Financial giant Goldman Sachs’ bullish music industry forecasts have sparked questions in the past about potential conflicts of interest in its work for and/or ownership of shares in companies including Vivendi and Spotify.
It’s useful to bear in mind whenever reading breathless headlines about its latest predictions. At the same time, these figures and the reports that they come from are influential in investment circles, including fuelling the ongoing wave of finance for acquisitions of music catalogues and companies alike.
With that in mind: stonks! Goldman Sachs’ latest report ups some of its already famously-big numbers. It values Universal Music Group at €44bn (around $53bn), for example, compared to €30bn in its previous report last year. The increase will certainly be welcome to UMG as it prepares to go public later this year.
The report also predicts that global recorded music trade revenues will grow from $21.6bn in 2020 to $23.5bn in 2021, with streaming accounting for $21.1bn of that. Meanwhile, it predicts that publishing revenues will grow from $6bn in 2020 to $6.2bn in 2021.
While Covid-19-hit performance royalties are part of the reason for the relatively small growth, we suspect that the figures will also be seized on by campaigners who think publishers (and songwriters) should get a bigger share of streaming royalties.
There is some bad news in the new Goldman Sachs report too. It predicts that the global live music industry will be worth $12.7bn this year, which is a considerable revision down from the $18.3bn it predicted in its report last year. Why? Because it’s taking longer than was expected then to get the live industry up and running again in many parts of the world.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools :: Wyng
Through Music Ally’s internal marketing campaign tracking, we’ve recently discovered an interesting website by the…