Is merch getting unaffordable?; Bands cancelling gigs due to low ticket sales; Are we in a "Pop Slump"?; Music in space; Do you have irrational hate for a specific artist?; and Celine Dion is back?!

0:02Hello and welcome to The Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that both looks at the finances of the music industry, while also bringing you some of the music industry. business. He's Stuart Dredge. I'm Steve Lemaque. Let's start with a financial fact that you can amaze your friends or colleagues with. This is Stuart's big number for this week, which is Stuart. It's actually, it's breaking news, is this? It is. It's a really big number as well. It's exciting for two reasons. $63.5 billion. And this is how much a company called Pershing Square wants to pay to buy Universal Music Group.

0:42Really? So this, has this come out of the blue? Was there, were there any whispers that people were interested in taking on UMG? Not really. I mean, it's, there's some history. So this, Pershing Square is a big hedge fund owned by this billionaire called Bill Ackman. And it is one of the big shareholders in Universal Music already. So it's not like it's a stranger, but yeah, the story just came out the blue this morning are saying, yeah, they want to buy it. And basically the reason they want to buy it is they think that, because Universal Music is a public company, so it's got a share price. And Pershing Square thinks the share price undervalues the company.

1:18And there was a statement saying, we think they're great at signing and developing artists and making money, but they've got other problems related to kind of corporate stuff that means it's undervalued. So he wants to buy UMG, list it on the New York Stock Exchange. And here's the thing, they want to negotiate a, quote, new employment contract and compensation arrangement for its boss, Lucian Grange, which sounds a bit ominous. If your boss says, I want to negotiate a new employment contract and compensation with you, is that a big rise or is that not a rise? We should, for people who don't know, Lucian Grange has been in the music industry for what seems like 100 years, but he is one of the most powerful men in the music business and has been in post for a very long time steering the company.

2:03And how much he gets paid is obviously, is a subject for media debate because he gets a lot of money and that's off in the story. But like, so the two things that really jump out, I mean, so Universal Music hasn't commented yet. I did check for them if they had a statement yet and they said not yet. So one thing that's interesting is this offer values UMG a lot more than it's worth on the stock market at the moment. Right. So I think it's market cap, its value is currently, I think it's about just over 31 billion euros, which is around 36 billion dollars. So I think it's like, I think it's about 78 % more than it's currently worth is the offer.

2:37So they think it's worth a lot more than anything. And I guess the second thing, and this is kind of where we bring football back into it to keep us both on firm ground. You know when hedge funds buy companies, there's always a question of where is the money coming from? To what extent are they providing sales versus getting it from debt and loading the company they buy with debt that's going to bite them in the ass sometime. That's a financial term, obviously. so that's what we don't really know where is the money going to come from from this what will it mean for Universal Music will it have a load of debt settled on the talk of it or something else but yeah it's kind of we've talked so much about Universal Music buying companies but this is out the blue so I think the next development which might even happen by the time people listen to this is Universal will say what it thinks of this offer is it interested in it is it not, is it resisting it And then that will kind of dictate what happens next.

3:32But yeah, big news. All right, here's three more talking points from the past week. A new report suggests that 2025 saw a, in inverted commas, a pop slump in the streaming charts, and that this is getting worse in 2026. What does pop slump actually mean? It's just something really awkward to say. Pop slump. So this is from a company called Chartmetric, which they do at Music Analytics. So if you're an artist, you can use them to kind of analyze your streams. But that means they have this huge pipeline of all the streams, streaming data, and occasionally put a report out on that. And so this is all about how many new songs get into the top streaming charts.

4:15So songs released this year get into this year's streaming charts. And so one of the findings was that in January this year, three and a half percent of the songs in Spotify's global top 50 chart came out this year. Which sounds not that surprising because it's January. But a couple of years ago, it was 9.4%. So, you know, it's nearly a third. They took a bigger sample. I think of the 197 tracks that were in Spotify's top 50 in the first three months of this year, 81 of them were current releases. So from this year, 116 were what it calls holdovers. and that's the kind of the support thing it's saying basically last year was a stagnant year this is a quote, stagnant year marked by holdover hits which is something we talked about before isn't it things hang around a lot longer you see when I saw this I thought this was going to be a reference just to pop music as a genre but what they're meaning is new music then is suffering something of a slump popular music and music and yeah and they sort of say that it's quite dependent on big releases so for example last January was a big spike from Bad Bunny's new album because loads of its songs were in charts and this March apparently Harry Styles and BTS swung things back towards new but yeah and it's one of those where it's like there's two things happening it's old tracks are hanging around a lot longer the biggest popular tracks hang on but also it's about things coming back and I think one of the things they talk about is Zara Larson's Lush Life which came out in 2015 but then went viral last November and is now back in the top charts.

5:51So new music is kind of being squeezed by two things there. It's the biggest tracks not going down the charts and then just random old tracks popping up. And although this report was kind of just saying these are the figures, it wasn't really giving an opinion. But this is kind of one of the things the music industry is discussing a lot, I think, about that. How do we break new music when the old stuff is just kind of sitting there clogging up the charts? Yeah. Yeah, and what they're most of it, you know, I mean, as much as labels would like to launch new talent at the same time, they're still making money from their catalogue if they're using their catalogue well.

6:28And it's hard, isn't it? Obviously, in this day and age, you can't just delete a record. When you used to get bored of one single, a records company in the old days with physical products could just stop manufacturing it and then let's all move on because you can't buy the record anymore. that's not the case anymore so it's harder to dictate what people like in a way. Well yeah and also I mean this is, labels do still want to break new music I think but if you're the label and you're like okay Zara Larsson's old track is back in the charts because of a TikTok thing we make money from that without spending as much money as we would on breaking a new artist.

7:09So there's kind of a, almost an incentive where when this happens to go okay we're not really that it's not that big a problem for us. because the flow of old hits can carry on. So it's a slight worry, I think. Does it make a label not want to... That's the point, isn't it? That is the worry, that all of a sudden they'll just go, well, we can just rinse this catalogue for as long as we like for, as you say, less investment. But it's such a short-term thing. But is that where the music industry is going now? It's a short-term. Who's going to have the biggest share of the pie come the end of March rather than are we a company set up for the next five, ten years and what artists will be making us money in the future that we should be backing now.

7:55And this brings us back to something like Universal Music Group being bought by a hedge fund. Because I think for what people have a lot of opinions on, Universal and Seleucy and Grange, but his commitment to music and signing, that's how he came up, isn't it? But when a hedge fund owns you, there's an argument that someone might be like, well hang on a minute it's much more efficient to just focus on catalogue who needs all this new arties and so that's the backdrop to i think some of the other bigger corporate moves going on too yeah well while we're on the uh subjects of research studies uh this this is another one this surprised me actually a little bit but another um study has found this week that just under half of music fans think that merchandise is becoming unaffordable and two-fifths of the people who responded to this study.

8:43Two-fifths of fans said they felt exploited by their favourite artists. Tell us, where has this come from? Yeah, this is a study by Media Research. They're quite a respected research company. And they were talking to a thousand American music merch buyers. So it's people who do buy merch. And yeah, so there was some positives. One finding was they want more variety. They don't just want to buy t-shirts anymore. They want, and it didn't seem very ambitious. They want posters and key rings, but also jewellery, quite popular. And they want vinyl. Vinyl is bundled into merch here. Right. Okay. But just under half of them, yes, merch is becoming unaffordable.

9:23So I thought it was interesting that choice of words, unaffordable. It's not necessarily that it's just too expensive. It's about they can't afford it because they're spending so much on the tickets, on the stuff around the gigs. So it's like the price is going up, but it's not just that. it's about all the other things they're spending money on so merch is being squeezed by the price of i guess you know if we're talking at the top level stadium level about it's being squeezed by travel hotels or if you're just wandering to the gig it's being squeezed by beer or whatever else everything else that's going up in price as you say including very much the ticket itself to the gig that's what's squeezing out merchandise i think so and we talked i mean we talked when i when I went to the Blur gig at Wembley Stadium and I saw the football shirt they were selling the night before, I was like, I'm having that tomorrow.

10:12And I got there and saw the price of it and was just like, no, I can't justify it. Not a job of that band, but it was that moment where I was like, I can't afford that. And I felt quite sad. But the other thing is, yeah, the other thing is that nearly two-fifths of people surveyed today sometimes feel they're being exploited by their favorite artists. So it's not just a, I can't afford this stuff, isn't that sad? sometimes this can tip over into I think the artist is pushing it right into sort of negative feeling which is it's difficult isn't it we've talked about it's like I think merch is really important now to so many artists it's what could tip your tour into profit from a loss yeah I mean the the thing about this is what sort of demographic uh was the research based on because if I mean this feels like the responses of somebody who goes to a bigger gig and then sees the quite steeply priced t-shirt or hoodie or something just thinking now that's taking the mickey now you know we've we've spent 150 pounds to be here and you're trying to charge us 60 quid for a hoodie then that is too too much and uh i don't know the bigger artists are probably more confident in the fact they'll be able to sell the merchandise to somebody whereas as you go down i don't think there's that resentment of artists um when you get down to grassroots level because there is an understanding that t-shirts are reasonably fairly private.

11:34They're not exploiting you, and they're not trying to take the mickey by selling you a 40 quid t-shirt. They've made the t-shirt, they're covering their costs, and they've left a bit of money as profit to pay for the petrol, which is what got them here in the first place. Yeah. So actually, it's still a way. I think, wasn't it in the interview that they were saying that giving away t-shirts to people who would come up and nice to you at the merch store. But yeah, so I think it is, like you say, it's nuanced. And yeah, I think there's a difference here. But I think it's maybe a good thing to remind people of.

12:06It's a good way of putting a tenor in the pocket of your favourite artist, isn't it? And the last of the things which we thought we'd share this week is this, which is from Instagram. Well, Instagram now reckons it's the home of music superfans. superfans. Well, I don't know, what is behind this claim? What does that actually mean for fans and their favourite artists? And how have they come to this conclusion? Yeah, well, the context for this is, I think, the last year or two, there's been a lot of talk about artists and superfans. But also, and part of that is the fact that the idea that the big social media apps aren't great for that relationship.

12:42Because if you're an artist and you're posting on a social media app, your posts have got to get through their algorithm them to reach your fans, even if they follow you. And you have to post all the time like a guinea pig on a wheel to keep getting engagement. And you don't even get to have the data. You don't get their email address or anything like that. So that's been the big, and I think this is Instagram going, I think we're going to try and push back on this. So they commissioned a big survey from Luminate, which is another big research company. And it's one of those studies that's like, of course it says, aren't you wonderful?

13:11It's a piece of research designed to sort of back their case. But yeah, it said basically, I think it was 58 % of music super fans use Instagram to engage with artists and music content. And one of its big points was that the artists who are most active on Instagram see strong, the quote is, off-platform streaming growth. So in other words, if you post regularly on Instagram, you will get more streams on Spotify and Apple Music. And then there's a bit about how the subtext was, we're much better than TikTok because that's the big competition of your Instagram. and they reckon that Instagram users are over-indexing for going to concerts and following artists and buying vinyl.

13:51So this is part of their argument to the music industry, saying, look, we can be good for your artists. Keep posting, keep using our features. But it's against this backdrop of people kind of, not everyone, but growing up people talking out and saying, actually, I feel like I'm posting a lot. I'm not reaching the people who follow me and I don't really get a direct relationship where I can tell them things when I want to. And that's not just an Instagram thing. I think it's every big social media platform, even streaming to some extent. I think a lot of artists have lost their kind of excitement around how, you know, hey, I've got a million followers on PlatformX, but that doesn't mean anything if I can't actually reach them when I want to tell them stuff.

14:34Okay. Any other business for this? Here's something which I think is probably worth looking at because I noticed, talking social media, I noticed a few posts over the last week about this, which is geeks that are being cancelled due to disappointing advance ticket sales. And we have spoken about this before, but it's a problem that obviously hasn't gone away. And if you listen to what some people are saying, it might just be getting worse. So this started with the band Smooth and Turrell. Did you say Smooth and Turrell? Well, Smooth and Turrell. Smooth and Turrell. Smooth and Turrell. but they announced the cancellation of a show in Cambridge which was due to take place later this week and it was I mean it's quite a long post but I'll give you the salient points it reads it's time to be honest here our industry is in trouble it's a simple fact that people are skinned and can't afford to live the venues and promoters are panicking and pulling shows if people don't buy tickets leading up to that show it's frustrating and trust us when we say that we too are disappointed when this happens, but it really is out of our control.

15:44And nobody is talking about this struggle on socials and pretending everything is okay. But let me tell you, it's not okay. It's very real. And they're not the only ones. I saw Luke Hinton from the award-winning venue, The Horn in St Albans, also posted about advanced tickets recently and why it's important to buy a ticket up front. And a few others have as well. So it is still an issue. the fact that fans of gigs, and obviously I think this is more at grassroots and theatre level than at stadium level, but in a lot of cases, advanced ticket sales for gigs are just nowhere near what promoters are banking on, I think, and that's where they become nervous.

16:29And it is leading to more and more gigs being pulled because, I mean, we can look at it from both sides if you're a promoter uh say of a 250 capacity venue and you've booked a group to play and say your your break-even figure if you're lucky is somewhere between 200 and 220 to make your money back but if you've got a venue of which holds 250 people if two weeks before the gig you've sold 30 advanced tickets then you're going to get the fear aren't you so it's at that point where you have the choice. Do you pull the gig and refund the 30 tickets sold, which is a hit, but it does mean that you won't have to pay all the staff on the night, bar staff, maybe security staff.

17:16You don't have the staff cost. You also haven't had to open up the building, so you haven't had to pay for lighting and heating at all the costs of running a show, which might be quite sparsely populated. So you could either pull the gig, or do you gamble that people are planning to come they just haven't bought a ticket yet and you might have a brilliant walk up on the night but can you gamble on that when you're balancing very fine margins it's a really difficult call I think because the thing is there is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that people will still go to the gig it's just they won't make up their minds until a day or two before the show takes place.

18:01I mean, my own live agent was telling me about one of his bands who, for their London headliner, you know, in, I don't know, some years ago, pre-COVID, that London headliner would have done 80 % of tickets, you know, probably two or three weeks out from the actual gig. But in this case, they did about 50 % of their advanced sales in the last three days before just leading up to it. And then they had some walk-up on the night. And so it was fine in the end. But they really had to argue that this will be all right. We're sure people are going to come. But as I say, you can see why promoters get nervous about this.

18:44And sitting there thinking, I mean, is it worth the stress and the financial risk to go ahead with a gig where advanced sales are so low? as I say at a time when margins are so tight when many venues and independent promoters of course are just walking this you know fiscal tightrope and it's obviously as Smoother Terrell pointed out it's also it's really frustrating on the other side of things for the artists because all the planning that goes into a tour or even a one-off gig if it suddenly pulls because I mean you look at it from the artist's point of view you've probably already booked the day off work because a lot of bands at that level are still working.

19:23You book the day off work. You might have booked, you know, the van in advance, throw in some extra rehearsals for the gig, you know, and not to mention just the, you know, the bit about being excited about going out and playing live. But then, unfortunately, if not enough people have committed up front, the gig, as they say, is called off, and it's not really anything within their control. And it does, I mean, it is, I think when we talked about this last time we noted that you know it's becoming a trend and I think it's a trend which really took hold after COVID when people didn't want to risk buying a ticket because so many been cancelled and that's become part of the culture I think maybe it's becoming more maybe it's just become more of the norm you know with people thinking I don't know I might change my mind or I might not have enough money at that point in the month and and that's that's as you know that's led us to where we are now with the artists in the middle of things.

20:24And if you're on a financial tip, obviously, if you're an established act, you're probably quite likely to have a clause in your contract where the promoter or the venue will pay half or a proportion of your fee up front, which you get to keep whether the gig goes ahead or not. It's like here's the deposit on your services. And so you do get some help. I'm not sure how far that applies. as the gigs get smaller, I'm not sure, you know, whether that clause is in contracts for grassroots shows. I mean, I can only really add my own experience here because this has happened to me, well, a couple of times now.

21:03Once with a new club night I was booked to do, and then there was once where I was booked to play a festival and the festival was cancelled, which was annoying because the festival was in – so the festival's in Hampshire, the day before i'm finishing a short run of i was doing my one-man show at the edinburgh festival so i had to so the only way of making it to hampshire was to fly from edinburgh to south hampton so so i booked the tickets for the flights for me and my mate tom part-time tour manager tom um so that we could fly directly to south hampton then car to the festival but the festival was cancelled.

21:47I mean, you book flights up front thinking, well, the costs might go up. I mean, I'm not usually that organised. But anyway, so I booked the flights. Then the festival is cancelled because of disappointing advanced ticket sales and the organisers thought, well, rather than lose potentially this amount of money, we'll lose a smaller amount of money by pulling it. So now we're flying to Southampton for no reason. So I looked up the cost of flights from Edinburgh to London. Of course, by that point, they've gone up in price. So it ended up being cheaper. What we did in the end, we flew from Edinburgh to Southampton for absolutely no reason and then caught the train home to London.

22:30And so we didn't lose as much money as we could have possibly done. And that's the artist. as I say it's a really difficult position to be in on both sides really but the also reputationally isn't it because if you're an artist and your gig is cancelled due to low ticket sales your worry is that other promoters will look at that and go oh yeah they couldn't they couldn't sell tickets for that thing maybe we shouldn't book them but it wasn't their fault they might have sold out the venue on the night yeah you get you can always get tired with this brush it's harsh Yeah, absolutely. So the moral of the tale is, if you can, do book in advance.

23:06And I appreciate it's not always easy, you know, planning ahead. It's, you know, unless, I don't know what we do about this. I don't know whether you can discount six weeks out tickets if you buy them early. Early bird for gigs as well as festivals maybe. Yeah, I don't know whether that, I think that makes things very complicated. And also, again, we've got to deal with the margins and what the ticket gives you. There's so little profit in putting on gigs. You know, even at theatre level, it's quite really tight. So, yeah, I know you might not want to book a ticket for something that you might not be able to go to.

23:41That would be a waste of money. But where you can, do get a ticket up front. And this brings us to something which is, well, a slight bugbear of mine, as regular listeners will know, because I mean as if and I know I've got I've got friends who are under 35 and they've got quite good musical taste but across the board from all our stats as if keeping Fleetwood Mac in the charts wasn't bad enough uh now the under 35 have instigated a Celine Dion revival yeah which is I'm torn because she seems like a good human who's quite self-aware and funny she's been through some tough times but my teenage years were when her music was the enemy for me you know it was like when Britpop was happening and I was like yeah sweep away those horrible ballads um but she's coming back she's playing a bunch of gigs in Paris I think and she's not having any problems selling out that in advance I should think but this came I got this press release just after those had been announced from it was from Spotify again it likes pulling stats out and it was saying yeah 30 percent of her Spotify streams come from 25 to 34 year olds so these are people who at best were toddlers when their titanic theme came out in 97 but this is part of a wider here's another example that you might like more than your young friends so gorillas have got the same thing so this week they put some stats out about gorillas debut album which is 25 years old which I don't want to think about that stat for a while because I feel incredibly old and it's biggest year for streams ever was last year so it had 333 million on Spotify alone last year.

25:25And that was up 46 % on the previous record, which was the previous year. So they have this quote saying, it's less like a catalogue title aging gracefully and more like a new release building momentum. But the key thing is nearly a quarter of its streams came from 18 to 24 year olds who weren't even born when the album came out. So there you have it. That's the link between Celine Dion and Gorillaz. But it is a trend. There's some stuff that is just, it just builds and builds and builds every year. And again, it goes back to, I think about if you're a label looking at that, you're going, right, well, we could just sit here and watch the gorillas.

26:00Well, not gorillas, good example. Watch the Celine Dion money come in rather than signing the next Celine Dion. Can I just say, I'm still going through those teenage years. I mean, not actually, because I'm a man of an age. But I have a teenage attitude, I think, to some artists that will remain forever now. whether there's a reason behind it or not. Do you know, I once said I could listen to Smiths because I knew some people who were thinking, you pointed me in the direction of that Half Man, Half Biscuit song. Oh, was it Half Man, Half Biscuit? No, MJ Hibbert. MJ Hibbert, sorry. Lesson of the Smiths by MJ Hibbert.

26:38Which is like, don't avoid something just because dickheads like them, to paraphrase. But my thing is, what if your dad liked them? There's a whole era of artists, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, Meatloaf, that my dad would play in the car going, this is great music, not like that blur rubbish. And I just, I really can't get past that, even when they turn out to be nice people. Yeah. You know, Michael Bolton, brilliant chap, good principles, just can't bear his music still. And it's the teenage me screaming inside. I have changed my attitude, not necessarily to their music, but to the concept of Level 42, because Mark King is a nice man.

27:16But otherwise, I will hold onto an irrational hatred of somebody's music, you know, which I've just taken against somebody at some point. I'll hold on to that for years and years. I think we've just got time probably just to mention a certain space mission because, I mean, if you've been following the Artemis II moon mission and you've been thinking, I wonder if there's a music angle here that isn't dark side of the moon. Well, apparently it turns out there is. There is. Yeah. So this is about an electronic music show called, I think I'm saying it right, Defoe. And one of the astronauts on the mission, Christina Cook, is a fan of the band, fan of the group.

28:01So they've made this one hour radio show, which has kind of got a theme about space and the earth. And they're going to, with a service called Thunk Radio, and they're going to beam it out and the astronauts will be listening in, which I imagine, like, I'm not sure the other astronauts are fans or not. She might be sitting there enjoying it and they're going, what is this rubbish? I can't even leave the room. We're in a rocket. but it's yeah I was writing this story and researching the previous examples of like music in space because like Blur and Beagle 2, do you remember that? I do. The call sign for the Mars mission apparently NASA woke up the International Space Station crew with Elton John's Rocketman in 2011 I don't know if that's like a they woke up and were like for heaven's sake also please find a more literal song to play your astronauts please.

28:48Oh wow Well, here we go. NASA also beamed the Beatles across the universe into deep space in 2008. And they premiered Reach for the Stars, not the Club 7 song, but the Will I Am song from the Mars Rover. So the person I feel sorry for here is Babylon Zoo, because they picked every space-themed song title, but not his yet. Maybe next mission. And finally for this week, guitars, synthesizers, drum machines, all musical instruments, mayonnaise, not so much. Or is it? Or is it? Yeah. So I was on the watch for April Fool's last week because I write this morning news bulletin. If I get caught by someone's musical April Fool, I'm in trouble.

29:28And I saw this and was like, this must be an April Fool, but it's not. It's a research study from Northumbria University on whether mayonnaise is an instrument, which I believe this began as some kind of online meme. It was probably on TikTok. So it's not an April Fool, but it is a marketing stunt because Hellman's, the mayonnaise people, others are available, commissioned it with its ad agency. And they're basically running this study, getting experimental musicians to try and make music using mayonnaise. And they're going to publish a research study based on this. It's basically an advertising wheeze, but they've roped in a university.

30:02And the thing that got me was there's a credit section of the case study of this campaign. And 54 people are listed in this case study as having been involved. Like 54 people involved in pretending that mayonnaise is an instrument for a brand, which, you know, labels may be reducing their rustus but there's still plenty of people in Adland doing silly things with mayonnaise We started with a huge story about a potential UMG takeover and we've finished up mayonnaise Thank you very much for listening this week If you are enjoying the show tell your friends, work colleagues passing musicians help us spread the word You can also support us via Patreon In fact if you sign up to be a superfan you can get to join us for our weekly lock-in which is where you get to stay behind with us after hours for more discussion and debate and who knows also stories about other sources that you might be able to spread the musical love with you can gain access to the extra bit of the show the lock-in by becoming a superfan at, here's the address, patreon.com slash the price of music.