Artists demand a fair share of the music industry pie

Technology once threatened to destroy the music industry, now it's helping it thrive. But while investors are making a packet, artists says they are not getting their fair share.

Taylor Swift
Billionaires are scrambling for a slice of Taylor Swift
(Image credit: © Getty Images)

What’s happened?

Shareholders in the media conglomerate Vivendi have approved plans to spin off Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label, as a standalone business and list it on the Amsterdam stock exchange in September. Universal accounts for around a 30% slice of the global recorded music market, and its catalogue includes more than three million songs from many of the leading artists of every era, from The Beatles and Queen to Adele, Taylor Swift and Drake. Recently, the label has been making headlines in the financial pages as bidders jostled to build up stakes, including the Chinese giant Tencent (which owns 20%), and rival US hedge-fund billionaires Daniel Loeb and Bill Ackman. The latter’s special-purpose acquisition company (Spac) has just bought 10% of Universal for $4.2bn. That values Vivendi at $42bn and suggests that Vivendi was wise to turn down an acquisition offer of $8.5bn from SoftBank in 2013. The scramble for a slice of Universal also reflects the music industry’s changing fortunes.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.