MBW Reacts is a collection of analytical commentaries from Music Enterprise Worldwide written in response to main latest leisure occasions or information tales. Solely MBW+ subscribers have limitless entry to those articles. The beneath article initially appeared in Tim Ingham’s newest MBW+ Overview e mail, issued solely to MBW+ subscribers this week.
To know how intelligent Taylor Swift’s workforce is, hearth up Google.
For my cash, Swift has solely made one main profession blunder over the previous six years: her starring function within the 2019 Hollywood stinker Cats. A movie so dangerous, Ricky Gervais memorably known as it “the worst factor to occur to cats… since canines”.
But plonk “Taylor Swift Cats” into the globe’s favourite search engine at present and also you’ll wrestle to identify any proof that this much-maligned film ever existed.
As a substitute, you’ll discover a number of Web optimization-dominant press articles (Individuals, Cosmopolitan, US Weekly), plus one distinguished Reddit discussion board, all targeted on the trio of home felines that Taylor retains as pets.
You’ll even discover, on web page one among Google, a handsomely furnished Wikipedia web page for one among Swift’s moggies, Olivia Benson.
Neglect ‘Taylor Swift in Cats’. Did you imply ‘Taylor Swift’s cats’?
You’ll be able to’t persuade me that any of that is coincidence.
To my thoughts, it’s excellent/purrfect proof that Swift and her self-run group can exert extra affect on the web, and its shoppers, than most firms may ever dream of.
She’s able to globally exploding her proudest and most profitable moments (see: Eras tour ticket gross sales). And, like a Mr Wolf of the web, she and her media acolytes can largely wipe clear her errors – as in the event that they by no means occurred.
This all offers a smart justification as to why Swift simply spent lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} shopping for the grasp rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Holdings.
The logic: By leveraging her personal peerless fan-activating channels, Swift can set off extra curiosity in these data than arguably another entity on earth. Particularly a publicity-shy non-public fairness agency with no actual capability to immediately persuade or inspire shoppers.
We don’t have to re-live the full extent of the Swift masters saga right here. However in keeping with MBW’s sources, Shamrock paid Scooter Braun a complete of $405 million for the masters to Swift’s first six albums through a 2020 deal. That value included $360 million upfront plus a subsequent $45 million earn-out primarily based on efficiency.
Studying between the traces of assorted latest media studies, it appears Shamrock could have bought Swift her masters for the same charge to the $405 million it paid to get them.
This would definitely clarify Swift’s enthusiasm for Shamrock’s habits through the course of. (Swift wrote the opposite week: “This was a enterprise deal to [Shamrock], however… I’m endlessly grateful. My first tattoo may simply be an enormous shamrock in the midst of my brow.”)
If Shamrock didn’t make a bundle of revenue from the sale, don’t let your coronary heart bleed. Do not forget that the agency has absorbed nearly 5 stable years of royalty cash-flow from these property, throughout a interval when Swift has ascended to never-before-seen industrial heights.
But, over and above the enchantment of a quiet PE agency retreating from all of the Swiftian drama (Taylor’s Variations et al), you must surprise why Shamrock and its music heads (together with the popular Patrick Russo) determined to flip these property of the world’s greatest megastar… now.
One principle: it’s all about Shamrock’s consciousness of the way forward for the music rights enterprise – and the way important the ‘portfolio impact’ will likely be for anybody trying to declare a large chunk of it within the years forward.
In accordance with the IFPI, Taylor Swift’s recorded music has generated greater than another artist on the planet for the previous three years in a row.
However right here’s the factor about being the world’s greatest megastar in 2025: your dominance of the general market, similar to that of a significant document firm, is frequently being nibbled into by an limitless stream of music you don’t personal.
Firstly, there’s the persevering with wave of self-uploading artists to contemplate – a key issue within the addition of round 99,000 tracks per day onto streaming companies.
There’s additionally the incoming tsunami of AI-generated music from the likes of Suno and Udio. (Did you see that ‘Masters Of Prophecy’ – a hub for AI-made Musak – reportedly simply overtook Mr. Beast to turn out to be YouTube‘s fastest-growing channel?)
Lastly, and most significantly, there’s the rise of what may as soon as have been termed ‘regional’ music – and its rising influence on international charts.
From Luminate‘s 2024 annual report: “English-speaking markets are dropping native share to non-English language imports…whereas many non-English talking markets present native content material gaining share.”
Artists from the US misplaced 0.20% market share of premium streams within the US final 12 months; globally, they misplaced 0.44%.
Regardless of Swift’s large reputation, as a market share proposition, even she is being affected by these tendencies.
In accordance with my studying of Luminate information, Swift claimed roughly 0.9% of the 1.4 trillion whole on-demand audio streams in the US final 12 months.
In business parlance, Swift is (in and of herself) a really important impartial label.
However it could be a shock if her share of worldwide streams (and due to this fact her share of streaming’s income ‘pie’) didn’t proceed declining within the years forward.
This brings us to the ‘portfolio impact’.
Firms like Common Music Group have grown used to seeing artists like Taylor Swift negotiate offers below which they maintain possession of their copyrights – and obtain greater royalty margins than they as soon as did.
UMG is due to this fact adjusting to a lower-margin actuality in relation to frontline music in 2025.
But, concurrently, main music firms are working laborious to keep away from being overly uncovered to the fortunes of anyone artist.
Certainly, UMG’s Prime 50 artists solely accounted for 24% of its recorded music income in 2024.
In its newest annual report, the corporate wrote, “Our terribly various roster of artists… implies that our enterprise’ success shouldn’t be reliant on one artist or perhaps a small variety of artists.”
Like its fellow majors, UMG faces its personal market share challenges from (a) the limitless inflow of music onto streaming companies and (b) the altering listening patterns of worldwide music followers.
That is partly why Common is investing $775 million to purchase Downtown — to bolster its market share throughout publishing and data, whereas additional lessening its reliance on the celebrity economic system.
In distinction, for a passive investor like Shamrock, betting every part on a single megastar, nevertheless dominant, is a harmful gamble. As musical consideration turns into more and more democratized, even the mightiest particular person catalog faces structural headwinds.
By way of her personal legacy, then, Taylor Swift has simply reclaimed management. However she’s executed so in a market the place ‘management’ is an more and more overseas idea.Music Enterprise Worldwide
