welcome to The music industry around the worldWeekly Recap – where we make sure you’ve caught the five biggest stories that have made headlines in the past seven days. The MBW Roundup is supported by Centtrip, which helps over 500 of the world’s best-selling artists maximize their income and lower their touring costs.
When the world’s biggest music rights holder spends an eight-figure sum on an acquisition, it’s time to sit up and take notice.
That’s what happened last week, when Universal Music Group confirmed its acquisition of a majority stake in the Thai group RS.
Expenses?
As revealed in a public filing in Thailand, UMG is spending a first dollar $45.5 million on the purchase – which should close in the third quarter – followed by a possible $4.9 million.
Elsewhere this week, TikTok confirmed that its new Spotify– Competing subscription music app – TikTok Music – launches in Brazil and Indonesia.
It will effectively replace ByteDance‘s Resso in both territories, which will be phased out in each market over the coming months.
Other titles we covered this week involved Queen (who is still making big money), Taylor Swift (who may be making even more than she bargained for) and Raine Group (who has raised a lot of money).
Here are five stories you need to know from the past five days…
All this is an interesting context to consider following the news that Universal Music Group has just committed USD$45.5 million For acquire a majority stake In RS Group in Thailand.
This $45.5 million the price can still increase $4.9 million going forward, according to filings, while the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2023.
Thailand is emerging as a strong market in Asia for the recorded music industry, with 20% year over year revenue growth in 2022. The territory exceeded $100 million wholesale market revenues for the first time last year.
After months of speculation and analysis over TikTok’s plans to launch a standalone music streaming service, Thursday, July 6, “TikTok Music,” a streaming app and a serious new rival to Spotify, officially arrived.
According Ole Obermann, global head of music business development at TikTok, the app is “a new kind of service that combines the power of music discovery on TikTok with a premier streaming service.”
TikTok Music was launched as a premium music subscription service only in Indonesia and Brazil, and it is licensed by and includes the catalogs of the three major record labels: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group And Sony Music….
Over the past few weeks, The music industry around the world has uncovered new details about one of the music industry’s most controversial sagas: the sale of the master rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums, originally recorded for great machine.
In our final chapter of this investigation, we obtained — and published material from — an unsigned June 2020 NDA co-drafted between Swift’s team at 13 Management and Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings.
This NDA was created to advance talks between the parties on the potential sale to Swift of her Ithaca “Big Machine” masters. It contained what appeared to be a rather boilerplate clause preventing either party from speaking publicly about the negotiations of a confidential agreement.
All of that, however, is now a thing of the past.
Whether or not there were elements of Swift and her team “bargaining in public” with Braun via accusations regarding the aforementioned NDA, history will show that ultimately a deal was not reached. between 13 Management and Ithaca.
Braun would eventually sign a sale for the master rights to Swift’s first six albums to Shamrock Capital for a total of US$405 million in October 2020.
So what happened next? That’s what this article is about – where we reveal just how successful Taylor Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings of her Big Machine albums have been so far, ahead of the release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) this Friday (July 7)…
British rockers Queen have seen a surge in earnings in recent years, largely thanks to the success of the 2018 Oscar-winning biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
Almost half a decade after the release of this film, you would think that the group’s income would fall again. Not so.
The latest annual report from Queen Productions Ltd. – the UK-based company that collects the group’s turnover – shows that in the financial year ending September 30, 2022, the group collected £40.89 million (50.41 million US dollars at average annual exchange rates as per the IRS).
This represents a 4.3% increase on financial year 2021, when revenue was £39.19 million. (In US dollar terms, that comes to $53.9 million, as the pound was stronger against the dollar that year.)…
The Raine Group, a global strategic advisory and investment firm, has closed its new fund, Raine Partners IV.
The total size of the fund is over $760 million, bringing The Raine Group’s total assets under management to nearly $4 billion.
Raine Group is an existing investor in music companies such as SoundCloudC3 presents and have fun. It is also the primary financial backer behind Firebird Music Holdings.
As an advisor, Raine Group has been involved in recent major music industry transactions, including HYBE’s approximately $300 million acquisition of Quality control…
