Music’s Instagram moment The social music creation revolution

Our clients have full access to all of our reports. Clients can log in to read this report. Click here to become a client or, you can purchase this individual report.

20,000 foot view

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 consumers. It would represent a new revenue and fandom driver for music rights holders. But the social and creator tools industries could more easily (and cheaply) capitalise on this opportunity on their own, adding urgency for the music industry to design new licensing frameworks.

Key insights

• The average consumer spends        hours per week using social media, compared to        hours streaming music
• Average consumer time spent creating and producing content grew        between        and        2022 to        hours per week
• Content creation is growing even faster among        who spent an average of        hours per week creating content in        2022, a        rise on        aficionados are more likely to be social platform WAUs, especially on Twitter, where they over-index by        compared to the average consumer
• Because younger consumers spend more time streaming music, social platforms with younger userbases are the prime targets for music integration tools — particularly Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts
• Artificial intelligence (AI), stem-splitting, and augmented reality will accelerate the development of social music creation tools
• These tools fall into two categories: music creation (where revenue flows to the music creator tools industry) and music recreation (where revenue flows to music rightsholders)
• TikTok and Snapchat are the social platforms best primed to capitalise on this opportunity

Companies and brands mentioned in this report:  Apple, Ariana Grande, Artiphon, AudioShake, Bandersnatch, BandLab, Beatoven.ai, BTS, BTS ARMY, ByteDance, Calvin Harris, CoSo, Endlesss, Epic Games, Epidemic Sound, Facebook, FKA Twigs, Halsey, Holly Herndon, HYPH, Instagram, Instagram Reels, JukeDeck, KILLBOY, LANDR, Lil Nas X, Minibeats, Mubert, Netflix, Orbacam, Roblox, Snapchat, Splash, Splice, Spotify, Starmony, SZA, Taylor Swift, TikTok, Tinder, Twitter, YouTube Shorts, YouTube