YouTube has surpassed the milestone of 50 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers, growing its subscriber base by around 20 million in the past 11 months, or around 1.8m subscribers per month since October 2020, MBW reports on the music stat. YouTube's biggest rival Spotify's global Premium Subscriber base grew to 165 million in Q2 2021, which was up 20% year-on-year. Apple Music in June 2019 announced it had surpassed 60 million subscribers.

"A large portion of the people that are streaming, they've never owned a CD, they may not listen to the radio, and when they hear David Bowie's Life On Mars, they're hearing it for the first time" - songwriter Ryan Tedder, who wrote songs for Adele, Ed Sheeran, Paul McCartney, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lil Nas X - told the BBC. "So the source of discovery is the last 70 years of music. It's all brand new, right now. So you're competing with every song that has ever come out". He's got a point - entertainment analysts MRC Data say that catalogue albums (defined as anything older than 18 months) now account for 66.4% of all streams worldwide.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group have generated $5.60 billion in the three months to end of June, up by $1.53 billion (or +37.6%) on the same period of last year, Music Business Worldwide calculates. That $5.60 billion turnover equates to the three majors cumulatively generating $61.5 million per day in the year’s second quarter – or, in turn, $2.56 million every hour. In the first six months of 2020, the three major music companies generated $10.91 billion – putting them firmly on course for a cumulative $20 billion year.

Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie has sold her 115-title song catalog, including hits such as 'Don’t Stop', 'You Make Loving Fun', 'Over My Head', 'Songbird', and 'Say You Love Me', to Hipgnosis, Music Business Worldwide reports. McVie first joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970 helping them become one of the most commercially successful music artists of the past 50 years, with the Grammy-winning 1977 album 'Rumours' selling more than 45 million copies worldwide. Hipgnosis has spent more than $2 billion in three years acquiring rights to a vast number of popular songs. Hipgnosis’s filings reveal that McVie's 115 songs acquired in the deal generated $1.7 million in 2020, $1.72m in 2019 and $1.58m in 2018. Hipgnosis usually pays an average multiple of 15 times the annual income, which would bring the price to McVie's songs to approx. $100 million.

Sony Music generated $1.39 billion from recorded music in the second quarter of 2021, a 48.2% year-on-year rise, or a massive USD $451 million versus the same period in 2020. Sony generated $996.4 million from streaming alone – an all-time high, and brushing the magic billion dollar mark for the first time, Music Business Worldwide reports. This recorded music streaming revenue haul was up by a whopping 50.2% year-on-year, versus the $663.4 million the firm posted in calendar Q2 2020. Sony's biggest revenue-generating projects were by Harry Styles, Lil Nas X, and Polo G.

In the three months to the end of June 2021 (Q2), YouTube generated a whopping $7.002 billion from advertising alone – equivalent to approximately $77 million a day, or $3.2 million every hour, Music Business Worldwide reports. The rise is astonishing - YouTube’s Q2 2021 ad revenue was up by 83.7% on the equivalent figure from 2020. In the six months to the end of June this year, the platform generated $13.007 billion in ad revenues, almost double what YouTube generated in the equivalent six months of 2020 ($7.850 billion). These numbers don’t include subscription revenue on YouTube generated by those customers paying for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium each month. Looking back, the numbers impress even more - YouTube rode out 2020 having generated some $19.77 billion from ads in the year – actually up 30.5% on the equivalent annual figure from 2019.

Spotify's Premium Subscriber base grew to 165 million in the second quarter of 2021, which was up 20% year-on-year. The company’s total global monthly active users grew 22% year-on-year to 365 million in Q2 2021. Spotify’s Premium subscriber growth translated into revenue of €2.056 billion in Q2. That's big numbers, there are some small numbers, on which everything depends really - the firm’s average monthly revenue per subscriber landed at €4.29 in Q2. Music Business Worldwide takes a closer look at the numbers.

Apart from their societal influence, K-pop septet is a major money-maker in their country. According to the Korea Culture And Tourism Institute, BTS is bringing an estimated 5 billion dollars to the South Korean economy each year. The group is fueling interests in all things Korean - tourism, language, films, television, fashion, and food. NPR discusses BTS' influence in the latest podcast.

Billboard calculated the incomes of the five highest-paid musicians in the world in 2020. Queen are on the top with $48.7 million of total income, followed by Taylor Swift with $41.4 million, Billie Eilish with $32.8 million, BTS with $31.5 million, and finally Post Malone with $29.7 million.

"There were 555.3 billion streams of music on audio and video platforms in the United States in the first six months of 2021 – up by 54.3 billion year-on-year" - MBW reports, and points out to a much more important fact. "Catalog music’s share of total album consumption in the US has rises to 66.4%, whereby ‘catalog’ reflects anything released over 18 months before a consumer made a purchase and/or pressed play. That 66.4% figure was up from 63.9% in the first six months of 2020, and up from 60.8% in the first six months of 2018. Conversely, the percentage of total album consumption claimed by ‘current’ music – that’s music released within the prior 18 months of a consumer making a purchase and/or pressing play – keeps on falling. In the first half of 2021, ‘current’ music claimed just 33.6% of total consumption, down from 36.1% in H1 2020".

MBW goes into some fun music math regarding Queen: the British rock band generated £41.95 million ($58.1 million) in 12 months prior to September 2020, with royalties amounting to £41.67 million ($57.7 million). In FY2019 (the 12 months to the end of September 2019), Queen Productions Ltd generated £72.77 million ($100.8m), of which £71.53 million ($99m) was from royalties. On the other hand, Hipgnosis Songs Fund takes 18 multiple as a reasonable reflection of the market value of gold-standard music publishing rights today. In the past three years, according to Queen Productions Ltd, the band’s rights have generated some £134.5 million ($186 million) in royalties. That’s an average across these three years of $62 million per annum. So, an 18 multiple on $62 million would make Queen’s royalty-bearing rights worth - $1.1 billion today.

The strategies of the Big Three record labels - Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and Sony Music Entertainment (SME) - dictate the future, even for companies outside of the major label system. They are investing billions of dollars to keep your attention for as long as possible. Their moves signal the best opportunities, and the areas getting slept on - Trapital's Dan Runcie goes behind the moves of the labels which hold 69% of the recorded music revenue.

Warner Music Group has confirmed that it has acquired the entire recordings catalog of French DJ/producer superstar David Guetta. Financial Times reports that the Guetta deal cost Warner more than $100 million, whereas MBW's sources say the price was lower than $150 million. This news is interesting, among other reasons, because it hints that Warner’s catalog acquisition strategy today may be leaning towards hits created in the past 20 years.

Boomer rock acts such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Paul Simon have made the biggest splash selling their music catalogs for 9-figure sums. Synchtank explores the possibility of catalogs of hip-hop artists reaching those levels. Trapital's Dan Runcie believes hip-hop catalogs are indeed undervalued and that the "music that came out from the mid-90s to mid-2010s will be especially popular with the Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z. Some investors may undervalue hip-hop because they identify more with Paul Simon than Paul Wall. Another group of investors will recognize the opportunity".

Music Business Worldwide goes into the reasoning around the precedent business move by Sony Music, as the big publisher has announced it is disregarding unrecouped balances for heritage catalog artists. "This would see modern-day royalty earnings of these acts get paid into their pockets, rather than being swallowed by a record label with whom they may have ended dealings decades ago". MBW argues that's a "small reduction in Sony Music’s margin today is worthwhile if it means that his company establishes a long-term reputation amongst the artist community – where power keeps growing – for generosity and fair dealing. (Quick math: if there’s, say, 2,500 legacy Sony artists who will benefit, and they’re paid through an average of $5,000 to $10,000 each per year that they weren’t getting before, the move will cost Sony Music $12.5m to $25m per annum)".

The U.S. music publishing industry registered a 9.6% revenue increase to $4.077 billion in 2020, up from $3.72 billion in 2019, Billboard reports. In 2019 total revenue was up 12.7% from $3.3 billion in 2018. Although 2020 was the year of the lockdown, surprisingly, performance collections grew 7.92% to $2.1 billion from $1.945 billion in 2019.

Rolling Stone looks at the music industry's trend of trying to "concoct new ways to profit from the legacy of rock stars from days past. Some well-heeled investors are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars for lucrative publishing catalogs; others are making use of TikTok and developing technologies like holograms; others envision deepfake software that could create 'new' songs by departed artists. Industry experts say that’s just the beginning".

Several companies have spent billions of dollars buying music catalogs of established pop stars. Variety goes behind the new model in the music business: "A song catalog is an asset much more complicated than, say, a Picasso or even many real estate properties, and some investors seem to enter the arena on the mistaken premise that all songs, or even all hit songs, are created equal. In reality, they are demanding, ephemeral assets that require a lot of attention — pitching, repackaging, finding new opportunities — without oversaturating and thus damaging the artist (a.k.a the brand) or the songs".

New York-based Pershing Square Tontine Holding, led by billionaire CEO Bill Ackman, is to acquire 10% of Universal Music Group for approximately $4 billion. The deal would value the label at $40 billion and make it the largest ever investment by a blank check vehicle, Reuters reports. Universal, owned by the parent company Vivendi and controlled by French billionaire Vincent Bollore, has benefited from growing streaming revenues at the world's biggest music label, which is behind artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. The deal would give Universal an enterprise value of 35 billion euros ($42.4 billion).

New York-based music rights company Reservoir has acquired the US record label and music publishing company Tommy Boy Music LLC - home to Queen Latifah, Afrika Bambaataa, Digital Underground, Coolio, De La Soul, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature, among others - in a deal valued at approximately $100m. Reservoir’s deal to buy Tommy Boy comprises 6,000+ masters including Coolio’s 'Gangsta’s Paradise', House of Pain’s 'Jump Around', and Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force’s 'Planet Rock', MBW reports. Apart from the hip-hop pioneers, Tommy Boy also introduced EDM to mainstream audiences through releases by LFO, Coldcut, and 808 State, while helping to establish the Latin Freestyle and Latin Hip-Hop genres with releases by TKA, K7, and Information Society.

YouTube paid artists, songwriters, and rights-holders over $4 billion in the last 12 months – money derived from both YouTube ads and YouTube Music / YouTube Premium subscriptions, YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen confirmed in a fresh newsletter sent to the music industry, Music Business Worldwide reports. YouTube paid the music industry over $3bn in 2019, and the streaming service added more paid ‘members’ in Q1 21 than in any other quarter since launch. Cohen states that the Alphabet-owned platform’s goal is now “to become the leading revenue generator for the music industry”. Spotify paid out over $5 billion to the music industry in 2020.

"I'm not naturally competitive but the hardest lesson I learned was that there are a lot of people in the music business who are extremely competitive and will sometimes do things that could be problematic" - Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records who published Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, New Order, Can and many more says in The New Cue interview. One of his fondest memories comes from "when Moby made Animal Rights, a pure punk rock record, and everybody had written off his career and then he came back with 'Play'. When he did his first tour around 'Play', he was playing the Scala, and it was kind of semi full. The album started getting some airplay and, about a month later, he came back to play the Scala after a month on tour. And I've never had more guestlist requests than for that gig. Every celeb was there, wanting to be part of it, lots of other musicians. Nobody was interested three weeks before! The album got a full page zero out of 10 review in the Melody Maker".

Sony Music Group spent $1.4 billion on music acquisitions in the last six months, according to SMG Chairman Rob Stringer, MBW reports. According to Stringer, by Sony’s calculations - “in just the first four months of this year, music-related M&A and catalog investment activity was over $7 billion”. Sony estimated says that this $7 billion figure was “nearly equal to the total investment activity in the 12 months of 2020”.

Apple Music announced it’s adding both Lossless Audio and Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos to its service. From June 1, Apple is bundling these HD formats into its standard $9.99-per-month streaming subscription price. Amazon Music moments after confirmed that a range of HD audio options on Amazon’s Music Unlimited Service will now all be available for just $9.99 per month. Music Business Worldwide's founder Tom Ingham believes this is bad news for music in general and predicts that "over the next decade, we can now expect a slow war of attrition to trundle on between music rightsholders and the world’s largest tech giants over precisely this value calculation". Ingham also believes selling pricey hardware is the wrong way to go.

YouTube generated $6.005 billion from advertising in the three months to end of March this year, which is up by nearly $2 billion, or by 49%, on the $4.038 billion YouTube generated in the same period of 2020, Music Business Worldwide reports on staggering numbers by the streaming platform. Compared to 2019 the numbers are even more impressive - in Q1 2019 YouTube had $3.025 billion in revenues. If YouTube can maintain that +49% growth across the course of 2021, it will turn over more than $29 billion this year. The number MBW isn't giving is how much of that $6 billion YouTube made during the three first months of the year is going to artists.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are selling the publishing rights of their catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund for upwards of $140 million, Variety reports. The transaction marks the latest catalog sale from a major legacy artist and one of the highest profile acquisitions to date for Merck Mercuriadis’ fund.

Spotify's former chief economist Will Page published a new study Twitch's Rockonomics which claims that artists make roughly 10 times more on Twitch than streaming providers. However, Twitch is very specific, and very different from Spotify - artists use Twitch to livestream content to their fans, charging monthly subscriptions (for $5, $10, or $25), earn digital tokens called Bits, or generate ad revenue. In general, Twitch aims super-fans willing to pay more for artists they like...

Spotify's monthly Premium subscriber ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) in the first quarter of 2021 stood at just €4.12, down 7% year-on-year. In Spotify’s prior quarter (Q4 2020), the firm’s ARPU stood at €4.26, while in the prior year quarter (Q1 2020), it was €4.42. Music Business Worldwide recalculated it in US dollars - Q1 2021’s €4.12 per month figure was the equivalent of USD 4.97 per month period based on current exchange rates. Spotify has announced it is set to raise prices in Europe and the US by 1 to 3 euros/pounds/dollars, depending on the plan.

Concord Music Publishing announced the purchase of Downtown Music Holdings’ entire portfolio of 145,000 owned and co-published music copyrights for an estimated $400 million, Music Business Worldwide reports. Numerous artists are included in the deal: Adele, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, Blake Shelton, Bruno Mars, Carrie Underwood, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Maroon 5, Marvin Gaye, Mary J. Blige, Mos Def, Mötley Crüe, New Order, Rage Against the Machine, Ray Charles, Santigold, Sam Smith, Stevie Wonder. Also in the songs rights news, financial giant Blackstone is about to acquire Entertainment One Music (eOne Music) $385 million in cash, according to MBW. The eOne music label features artists such as Snoop Dogg, Wu-Tang Clan, the Lumineers, Kaytranada, Cypress Hill, the Game, High on Fire, Tegan and Sara...

Universal Music Group’s total revenues hit $2.20 billion in Q1, up 9.4% year-on-year. MBW does a breakdown of that number - $2.20bn quarterly turnover was equivalent to $24.5m a day, or $1m an hour. The star of the period, expectedly, was streaming - it generated $1.23bn, up 19.6% year-on-year.