The Disruptors: The View - Music Got There First
The Disruptors by Engine Room - The View: Culture × Technology × Music
Why the industry keeps building for an audience, gathered around a song, a franchise or a person, that stopped queuing years ago
By Athena Witter, Founder, Engine Pop® Published in partnership with MIPCOM Cannes, mipcom.com
A fan doesn't wait anymore. They find fifteen seconds of a song on TikTok, watch the full track on YouTube an hour later, add it to a playlist by the weekend, and buy a ticket to the tour before they've worked out who manages the artist, out of order, without asking anyone's permission. Music has been living in that world for years, and so has anyone who built an audience around a franchise, a community, a person people already trust, while the rest of entertainment is only just arriving.
The Queue That Isn't There Anymore
Entertainment still tends to think in windows: this platform first, that one later, for an audience that queues patiently for its turn. Music gave up on the queue a long time ago, once a song could break on a fifteen-second clip before it existed anywhere else or a fan could commit to an artist on a livestream before a single track had been “released” in the traditional sense.
The industry keeps building the queue. The audience stopped standing in it years ago.
The data backs up what anyone paying attention already suspected: according to Luminate and TikTok's own Music Impact Report, 84 per cent of the songs that entered Billboard's Global 200 chart in 2024 had already gone viral on TikTok before they charted, the audience deciding first and the industry's own scoreboard catching up after the fact.
Music got there first, but it was never really about music. It's about what happens once one audience learns it doesn't need permission to move, because every other audience learns the same lesson from watching. Deloitte's 2026 Digital Media Trends survey found that 44 per cent of fans, and 60 per cent of Gen Z, now discover content of any kind on social media and then go somewhere else entirely to watch, listen to or buy the full version, the exact pattern music normalised, now the default for everything.
Music got there first, but it was never really about music.
The Industry Was Already Simultaneous
I've been on the inside of this exact failure more than once, not just watching it. At Fremantle, when ITV2 cancelled the linear run of Britain's Got More Talent, I pitched Britain's Got Talent Unseen: built for YouTube with simultaneous VOD release, because the audience was already there and the platform didn't need anyone's permission to catch up. At BBC Studios, on a much bigger canvas, Bluey grew into one of the most-streamed titles in the world for the same reason, because we treated the YouTube channel and the premium streaming deal as one audience to grow, not two competing windows to protect. Same instinct, franchise scale rather than studio scale.
That instinct is exactly what a major broadcaster has now engaged me to formalise, analysing the value exchange between its SVOD platform and YouTube across parts of its slate, what each platform actually gains and gives up in reach, data and monetisation, and turning that into directional recommendations for content strategy. The question hasn't changed since Bluey. What's changed is how much the answer is now worth getting right.
The Platforms Already Building For It
What I'm watching change is that platforms have started designing around that audience behaviour instead of resisting it, and the sharpest examples sit at the intersection of music, culture and FAST (free, ad-supported streaming TV), where global viewership grew 21 per cent year-on-year in the final quarter of 2025 alone, according to Amagi's Airtime Report.
Samsung TV Plus is a telling case: when it ran an interactive FanVote poll during a Jonas Brothers concert, engagement came in at 26 times what a standard QR-code interaction produced, blunt proof that audiences respond to being inside the moment, not directed toward it afterwards.
The more direct version of this sits closer to home. The Sidemen built an audience of more than 100 million subscribers across platforms before a formal streaming deal ever entered the conversation. That audience walked onto Netflix with them: Inside UK became one of Netflix UK's biggest reality launches and reached number one on the service's UK chart. Nobody built that audience for Netflix; it arrived already built, and the platform gave it a bigger stage to grow on.
The same argument had already played out once before Inside UK existed at all: in 2024, Pangaea's Luke Hyams made The Sidemen Story, a feature documentary betting on the same premise, that the Sidemen's YouTube audience would follow them onto Netflix. Luke told me on my SXSW London panel why it worked when so many creator-to-broadcaster projects before it hadn't. The earlier ones treated the creators as talent stepping into someone else's format, while The Sidemen Story let them show up on their own terms.
It's a principle I've set out elsewhere, that “the audience relationship belongs to the person, not the platform, so it survives algorithm changes and platform migrations”, and the Sidemen are the strongest proof of it on offer.
The Exclusive Moment Still Matters. The Question Is How Long.
Exclusivity itself isn't the problem. A first moment, a launch, a genuine period of first-look access, still has real value, for much the same reason a first broadcast window does: it rewards whoever took the risk of building the thing. The window only works, though, when it's sized to the audience's patience rather than to a rights department's habits, short enough to respect how quickly culture moves, long enough to still mean something. The mistake is protecting a moment for longer than the audience is willing to wait, then acting surprised when they've already left.
Britain's Got Talent Unseen is a useful test of that sizing question, because it was built with no holdback at all: simultaneous release on YouTube, then only a short, tightly bounded window on VOD, timed to how long people were actually likely to go looking for more, not to a standard rights term. The industry's usual mistake isn't holding something back; it's guessing at how long, and doing it by habit rather than by evidence.
What the Rest of Entertainment Is Still Getting Wrong
The reflex across most of the industry is still to protect a window rather than build for wherever the audience already is. But the length and rigidity of those windows are rarely calibrated to how audiences actually behave, and music is the plainest evidence that the old sequence isn't just outdated: audiences have already routed around it. MIPCOM's own programming seems to know it: as MIPCOM Director Lucy Smith put it recently, “Content is no longer defined by a particular screen, format or business model”, a sign that the market itself is already thinking ahead of the model much of the industry is still building for.
None of this needed new technology, and it isn't unproven either: music has been demonstrating it for years, and the two examples earlier in this piece show it working at both format and franchise scale. What's missing isn't proof. It's the willingness to act on it before the audience makes the decision anyway.
Audiences Are Already the Asset
There's a comparable mistake on the value side, not just the sequencing side. The industry measures attention well and still treats what audiences actually make with it (the remix, the reaction, the fan version that outperforms the official one) as a byproduct of marketing, rather than what it actually is: participation with real, unpriced value. As I put it recently: “a following looks like value, but it isn't ownable until someone has structured it into something that behaves like an asset.” I've made the fuller case for that elsewhere. The short version here is the same pattern as the queue: the value moved first, and the system to recognise it hasn't caught up yet, because a hit creates attention while durable IP creates options.
A hit creates attention. Durable IP creates options.
Producer Jake Gosling is a textbook example of the difference: in 2013 he set up his own publishing company, The Movement London Limited, specifically so he wouldn't have to hand his rights to a major publisher, and he still earns royalties from the records he helped build there. He didn't just spot the value. He structured it so he could keep it.
Platform leaders are increasingly making the same point themselves. Speaking on a panel I moderated at MIP London in February 2026, Snapchat's Julie Bogaert described a platform built for relevance over reach, and Spotify's Saruul Krause-Jentsch pointed to the loyalty that builds through long-form listening in a way no short clip can buy, two platforms with almost nothing else in common, arriving at the identical conclusion: depth beats scale, and the industry keeps paying for the wrong one.
Stop Building the Queue
Seeing this never required new technology, only someone willing to look, and music's audience has been proving it at scale for years while most of the industry wasn't watching for it. The evidence has been sitting in plain sight the whole time, and what's different now is that it's finally impossible to ignore.
The brands and platforms getting this right aren't the ones with the best release calendar; they're the ones who built for wherever the audience already was, instead of waiting for it to arrive on schedule.
Music got there first because it had no choice; the rest of entertainment still has a choice to make.
About the Author
Athena Witter is the Founder and CEO of Engine Pop®, a creative and commercial content growth studio helping producers, founders and organisations turn ideas and existing brands into scalable content businesses with long-term value. Her career spans senior editorial and commercial leadership roles at BBC Studios, Fremantle, ITV and Channel 4, with major titles and IP portfolios including Bluey, Top Gear, Doctor Who, Britain's Got Talent and Love Island, among many others. At BBC Studios, she also led the commissioning of 500+ original digital titles. Today, she works upstream of production, helping teams align creative ambition with commercial growth across digital, social, streaming and emerging platforms. She writes The Disruptors, an editorial series on how creators, founders and media businesses build lasting value in a platform-driven landscape, and is a Non-Executive Director at Screen Yorkshire. She'll be picking up this thread live at MIPCOM this October, appearing on the Creators Connect stage for Fearne Cotton and Samsung TV Plus (14 October) and Netflix and the Sidemen (13 October).
Engine Pop®, a creative and commercial content growth studio. enginepop.co
© 2026 Athena Witter / Engine Pop®. All rights reserved.
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