but audio creators are increasingly active on the same digital platforms and operating within the same formats. As a result, the audio creator has become a jack of all trades, moving between copyediting, audio editing, and ...

Recorded music market shares 2024
Widening gaps

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Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

March 2025

Music revenue

Streaming

Spotify

After a buoyant 2023, recorded music revenue growth slowed again in 2024, the fourth year of alternating growth rates. It was a year of varied fortunes across both formats and labels, but perhaps most crucially of all, a growing divergence between label streaming growth and DSP growth.

Scenes are the new markets
Why and how entertainment should go niche

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Tatiana Cirisano

March 2025

Marketing

monetisation

Entertainment

In 2022, MIDiA introduced scenes as a new lens for marketing music. This report expands on the concept, reintroducing scenes – groups of people whose shared interests, aesthetics, values, behaviours, and vernacular have coalesced into a shared lifestyle – as a wider business strategy reset for all of entertainment.

Streaming TV’s fight on social’s stage
Tactics for a short-form video future

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Ben Woods

February 2025

Streaming

live

YouTube

Streaming TV and social platforms have long competed for audience attention but from separate lanes. Now, these roads are merging in the social platforms’ favour as the likes of YouTube and TikTok evolve into kaleidoscopes of entertainment content, from vlogs and music videos to live sport and TV series.

Social 2025
Navigating platforms for fan power

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Hanna Kahlert

February 2025

Creators

Spotify

Social

The biggest apps are in the process of disruption. TikTok’s uncertain future and Meta’s apps relaxing content restrictions and fact checking will constitute greater challenges for creators, advertisers, and audiences looking to use and benefit from these platforms.

Audio’s entertainment value
Examining audio listeners’ cross-entertainment lives

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Rutger Rosenborg

February 2025

music industry

Music streaming

Content

Typically, the marketing team for a games company or TV show would not be thinking of audiobooks and podcast listeners as a key consumer segment to address. Yet, podcast and audiobook listeners are digitally sophisticated and spend more time and money than the consumer average on most forms of entertainment – including games, music, and video.

MIDiA Research global games forecasts 2025–2031
The market is mature, so double-digit growth is a fantasy

Cover image for MIDiA Research global games forecasts 2025–2031

Perry Gresham, Mark Qi and Rhys Elliott

January 2025

US

Global

Gaming

Interested in ' MIDiA Research global games forecasts 2025–2031' ? Access the free version here . Recent years have been tough for the games market. Like many industries, gaming overextended itself following the black swan event that was the COVID-19 pandemic.

MIDiA Research 2025–2031 music creator tools forecasts
AI comes to town

Cover image for MIDiA Research 2025–2031 music creator tools forecasts

Mark Mulligan

January 2025

subscribers

AI

Business Strategy

This music creator tools forecasts report acts as a companion piece to MIDiA’s report “State of music creator economy: AI’s growing reach ” . This report provides analysis, market sizing, and forecasts for users and revenues for music creator tools revenues across the following categories: Software and services DAWs Music software (plug-ins...

State of the music creator economy
AI’s growing reach

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Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

January 2025

Innovation

Creators

revenue

Still recovering from post-pandemic aftershocks, the music creator economy now faces unprecedented disruption from generative AI. More people are creating than ever before (both as creators and consumers) and sounds, services, and software revenue is growing well (the latter boosted by generative AI).

Creators versus creation
Tackling headwinds and bifurcation

Cover image for Creators versus creation

Ben Woods

December 2024

Creators

Music creators

Business Strategy

Headwinds are threatening the creator economy’s potential. Audience growth, social platform monetisation, and content saturation are creating friction that is leaving creators frustrated. Now, the red lights are flashing on the dashboard: the average weekly time consumers spend creating and producing content has fallen for the first time since 20...

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