Thursday’s Themes . . .

November 16, 2017Uncategorizedgmtartaglia@aol.com

DID THE LABEL GAME JUST CHANGE YESTERDAY?: Fasten your seat belts for this one. Yesterday Alphabet (Google’s parent co) and Steve Stoute (former president of Interscope Records) came out of nowhere with a startup music tech company called UnitedMasters. The concept is effectively a next gen record label which will represent artists in the streaming/social media space. The vision is to help artists monetize their music in this new digital landscape to the point that they won’t need traditional record labels any longer. UnitedMasters is playing the ultimate disruptor in a famously dysfunctional industry which has been dominated by a handful Label gatekeepers for most of the past century. The first sentence of the attached Tech Crunch link tells you everything you need to know . . . according to UnitedMasters, “Record labels are obsolete”. If these guys succeed November 15^th, 2017 will go down as the official beginning of the end for the Label dynasties.

MORE EVIDENCE OF STREAMING’S POWER: Yesterday Nielsen released its latest Music 360 research, as reported in the attached Billboard link. Thanks to streaming and the proliferation of connected devices overall music consumption is way up – increasing to an average of 32.1 hours per week compared to 26.6 hours in 2016. Streaming music (in both audio and video forms) continues to surge – you can really see it in the graphic below comparing listening consumption from 2015 vs. 2017. While streaming is pulling some share from AM/FM and satellite, the most noticeable shift is coming from downloads, which decreased from 23% of music consumption in 2015 to 14% today. Digging deeper into that streaming slice, 45% say they prefer free streaming (like Pandora and YouTube), while 29% pay for subscriptions. Not sure what that missing 26% does – maybe they like both? This data provides the clearest picture yet that streaming is becoming the dominant way people are consuming music today and into the foreseeable future.

GROUP M STARTS SCRUBBING THE SSPs: Unless you’re purchasing programmatic inventory directly from a publisher in a PMP arrangement, clients and agencies must use an SSP (supply side platform), which is an aggregator of the available inventory a purchasing DSP (demand side platform) pulls impressions from. But these SSPs are often the source of the ad fraud and hidden fees the digital media industry continues to struggle with. Now Group M is beginning to take the SSPs to task, as reported in the attached AdExchanger link. Besides just cutting the list of certified SSPs it uses to only the ones with disclosed fee structures, Group M is experimenting with individual providers by turning them off one at a time to see how each impacts their overall programmatic buys. By doing this they can isolate the impact each SSP has on things like overall scale, pricing, and viewability percentages. This process gives the SSPs nowhere to hide – their platforms either need to deliver clean inventory at a fair price and with scale, or be dropped from Group M’s selection set. I’m guessing we’ll see more SSP house cleaning from other agencies in the near future.

Have a great Thursday guys!