Music Business Worldwide has been crunching a veritable mountain o’ numbers today
That’s because the past 48 hours have seen two major music companies – Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony Music Group (SMG) – post their calendar Q2 revenue/profitability figures for investors. (Sony did so earlier today via its Japanese parent, Sony Group Corp.)
These results followed the equivalent calendar Q2 numbers from publicly-traded Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s biggest music rightsholder, which it reported to the Amsterdam Euronext late last month.
All of this means that – combined with previously-reported calendar Q1 figures from UMG, Sony, and WMG – we’ve been able to apply MBW’s microscope to how the ‘majors’ performed across the first six months of 2023.
What have we discovered?
Well, for starters, there’s that headline above: The three ‘majors’ – across recorded music, publishing, and other income streams – jointly generated USD $12.99 billion in the first six months of 2023.
This figure was a clear billion dollars (almost to the penny!) larger than the $11.99 billion that the ‘Big Three’ generated in revenues in the same period of 2022.
It also means – oh yes – that the three majors combined generated an average of approximately $72 million per day in the first half of this year… or roughly $3 million per hour.
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