Reports: Social media

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.

India market focus
A fandom and AI-forward online population

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Hanna Kahlert

June 2025

YouTube

Facebook

Fandom

Online Indian consumers are expected to be early movers. They are high entertainment consumers, AI enthusiasts, and high spenders – especially on fandom. This report explores a population that is an early adopter, format-agnostic, mobile-first audience, with huge growth potential.

Germany media consumption Q4 2024
Growth potential on all fronts

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Mark Mulligan

April 2025

US

UK

France

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Data covered includes streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles, and much more. All data is from our Q4 2024 survey, fielded in US, Canada, Brazil,...

UK media consumption Q4 2024
A mature market with niche growth prospects

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Laura Fisher

April 2025

Streaming

Streaming Music

US

This report presents MIDiA consumer entertainment data across media, music, audio, and games. Key data and insights: Time spent and weekly active users (by format and platform)for streaming music, podcasts, social media, games consoles and more. All data refers to the UK only (n = 1,000) except for ‘all-country average’ referring to the weighte...

Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

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Olivia Jones

March 2025

Streaming

Marketing

Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

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.

Songwriters take the stage
A new playbook for a new era

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Tatiana Cirisano and Fernanda Balzaretti

July 2024

Streaming

Spotify

music industry

The streaming era upended the already-fraught business of being a songwriter, pushing songwriters to secure new revenue streams and better deal terms. While the recorded music industry has responded to similar shifts with a flourishing artist services market, the same is not true for songwriters.

The state of music AI
The consumer opportunity lies in modification, not generation

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Tatiana Cirisano and Hanna Kahlert

June 2024

Consumer behaviour

music industry

Music publishing

MIDiA previously predicted that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) would accelerate music’s “Instagram moment”, where consumers could create and remix music as easily and often as they post photos and videos on social media. However, just because everyone can do these things does not mean everyone will want to.

State of the music video economy
Balancing act

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Tatiana Cirisano and Fernanda Balzaretti

April 2024

Consumer behaviour

music industry

Music publishing

The rise of short-form video, and the resulting shift in value from music videos to music in videos, have upended the music video space. This report unpacks the growth of short-form, the resulting decline in YouTube weekly active user penetration, and the impact on both artist marketing and advertising revenue.

Livestreaming strategy in a social-video world
Work with UGC, not against it

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Tatiana Cirisano

June 2023

live

Amazon Prime

gigs

Livestreamed concerts are establishing themselves as complementary experiences, rather than replacements for in-person gigs. A picture of the average livestreamer — older millennials who are entertainment super-consumers — is coming into focus. Now, as the rise of social video coincides with the return of in-person concerts and festivals, user-...

Music’s Instagram moment
The social music creation revolution

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Tatiana Cirisano

March 2023

Consumer behaviour

Apple

Spotify

Social media has steadily integrated music, and music creation tools have steadily become more social. These trends are converging, accelerated by shifts in consumer behaviour and artificial intelligence (AI). The result could be a new set of music creation and re-creation tools, integrated within social platforms and geared towards casual consumer...

Social platform user snapshot Q3 2022

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Hanna Kahlert

January 2023

Social media

Audience Insight

Media and Marketing

This slide deck presents a snapshot of different social platform users, including age breakdowns, time spent on social overall, time spent creating content, and ad tolerance. It covers Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, and TikTok.

A field of all levels
Strategizing music’s attention economy

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Tatiana Cirisano

November 2022

Consumer behaviour

Music creators

Record labels

Over roughly the past decade, each stage in the evolution of the attention economy accelerated the pace of fragmentation and oversaturation in music, unearthing new challenges for each micro-generation of artists. With all these generations now competing in the same playing field, artist strategy depends strongly on the era in which they rose to pr...

Attention recession impacts on D2C growth

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Richard Broadhurst

July 2022

Subscriptions

Streaming

Spotify

Weekly active user (WAU) penetration for the top streaming services is now slowing with quarter-on-quarter growth effectively flat for the leading subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. Peak attention is now clearly here for video. The looming attention recession, which is already impacting the wider digital entertainment landscape, will exa...

The future of music
The rise of a counterculture industry

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Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

June 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.

Esports viewers update
A valuable segment with a (solvable) growth problem

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Richard Broadhurst

May 2022

Vevo

Facebook

Twitter

Esports currently struggle to attract consumers beyond esports enthusiasts and players of esport-centric titles. Despite growth problems, the esports viewer segment remains valuable. These consumers have large amounts of time and money spent across entertainment, as well as high ad tolerance.

Audio ad opportunity
Niche targeting unlocks attention

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Annie Langston

May 2022

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Podcast advertising is one of the key income sources for both audio platforms and creators alike. Ad agencies and platforms must go ever deeper with targeting capabilities by learning more about the other entertainment habits of audio consumers. Social...

Profiling the social media footprint of niche entertainment audiences for Web 3

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Hanna Kahlert

March 2022

Social media

social media following

Audience Insight

Entertainment audiences are evolving, with digital-first habits – driven by both lockdowns and technology innovations – changing their relationship to the content they consume. Big hits are now just as likely to result from going viral on social media as through traditional paid mass-marketing campaigns.

Hybrid futures
MIDiA 2022 predictions

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Srishti Das, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

January 2022

Social media

Business Strategy

MIDiA Research Predictions

MIDiA analysts dive into our 2022 predictions, and why we believe it will be ' the year of the creator '. Watch the webinar here ....

Attention economy
After the lockdown boom

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Mark Mulligan

November 2021

Consumer behaviour

Streaming Music

Radio

The pandemic-triggered change in everyday life resulted in a boom in entertainment consumption, which, in turn, saw growth in emerging formats as well as a temporary rebound for traditional formats. As the world starts to ease back into pre-pandemic routines, much of this newly found entertainment time will go – but the declines will not be evenl...

From social media to creator tools
The evolution of UGC

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Hanna Kahlert

September 2021

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Entertainment is suffering intense competition as audience attention time, already saturated before the pandemic, is hit by the gradual return of ‘in real life’ activities. A flurry of new propositions over the last year and a half, namely in streaming and social media, are competing on largely similar grounds – making differentiation ever mo...

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Showing 1 to 20 of 26 results.