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Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.

Our research is independent and evidence-based, covering all sides of the market: consumers, leading companies, industry trends, forecasts and public policy & regulation. A complete list of our research can be found here.

 

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Recorded music streaming revenues rose 11% in 2022 and we estimate Spotify’s contribution at 1/3—Spotify added 25 million Premium Subscribers in 2022, growing its recording and publishing payouts to the music industry to $8-9 billion.

Spotify’s Loud & Clear resource shows that the long tail of artists generating royalties between $1,000 and $10,000, of which many are self-distributing, rose 16% to 175,500—75% of all those generating over $1,000.

Spotify’s open platform for uploads grew the long tail to over 100 million tracks in 2022. Major labels are seeking to change the pro rata royalty payout model on Premium to address the siphoning of royalties by fake music, clips and bots—a looming threat to creators is AI-generated music.

 

Analysts say BuzzFeed got the market economics for news wrong. Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at Enders Analysis, said BuzzFeed bet that free journalism distributed by large tech platforms with their wider audiences would bring in profits, but instead, the advertising money stayed with their bigger rivals.

“We are at the end of the tide turning for these groups. They were valued incorrectly as tech groups — making news content is expensive,” he said.

Analysts say the future of profitable news is likely to be behind a paywall. “Can you support a digital newsroom just through digital advertising? The evidence suggests not,” said Teasdale.

The total value of European football media rights has stagnated since the end of the last decade, translating into a real terms decline.

New entrants like DAZN and Amazon have occupied the space left open by incumbents such as Sky and Canal+.

Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Premier League will tender rights this year, entertaining unrealistic expectations of bids from Apple.

The gaming industry is sometimes touted as an example of how micropayments can work. Gaming and news, however, do not have much in common, says Joseph Teasdale of media analysts Enders.

While the economics of gaming is supported by a small fraction of heavy users that will spend hundreds of dollars per month on in-game currency, “you’re not going to find someone who’s spending $1,000 a month on news articles,” he says.

While companies like Axate and other micropayments platforms are solving some of the technological hurdles, a widespread solution is still elusive.

“It will probably take quite a large shift to to make the micropayments model viable for more media. You want a standard payments protocol that enables very small payments that everyone was using all the time and for it to be low friction, highly familiar and for it to be a kind of approved model,” says Teasdale.

A year after sub-par results brought a reckoning upon the whole streaming sector, Netflix backed up an affirming Q4 with another positive showing by its core business—allowing attention to shine on its more peripheral growth initiatives

The slower-than-expected rollout of Netflix's attempt to monetise non-paying users—dubbed "paid sharing"—indicates the difficulty of the project, but resistance will be felt even more by weaker competitors. Meanwhile, ARPU figures are very promising for the new ad-supported tier, but scale is assumedly still small

While Netflix continues to optimise its offerings, its competition remains hesitant—they appear no closer to understanding what their streaming products should be and how they should sit within their wider businesses

The games industry, with the potential to become the world’s largest media and entertainment sector by revenue, is undergoing profound transformation.

The consolidation of major developers is a response to a revenue model pivoting toward subscription, with direct consequences for those already in the subscription space: film, TV and music.

A technology-led creative medium, with an audience approaching three billion gamers, is seeing its franchises become more valuable and useful than ever.