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Empowering Entertainment Discovery Everywhere
Linkfire makes entertainment marketing easy. We optimize impact, drive streams, increase ticket sales and recommend audio content to billions of fans and listeners on a global scale.
Our SaaS marketing platform transformed music marketing and we are now building a global recommendation network for audio entertainment discovery to connect even more fans and listeners to the content they love.
Linkfire’s customers and partners include most artists on Billboard’s annual Hot 100, all major music labels, global audio and music streaming services, social media apps and media publishers.
Our journey started with music and the global music industry is also currently the primary market that we operate in. Our future total addressable market is above USD 400 billion. It includes VOD (video-on-demand), podcasts, audiobooks and gaming.
Global growth opportunities within the music industry
In the early 21st century, the music industry suffered from increased piracy and declining revenues. As internet connections improved and hard disk space became cheaper, the illegal sharing of music through the internet became more and more prevalent, with little provided in the way of comprehensive legal services.
The revenues of the music industry have been declining for a long time, but in 2015 the music industry once again returned to growth, and has been growing since. The shift from physical albums to streaming has been the main contributor in returning the total industry to growth. The shift from physical albums to digital consumption has been driven by the digital economy and global megatrends, such as increased internet and smartphone penetration.
The total global music industry consists of three segments: recorded music, live music and publishing. The recorded music market is by far the largest. Linkfire’s offer relates to two of these segments: recorded music and live music.
Global recorded music market and streaming market
The recorded music industry had experienced 15 years of decline until 2015 due to piracy and un- bundling. Since 2015, the industry has returned to growth, primarily driven by fans’ engagement with music on paid streaming services. While parts of the music industry took a large hit from COVID-19 (live music experienced a 63.9 percent decline year over year), recorded music revenue remained resilient.
Streaming revenues has been the key driver of the recorded music segment in recent years, and is also expected to be the key growth driver in the future. Streaming exceeded more than half of the global recorded music revenue for the first time in 2019.
Global live music market
The live music market has been characterized by stable growth in recent years, and has been one of the most resilient parts of the music industry in the past two decades, even growing during economic downturn. During prior recessions, the annual growth in US concert revenue was 6.7 per cent, compared to 1.9 per cent for public consumption expenditure.
Linkfire has a unique offering to penetrate the market, operates in a nascent, fast growing market with multifaceted growth opportunities and has a solid foundation for future growth. The growth strategy is divided into growing subscription revenue, and growing commission revenue.
There are two main ways of growing subscription revenue: by adding new clients and by increasing user monetisation. Commission revenue has two components: commission rates and traffic. Thus, to improve it, Linkfire needs to influence either one or both of the components.
You can find more information on Linkfire’s strategy in our latest annual report.
A scalable and flexible business model
Linkfire’s business of providing a digital marketing platform and generating leads is highly scalable. As a digital product, the cost of adding one more user to the platform or redirecting one more consumer to a streaming service is minimal.
Linkfire currently focuses mainly on the music industry, the service offering is flexible, and the company is exploring its options to address adjacent verticals such as video on demand, podcasts, audiobooks and video gaming.
Linkfire’s services could easily be tailored to suit needs in these industries, which together make up for a total addressable market of over USD 400 billion. This market size refers to total music market, total film industry, US podcast market, gaming video content market and book market.
Linkfire has set the following mid-term* financial targets:
Growth
Organic revenue shall grow at a compounded annual growth rate between 20-40 percent
Gross profit
The gross margin shall amount to approximately 80 percent
* Mid-term is 3-5 years from the revision in October 2022
Linkfire is exposed to various risks, both operational and financial.
Operational risks mainly comprise industry risk, commission revenue risk, data partnership risk, subscription revenue risk and management, management and key employee risk, privacy regulation risk and risks related to taxation.
Financial risks mainly comprise capital management risk, credit risk, foreign currency risk and liquidity risk.
For more information on the above risks and uncertainties related to Linkfire’s operating environment and operations, see Linkfire’s latest annual report.
You can find more information about Linkfire in our latest Investor Presentation. Please see Investor Presentation 04/2023.
