Strategic Intelligence: Music, Film, and TV Sector Scorecard Q3 2025 Update

In Q3 2025, film and TV companies accelerated restructuring efforts to adapt to streaming dominance, rising content costs, and artificial intelligence (AI) disruption. Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) led the charge with strategic splits. Meanwhile, Comcast spun off NBCUniversal’s cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, and SYFY, into a public company called Versant. Streaming and studios (e.g., Peacock, Universal Pictures) remain under Comcast’s media division. Likewise, WBD plans to split streaming (e.g, HBO Max, HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios) and linear networks (CNN, Discovery, Cartoon Network) by mid-2026. These moves reflect the collapse of traditional TV economics and a strategic pivot toward direct-to-consumer models, pioneered by Netflix.

Key Highlights

• The music industry is shifting from mass distribution to niche monetization, powered by AI, superfans, and platform agility. Spotify is shifting from flat royalties to engagement-based payouts, rewarding artists who drive deeper fan interaction. In addition, Spotify and Apple Music are lifting subscription prices without risking user churn. Traditional labels like Warner Music and Universal Music are restructuring not by breaking up, but by deepening direct licensing deals, artist-centric royalty models, and deeper integration with streaming platforms. This signals a shift toward platform partnerships, creator-first economics, and scalability, all essentials in the streaming era.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the music, film, and TV sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst's thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst has developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.