A new edition of the Milan Music Week is taking place these days which sees, among others, many panels dedicated to the evolution of technology and consumption models in the sector. At the center of the debate, the sudden change of technologies and the consequent adaptation of the strategies of the record companies to a revolution that never seems to stop. In the last ten years, in fact, the sector has made a total technological transition, going from a digital share of 24% in 2012 to 83% in 2022 and with streaming representing 82% of all consumption.
In Italy, in the last year, according to IFPI data from the “Engaging with Music 2022” research, the weekly hours that a person dedicated to music exceeded twenty hours. There are seven ways, on average, in which an Italian listens to music.
In the panels in Milan, here then, among new scenarios such as NFT and metaverse, the killer application of the market in the last two years takes the stage: TikTok.
The short video app, which initially looked like a synchronized ballet video platform, quickly assumed a central role in the streaming ecosystem, transforming itself first into a discovery application, i.e. searching and discovering new music (which can be, as we will see, even catalog songs that have been given a new life) to now even compete with audio and video streaming platforms such as Spotify and YouTube.
Over the past couple of years, short form video apps have seen exponential growth. According to the data just published by IFPI, 42% of Italian consumers use them and for 58% the consumption of music is central to the use of the applications.
The strategies of the companies have been remodeled to face this new challenge, so much so that, for example, Warner Music has a specific resource, the “tiktok specialist” who works both on the external source and on the education of the artists in the use of the application to support promotion strategies.
A very relevant aspect that emerged, as confirmed by the artist Matteo Romano, among the first to use the app’s opportunities, is the authenticity and credibility of the messages transmitted through the videos. Generation Z, the strongest in using TikTok, is the true protagonist of this ecosystem, both as creators and as consumers. This means that the strategies of companies and artists must adhere as closely as possible to the aforementioned models of authenticity and credibility. Everyone agrees that it is very difficult to impose something from above or create artificial content to promote a song. Organic growth is generally the norm and companies can only prepare to ride the sudden virality of a song that begins its journey on TikTok and then lands on other streaming platforms, enlivening the artist’s catalogue.
TikTok has in fact played a decisive role in the relaunch of catalog works, i.e. beyond the eighteen months of the artists. The last striking case was that of the song by the British singer Tom Odell Another love, a 2012 hit that went viral also thanks to the fact that it became the soundtrack of Iranian girls protesting the killing of Masha Amini. The multiplier effect led this track, which had ended up on the back burner, to reach one billion plays on Spotify in just a few days.
The short form video is also having new effects on the proposal of catalog songs, which for many young people are actually new, as the creator Maniviola said, describing the impact on the followers of De Andrè’s songs that the tiktoker used in the videos . In the United States, historical songs have also begun to be adapted by speeding them up (speed-up) in a sort of remix to facilitate their use on TikTok.
This further development of the sector also introduces new economic challenges. The current agreements with TikTok reveal a value gap, or rather a remunerative discrimination between what the platform generates in revenue compared to the other players in the sector, in the face of an exponential growth in diffusion. The theme of the renewal of licenses between record companies and the platform will therefore be part of the negotiation that will see the opposing realities confront each other in 2023.
* CEO, FIMI – Italian Music Industry Federation
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