If you have half an hour free today, spend it reading a couple of reports on the internet and social media. The first comes from analyst-turned-VC Mary Meeker with her annual Internet Trends slide deck – this time produced with colleague Liang Wu. The second is the Social Media Report 2012 by Nielsen and NM Incite. Both have plenty of food for thought for the music industry.
So, Meeker talks about “rapid mobile adoption” still being in its early stages, with 1.1bn global smartphone subscribers still being only 17% of overall mobile subscribers. She notes that iPad adoption is 3x the rate of the iPhone at a similar stage in its lifetime, while Android phone adoption is 6x. Oh, and mobile internet traffic overtook desktop internet usage in India in May this year, with “other countries to follow”.
She also talks about the “Asset-Light Generation” of younger consumers, contrasting “Asset-Heavy” ownership of albums and CDs with Asset-Light on-demand streaming on internet-enabled devices, alongside discovery through friends and experts. Hardly news to the music industry, but it’s interesting to see it put into the context of other Asset-Light services and behaviour.
Nielsen’s report dives into social media usage alone, claiming that the category sucks up 20% of time spent on computers, and 30% of time spent online on mobile phones. It also highlights rocketing use of Pinterest – about to overtake LinkedIn in terms of unique US visitors – and the fact that total minutes spent on social media in the US alone topped 121bn minutes in July 2012, up from 88bn in July 2011.
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