Indies Beat Majors To Grab Biggest Share Of Global Record, Music Publishing Market
The annual Music & Copyright survey of recorded music and publishing companies shows Universal Music Group maintaining its position as the world’s biggest record company and Sony topping music publishing. But the collective strength of indie labels and publishers again beat both.
Source: Music & Copyright market share report
Independent music companies collectively captured 32% of the recorded music market and 41.2% of music publishing, larger than any single major music group.
UMG saw gains in both physical and digital recorded music market shares, ending 2017 with a 29.9% share of total recorded-music revenue, up from 29.5% in 2016.
Sony accounted for 27.3% of global publishing revenue, up from 27% in 2016. It was the best year in the company's history. Sony published the IFPI's top three global artists of last year: Ed Sheeran, Drake, and Taylor Swift.
“Although the recorded-music and music publishing landscapes were relatively unchanged last year compared with 2016, there were some very interesting differences in some of the companies’ market shares,” said Simon Dyson, editor of Music & Copyright and Practice Leader of publisher Ovum’s Music team. “Both UMG and WMG had notably higher digital recorded-music shares than physical, while SME and WMG’s market share of streaming revenue outpaced their download shares. But, despite the subtle changes in shares for the majors, collectively, the indie sector was the leader in both recorded-music and music publishing.”
I am not sure what the title of this item implies but Indies beating and grabbing sounds to me that there was a masterplan to join forces, fight and try to win from the majors.
It’s probably just admin slang for combining everybody that’s not Universal, Warner or Sony in one category.
IMHO it does mean we have a huge group of small labels and publishers who represent a substantial amount of composers, writers and performing artists. Most of them started / run their Indie because they are totally convinced they can do a better job than the majors. Not necessarily do they work together.
As a tech supplier to major entertainment companies and indies I can confirm that serving “Indies” is not a dead end street but rather an interesting shortcut to new, scalable opportunities. If your solutions can deliver a healthy ROI, Indies will be the first ones to jump ship.
So I would like to change the hashtag #indieproud to #proudservingindies
With kind regards,
Hessel van Oorschot
http://level1.io