Music Majors in the Streaming Economy: Universal Music Group

Universal Music Group’s parent company Vivendi announced plans to spin-off the world’s largest music major company as a standalone entity on the stock market. It is no incident that the French media and telecommunication conglomerate Vivendi considers such a strategy. Spotify’s public listing early in April this year was a financial success and it seems that investors currently assess music as a good investment. The overall economic climate is positive and Universal Music Group (UMG) performed very well in the past few years – mainly because of significantly increasing revenues from music streaming. In the last annual report for the financial year 2017, UMG posted a total revenue of € 5.67bn (+ 25 percent compared to 2012) and an EBITA of € 761m (+ 45 percent compared to 2012). Music streaming is the main driver of revenue and profit growth. Thus, revenue from streaming increased by almost 33 percent from 2016 to 2017 to EUR 1.97bn contributing more than a third to UMG’s total revenue in 2017.[1]

The further analysis highlights how UMG had to reinvent itself as a comprehensive music service company with a focus on music streaming and providing a wide range of services far beyond the traditional recorded music business.

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Spotify goes public – an economic background analysis

April 3^rd 2018 is a historic moment in the digitized music industry, when the Swedish music streaming company Spotify is listed at the New York Stock Exchange. Spotify’s stock exchange listing is not just a touchstone for the music streaming service’s business model, but for the entire recorded music industry that is back on a path of growth. Spotify is the darling of the big music industry players. It provides a legal business model that can be monetized by hefty advances and royalty payments. This allowed the music majors and the indie label licensing agency MERLIN to become Spotify’s shareholders in return for advance payments Spotiy could not afford. Sony Music Entertainment’s Spotify stake of 5.7 percent (Spotify 2018: 148) e.g. is worth US $500m to 1.3bn.[1] The following analysis highlights Spotify’s success story, but also outlines potential risks of going public. It also analysis who benefits from Spotify’s stock exchange listing and assesses the impact on the music streaming market.

Artists in the Music Stream – A Case Study

On 24 January 2018 the Latin superstar Enrique Iglesias filed a lawsuit against Universal International Music for “systematically underpaying streaming royalties” (complaint, Enrique Iglesias vs. Universal International Music, January 24, 2018). The lawyers of Iglesias argue that Universal Music should have paid 50 percent of the net revenue from the streaming services. Instead Iglesias was paid just a fraction of the royalties according to the rate agreed for physical and download albums. This remarkable case sheds light into the contractual practices in the recorded music industry and helps to explain, why artists contracted to record labels does not really benefit from the music streaming economy yet.

Is Streaming the Next Big Thing? – The Labels’ Perspective

The Beggars Group chairman, Martin Mills, recently told the Guardian that “(…) 22% of the label group’s digital revenues came from streaming – and that the majority of its artists earn more now from track streams than track downloads” in 2012. Though the article does not report absolute figures, the revenue can be considered rather high with a roster including Adele, Jack White and The xx.

A member survey of the global rights agency Merlin representing more than 20,000 indie labels including Beggars Group/XL Recordings, Rough Trade, Naïve, Tommy Boy, Cooking Vinyl and Naxos unveils that “92% of respondents saw streaming and subscription revenues grow between 2011 and 2012, with a third enjoying increases of more than 100%” as recently reported by Musicweek. The same study shows that 24% of indies across the world and 30% of European indies generated more income from streaming than downloads in 2012.

These figures suggest that music streaming seems to be a promising revenue source for record labels. In the following the economic potential of music streaming and the underlying business model are analysed from the record labels’ perspective.

Book Review: “Download!” by Phil Hardy

“Download! How the Internet Transformed the Record Business” by music industry journalist Phil Hardy is a detailed analysis how the majors record companies lost control of the value added chain in the music industry in the digital revolution. He tells the story about self-confident and maybe arrogant music business executives, who had profited from the CD revolution in the 1990s, but were outmanoeuvred by industry outsiders who set up a totally new added value network for recorded music. The once highly profitable record business that attracted investors from other industries in the 1980s and 1990s turned into a laboratory of digitalization with declining record sales, job losses and divestments of pressing plants and distribution networks in the 2000s. “Download!” is, therefore, an important contribution to understand the impact of Internet and new media on the transformation of the recorded music industry.