Social media built the modern music marketing playbook. Now AI offerings, national regulations, and a rapidly fragmenting platform landscape are rewriting the rules faster than most music marketers can keep up. The next seven years will look nothing like the last seven and the artists, labels, and managers who understand what is coming will have a significant advantage over those who don't.

This session opens with a twenty-minute presentation from Hanna Kahlert, senior analyst at MIDiA Research, who shares the key findings from her landmark report Social through 2033: Growth Catalysts and Inhibitors. It’s the most comprehensive data-driven forecast of the social platform marketplace currently available, drawing on MIDiA's global consumer survey data from 2025. She maps the forces shaping social media's next chapter: the accelerating impact of AI on content and discovery, the growing regulatory pressure from national governments, including under-16 social media bans already enacted in the UK, France, and Australia, and the rise of a long tail of platforms fragmenting audience attention in ways that challenge every existing promotional strategy. A conversation with music industry professionals then takes those findings into the room: what do they mean for how artists build fan relationships, how labels plan release campaigns, and how the entire promotional infrastructure of the music industry needs to adapt to a social landscape that looks radically different from the one it was built on? A research-grounded, practically focused session for everyone whose job involves reaching music fans, and whose platforms are changing underneath them