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During an October earnings call, Universal Music Group CFO Boyd Muir told investors the company was conducting “a careful review” of its costs. In the world of public company statements, that was a hint that UMG expected to make cuts to its workforce of roughly 10,000 — specifically hundreds of jobs in the first quarter of the year, as Bloomberg later revealed.
UMG has plenty of company. Until late last year, the music business had mostly escaped the job-cutting that ravaged industries that depend more on advertising in 2022 and 2023. That was still the best of times for the industry, which had found double-digit revenue growth in streaming. Since 2020, 10 music companies have gone public to take advantage of investors’ enthusiasm for music, including labels and publishers (UMG, Warner Music Group, HYBE, Reservoir Media, Believe, Round Hill Music Royalty Fund), streaming services (Deezer, Anghami, Cloud Music) and live-entertainment firms (a spinoff of MSG Entertainment).
That changed during 2023. In March, WMG’s new CEO, Robert Kyncl, a former YouTube executive, laid off around 270 people — 4% of the company’s workforce — to focus more on technology initiatives and “new skills for artist and songwriter development,” as he wrote in a memo to staff at the time. Downtown Music Holdings — owner of CD Baby, FUGA, Songtrust and more — also thinned its payroll in May. BMG laid off about 30 people in October. Digital music companies fared even worse in 2023: Spotify cut about 23% of its workforce in two rounds of layoffs, TIDAL cut 10%, SoundCloud cut 8%, and Bandcamp chopped half its head count after being acquired by Songtradr.
But UMG? The company’s revenue in the first nine months of 2023 was up 9.4% on a constant currency basis, 6.8% as reported due to foreign currency fluctuations. More than two years after spinning off from former corporate parent Vivendi, UMG is a profitable, hit-making machine that controlled 29.4% of the U.S. recorded-music market in 2023, easily besting Sony Music’s 18.9% and WMG’s 15.6%. It has Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, Drake and many other big stars. Perhaps understandably, there has been talk that other labels could follow, with cuts of one size or another.
UMG’s decision may be the most dramatic example of just how profoundly the music business is changing — and how quickly. Lean is the new black. Bloat, or anything that evokes it, is out. The old ways of finding, developing and marketing artists no longer work the way they used to. How big a radio promotion department does a label need — how many radio promotion departments does its parent company need — at a time when radio no longer plays as important a part in breaking hits? Social media and data analysis might matter just as much. So could developing markets that once didn’t account for much revenue.
UMG’s next focus, chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge wrote in a memo to staff in early January, will be “creating the blueprint for the labels of the future” by building the technology to do more work in-house, expanding in developing markets and finding ways to better monetize superfans. That requires moving resources away from the “legacy business,” Muir said in the October earnings call, to “benefit from all of the opportunities that we see ahead.” What that will mean for how UMG reshuffles its organizational chart remains to be seen, but it is already building an artist services business with Virgin Music Group and making aggressive moves in developing markets with investments in TM Ventures in India and Chabaka in the United Arab Emirates.
Other music companies are also reassessing their priorities. BMG’s staffing changes were spurred by new CEO Thomas Coesfeld as a response to an international marketing structure that didn’t meet expectations and duplicated the efforts of local teams, he wrote in a memo to staff.
“Businesses are repositioning themselves slightly to become more competitive,” Downtown Music president Peter van Rijn says. “One must always be mindful to not get complacent,” he adds, noting that his company needed to stay nimble enough to respond to the marketplace. “What you do see, in general, is the music industry is maturing. The digital growth is still there, but it’s slowing down.”
The world is changing, too. Along with the major labels, companies like Believe and Reservoir Media are investing in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and other regions where music revenue is growing. And both new companies and the established majors are expanding their artist services businesses to court creators who can now choose from among an increasing number of alternatives to a traditional major-label deal. Sony acquired the artist services company AWAL in 2022, UMG is building up Virgin, and WMG’s Kyncl wrote in an early-January memo that he wants to augment services to the “middle class of artists” and scale up the company’s publishing administration business.
Public companies in the music industry face pressure from investors to constantly improve their bottom lines, especially as streaming growth levels off. “Two-and-a-half years ago, we started making cuts because we knew the market was no longer about just growth,” says Rob Ellin, CEO of music streaming company LiveOne, which is cutting up to 100 staffers in a restructuring. “You had to be profitable.”
The growth-over-profits era finally ended at Spotify, too. When the streaming giant announced it would cut 17% of its global workforce in December, CEO Daniel Ek explained that costs were too high, efficiency was too low and too few people “contribut[ed] to opportunities with real impact.” Cutting roughly 1,500 jobs and seeking a replacement for CFO Paul Vogel, Ek wrote in an open letter, were necessary to become “relentlessly resourceful.”
Record labels and music publishers have better margins than Spotify, which will rarely turn a profit — but investors also expect more of them. In the first half of 2021, UMG — then a subsidiary of Vivendi — had a margin of 21.5% in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and told investors in August it expected to reach the “mid-20s” soon. Two years later, revenue had increased 34% but its EBITDA margin was almost unchanged at 21.5% (or 14.9% after deducting 345 million euros of noncash, share-based compensation for senior management). With layoffs can come better margins. Restructuring saved Warner $19 million in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, and Barclays analysts estimated UMG’s layoffs could save the company $70 million annually.
To those who remember the crisis caused by the death of the CD, this talk of restructuring might have a familiar ring. As piracy ravaged the music business, the majors scaled back their physical distribution businesses, sold their CD pressing plants and retooled for a digital world. That’s why Grainge reminded investors that UMG is no stranger to managing disruption. “We’ve got decades of experience in executing cost-cutting programs in the various cycles of the industry, right back to the piracy days,” he said during the October earnings call. And currently, “we’re seeing a change in the business.”
Share of streaming among the top 10,000 tracks measured by Luminate in its recently-released 2023 Year End Music Report went down by 3.8 percentage points since 2021. Which begs the question: Where did that 3.8% go?
It went fully into the streaming share of Spanish language tracks, which went up by 3.8%.
Indeed, today, Spanish is the second most consumed language in music, both in the U.S. and globally.
In the United States, the top three languages in music consumption by percentage of the total are, of course, English (88.8%), followed by Spanish (8.1%) and Korean in a distant third (0.7%).
The most recent numbers show Spanish language music’s market share among the country’s most popular songs almost doubled over the past two years — jumping from 4.2% of the top 10,000 tracks in 2021 to 8.1% in 2023. Overall, consumption of Latin music in the U.S grew by 19.4 billion on-demand audio streams in 2023, a 24.1% jump. In total number of streams, it was second in growth only to country, which grew by 20.4 billion streams.
Worldwide, English-language music consumption among the 10,000 most listened to tracks fell substantially in 2023, from 67% in 2021 to 54.9% in 2023. Spanish-language music consumption also dipped, from 12.4% in 2021 to 10.1% in 2023, while consumption of music in Hindi grew from 6.1% to 7.8%, and in Japanese from 1.3% to 2.1%. However, all told, Spanish is still the second most listened to music language in the world, according to the study.
In the U.S., Spanish-language music’s growth has been a very gradual process that’s come with the growth of streaming, a bigger Latin population, and with a major cultural shift that accepts that there are more cultures and languages that can coexist. Chief among them is Spanish, which benefits from being the lingua franca of an entire continent, plus Spain. While Latins are not monolithic, as many have long pointed out, they are all (with the exception of Brazilians) united by language; go to any Latin music concert in the U.S., and you’ll find a plethora of nations gathered under the same roof enjoying the same music, regardless of its origin.
The shift in consumption has been noticed by mainstream labels; 25 years ago, Latin acts like Shakira and Ricky Martin, had to record in English to garner widespread promotion. Spanish, the language which has long defined “Latin” music, was conversely, widely seen as stepping stone on the path to international superstardom but not as the goal.
Today, for the first time, mainstream labels are signing and developing artists who record solely, or almost solely in Spanish, such as Yahrtiza y su Esencia to Columbia Records and Xavi to Interscope.
There is strength in numbers, and those numbers opened the door for Latin artists to scale the charts by singing only in Spanish, as well as for predominantly Spanish-language series –like “Narcos” and the new “Griselda”—to score big viewing numbers despite what many would have perceived as a language barrier years ago.
But clearly, today there is a growing number of non-Spanish speakers who also listen to music in Spanish. According to recent consumer research insights from Luminate, for example, 25% of U.S. music listeners (ages 13+) said they engage with Spanish-language music, even though Hispanics account for 19% of the population.
People may not speak Spanish, but they’re definitely listening to the music.
Taylor Swift dominated the U.S. market in 2023 by accounting for 1.8% of music consumption and one out of every 78 audio streams, according to Luminate’s 2023 year-end report released Wednesday (Jan. 10). But even without Swift, last year Americans streamed a record amount of music and purchased more albums than the year before.
U.S. music consumption grew 12.6% in 2023 to 1.1 billion units (measured as album sales plus track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums). With that double-digit gain, the U.S. market easily exceeded the 9.2% improvement from 2022 and had its biggest one-year gain since consumption grew 15% in 2019.
The streaming market picked up momentum in 2023 despite on-demand services already reaching mainstream status and subscription prices increasing in recent years. On-demand song streaming — both audio and video — climbed 14.6% to 1.5 trillion streams, an improvement on the 12.2% growth in 2022 and 10% growth in 2021. On-demand audio streams from services such as Spotify and Apple Music rose 12.7% to 1.2 trillion.
It was another good year for vinyl LPs and CDs as consumers continued to keep the album format alive in an era of single-serving music. Overall U.S. album sales rose 5.2% to 105.3 million — a rebound from 2022, when overall sales fell by 8.2%. Physical album sales grew 8.9% to 87 million while digital album sales fell 9.3% to 18.3 million.
Repeating a trend seen in recent years, the music Americans consumed in 2023 got a little older. The share of album consumption for catalog — releases more than 18 months old — was 72.6%, a slight increase from 72.2% in 2022. Total catalog album consumption increased 13.2% to 796.8 million units. Current music’s share of album consumption dropped to 27.4%, though current album consumption still increased in unit terms, rising 10.9% to 300.4 million units.
In the year it celebrated its 50th anniversary, hip-hop was the most popular genre in the United States with a 25.3% share of album units (album sales plus track equivalent albums plus streaming equivalent albums) — even though no hip-hop song topped the Hot 100 until Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” did it in September. Rock was No. 2 with a 19.4% share and pop was No. 3 with a 12.3% share. Country and Latin rounded out the top five with 8.4% and 6.9% shares, respectively.
Rock led album sales with a 41.5% share, more than triple No. 2 hip-hop’s 12.9% share and No. 3 pop’s 12.7% share. Country was No. 4 with a 7.8% share and World — mainly K-pop — was No. 5 with a 6.9% share.
In terms of growth rate, World music — which also includes J-pop, or Japanese pop, and Afrobeats — topped all other genres with a 26.2% increase in U.S. on-demand audio streams to 5.7 billion. No. 2 Latin was close behind with 24.1% growth but was far larger with 19.4 billion on-demand audio streams. Country was No. 3 in terms of growth, up 23.7% and with a total of 20.4 billion on-demand audio streams.
On the other end of the spectrum was comedy, which excels at YouTube and TikTok but lost 10.2% of its on-demand audio streams in 2023. New age fell 6.9% and children’s music dropped 6.2%.
Led by Peso Pluma, Regional Mexican grew 60% to 21.9 billion U.S. on-demand audio streams, with Peso ranking No. 43 overall in U.S. on-demand audio streams with 1.9 billion. Another rising Regional Mexican artist, the group Eslabon Armado, amassed 1.3 billion U.S. on-demand audio streams — good for No. 71 overall.
J-pop totaled 1.67 billion on-demand audio streams (of J-pop tracks ranked in the top 10,000 world music songs). J-pop’s success comes from a youth movement: Fans are 95% more likely than the general population to be Generation Z and 94% more likely to identify as LGBTQ+, according to Luminate.
Direct-to-consumer album sales increased 38.6% to 11.8 million units as record labels put greater resources behind selling albums to their fans from artist and label websites. Rock was the D2C leader with a 38.6% share, followed by pop with 18.3% and R&B/hip-hop with 13.2%. D2C vinyl sales grew by 1.9 million to 6.8 million, up from 4.8 million in 2022. D2C CD sales rose 400,000 units to 3.9 million, up from 3.5 million.
The average U.S. monthly spend on music increased to $116 in the third quarter of 2023 from $96 in the prior-year quarter. That was about even with the $117 average monthly spend seen in the full-year 2021. Live music accounted for 62% of average monthly spend.
Globally, on-demand song streams — both audio and video — reached 7.1 trillion, up 33.7% from 2022. Global audio on-demand streams totaled 4.1 trillion, up 22.3%.
The United States ranked first globally in total streaming volume with 1.45 trillion, approximately 40% ahead of No. 2 India’s 1.04 trillion and nearly four times No. 3 Brazil’s 374 billion. But India ranked No. 1 in new net streams with 463.7 billion, an increase of 81% from 2022, while the United States ranked No. 2 with 184 billion net new streams and Indonesia was No. 3 with 93.1 billion net new streams (and No. 5 in total streams with 235.5 billion).
By almost every metric, the music business in 2023 has been defined by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen. Collectively, they have led the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100 for 23 of the 52 weeks of the year, with Swift topping Billboard’s year-end Top Artists chart and Wallen ruling both the year-end Billboard 200 Albums and Hot 100 Songs charts with One Thing at a Time and “Last Night,” respectively.
Combined, the two recording artists have an astounding 2.49% in overall U.S. album consumption unit market share, according to Luminate. (Year-to-year percentages are based on data from Dec. 29, 2022, through Dec. 28, 2023.) Their domination underscores a year of explosive growth for country — of the two rerecorded albums Swift released in 2023, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) qualified in the genre — which is up 21.8% year over year. That’s almost double the 12.6% year-to-year growth of recorded music overall for the same period and nearly five times the 4.8% increase the genre had from 2021 to 2022.
Country music accounted for 8.40% of the recorded-music market in 2023, up from 7.76% the year prior — and Swift and Wallen weren’t the only acts fueling those gains. Hit albums by Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Bailey Zimmerman helped country’s current market share — defined as releases that arrived within the past 18 months — surge from 7.97% to 10.37% year over year, a 30% gain. And while that’s only good enough for third place when the genres are ranked by current market share, No. 1 hip-hop and No. 2 pop both fell year over year: the former from 26.72 % to 22.32%, the latter from 13.07% to 11.13%.
Country’s growth almost outstripped Latin music’s strides. Which isn’t to say Latin had a down year — the genre grew 21.9% year over year, the third-highest mark in the industry, largely due to the mainstream success of such new acts as Peso Pluma and Eslabon Armado, and its volume growth (13.5 million units year over year) bested that of pop (11.6 million). In 2021, Latin’s share of the overall industry was 6.33%; in 2023 that number has jumped to 6.86%, and its 37.8 billion on-demand streams for current releases is the third-highest among genres.
R&B/Hip-Hop Slips Again
R&B/hip-hop remains firmly entrenched as the No. 1 U.S. genre with 25.27% of the market, largely because of its outsize percentage of on-demand streams. (The genre accounts for more than one in four streams.) But some metrics indicate that hip-hop’s dominance — it commanded nearly 30% of the overall market in 2020 — may be waning.
The genre’s market share has dipped every year since that 2020 peak, as has its share of on-demand streams, which stood at 30.11% in 2021 and is now at 26.63%. Current consumption of R&B/hip-hop has also slipped 7.4% from 2022 to 2023 and is down in every format for the same period — including the genre’s strong suit, streams, which dropped 7.0% to 93.2 billion. Despite No. 1 Billboard 200 releases from Travis Scott, Drake and Rod Wave, among others, hip-hop albums have continued to lose share since the midyear headlines that the genre had not produced any full-length chart-toppers. That said, its 93.2 billion current streams is more than double the 38.8 billion racked up by 2023’s second-place genre, pop, which sustained overall growth this year. And while R&B/hip-hop’s overall growth, at 5.9%, was 10th among genres, it finished third on that metric in overall volume, adding 15.6 million equivalent album units over last year, behind only rock and country.
Tipping The Sales Scales
While overall album sales have seesawed over the last few years, they have shown growth this year — up 5.2% after a down 2022. Driving sales once again is rock, which has a monumentally large share of the market: 41.47% of all album sales and 43.36% of physical sales. Those numbers are larger than the next four genres — R&B/hip-hop, pop, country and World music, in that order — combined and largely stem from immense catalog sales. Rock sales account for 47.50% of the entire catalog category — defined as music older than 18 months — a 4.0% year-over-year increase. Rock catalog album sales totaled 30.8 million units in 2023, more than the combined sales — current and catalog — of the next two genres, pop and R&B/hip-hop.
Latin music’s album sales growth is the inverse of rock. With just 0.57% of overall album sales in 2023, the genre ranks 14th out of the 15 core genres tracked by Luminate — lower than blues, jazz, classical and holiday/seasonal. Only new age placed below it.
Like hip-hop, Latin’s huge overall growth comes mostly from on-demand audio streams, but also a big chunk of the on-demand video streaming market, 10.0%, which is larger than its 6.86% overall market share. Pop is the only other genre on this chart where its market share of on-demand video streams exceeds its overall percentage by that much: 17.35% to 12.33%.
World Music’s Gains
Latin is just one genre of non-English-language music that occupies more and more of the mainstream U.S. music market. The umbrella genre of World music, which includes K-pop and Afrobeats, among other styles, has grown massively. In 2019, World music accounted for 1.69% of the overall industry; in 2023, that’s up to 2.73%, a 35.3% jump. That growth is most evident when looking at album sales. World music captured 6.93% of the market this year, with physical sales totaling 7.96% of that figure. The bulk of those sales is attributable to K-pop, which surged 88.8% year over year. Afrobeats also had a big impact on the genre, particularly in on-demand streaming, where it was up 54.3% year over year.
Titanic Taylor
Swift’s dominance of music and popular culture this year has been well documented. But how big is she in genre terms? With 18.89 million in album consumption units so far this year, her industry market share is 1.79%. If Swift was her own genre, she’d rank at No. 9 based on the data used here — just a few thousand units shy of Christian/gospel’s 1.76% market share and ahead of children music’s 1.11%. In 2023, Taylor Swift is bigger than jazz.
The concert business has had a record year in 2023 — tours by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were pop culture moments, festivals roared back to life and consumers’ splurging on tickets seemed to defy gravity. There’s likely more good news on the horizon, too. By all forecasts, next year is shaping up for continued success, even as consumers still feel pinched by inflation.
Among the big names to announce stadium tours next year are The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Green Day and a pairing of Journey and Def Leppard. Chris Stapleton, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs will hit both stadiums and arenas. Drake, Bad Bunny, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Hootie & the Blowfish, New Kids on the Block, Alanis Morissette and The Trilogy Tour featuring Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull will play arenas and amphitheaters. Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour continues in 2024, too, with 85 shows announced for Asia, Australia and North America.
Advanced ticket sales suggest consumers remain eager to see their favorite artists perform live. Through mid-October, Live Nation’s event-related deferred revenue — from ticket sales to events that had not yet occurred — was up 39% year over year, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release.
AEG Presents, the second-largest promoter, is “feeling really positive” about 2024 tours across all venue sizes and genres, says Rich Schaefer, president of global touring. “I think people are discovering new artists and want to see big shows — and they’re willing to pay for it.” They’re buying well in advance, too: AEG put tickets on sale for 76 Zach Bryan shows in 2024 — some won’t happen until December — and has “largely sold everything out,” says Schaeffer. “That artist especially has a crazy connection with his fans. They’ve seen videos of what his shows are like, and I think everybody wants to experience it.”
Those big tours — and thousands of others — are counting on consumers to continue to open their wallets despite continued high prices for staples and living expenses, rising debt delinquencies and Americans’ credit card debt reaching a record level in the third quarter. The holidays are presenting mixed signals: Black Friday spending was up 2.5% compared to 2022, but numerous surveys have found consumers plan to spend less on gifts this year.
Consumers may feel beleaguered, but they continue to spend to see their favorite artists perform live. “I have weekly booking calls with the over 40 presidents around the world and we talk booking clubs up to stadiums and festivals, and we have not seen anything taper off in any sense,” said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino during the company’s Nov. 2 earnings call. The company is “not seeing any pullback in any way” in consumer demand regardless of the region or venue size, he added.
A big question, though, is whether consumers will be in a spending mood throughout 2024. A new Goldman Sachs economic outlook report says the U.S. economy today is better than was expected a year ago, inflation will continue to subside and the likelihood of a recession in 2024 is “limited.” The latest data from the University of Michigan is encouraging: U.S. consumer sentiment soared in December and people’s expectations for year-ahead inflation dropped to 3.1% from 4.5% last month.
Whatever uncertainties exist — including falling savings rates and weakening credit conditions — have not materialized in ticket sales thus far. “We certainly see the headlines [about macroeconomic conditions], but it’s not flowing through to numbers that we can see,” Lawrence Fey, CFO of secondary ticket marketplace Vivid Seats, said during a Nov. 7 earnings call.
One could simply look at who’s touring in 2024 to get a sense of where ticket buyers are thinking. “You got The Stones going on the road in parts in North America,” says Doug Arthur of Huber Research Partners. “They’re always a pretty big draw. The Stones are pretty savvy historically about touring when they think the economics support it.”
Consumers’ willingness to spend increasing amounts on live music isn’t a new trend — although some of 2023’s record-setting box office numbers appear to be the result of music fans may be clamoring for live events in after suffering through pandemic-era restrictions. The concert industry has benefited from a lasting shift among consumers from goods to experiences over the last 10 to 15 years, says Brandon Ross, an analyst with LightShed Partners.
This year’s boffo box office numbers weren’t outliers, and Ross expects to see “outsized performance on a global basis” in 2024. “There has been a year-and-a-half long concern for a broader pullback in consumer spending,” says Ross. “I don’t think will not impact growth, but I think there’s substantial tailwind supporting this industry.”
Those tailwinds probably won’t be strong enough for next year’s touring business to duplicate 2023’s stellar growth rate — but no one seems to be expecting that. “I don’t think you’re talking about another up 30% type of year, and I don’t think [Live Nation is] talking about that either,” says Arthur. “But can the concert revenues be up high single digits between volume, fans per show, price per ticket and spending per fan? Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable at all.”
Artists and promoters will continue to encounter high costs in 2024 — labor, catering, buses and staging are stretched thin with a high number of big tours on the road. That’ll continue to push ticket prices up. Even so, AEG hasn’t seen resistance to higher prices, says Schaefer. “There’s very few instances where we think that pricing is responsible for tickets not selling.”
Most corporations would love to rake in revenues well over $1 billion in a single year. In 2023, Taylor Swift has done it — and plenty more — by herself.
Billboard estimates that the 2023 Time Person of the Year honoree has grossed approximately $1.82 billion in music sales and royalties, concert tickets, merchandise sales at concerts and movie ticket sales in 2023 through Dec. 7.
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That figure represents the total amount generated in these handful of segments of Swift’s business career, not the amount she personally pocketed. Because none of this financial information is publicly available, Billboard calculated music royalties based on data from Luminate, concert ticket sales using publicly available information and her concert merchandise revenue was estimated based on Billboard’s reporting.
While impressive, $1.82 billion isn’t even the entirety of the income Swift has derived from her music career. Billboard left many items out of the calculations due to the inaccessibility of data, including synchronization royalties for her music’s use in advertisements, films and television shows, sponsorships, and merchandise sales from her website and licensing deals.
To put Swift’s year in perspective, she took in more than the $1.4 billion global gross of the motion picture Barbie. She exceeded the $1.6 billion fetched last year by the auction of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s art collection of works by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Gustav Klimt. And it’s almost four times the 2022 annual revenue of Deezer, a publicly traded music streaming company with 9.4 million subscribers. In fact, she grossed more than every record label besides the three majors.
Spending on tickets and concert merchandise accounted for the lion’s share of Swift’s business this year. Swift’s The Eras Tour generated approximately $900 million in ticket sales in 2023. That figure is based on Billboard’s estimate that Swift sold 3.3 million tickets to 53 concerts in the U.S. at about $250 per ticket. An additional 13 shows in Latin America likely earned another $60 million to $75 million from 750,000 ticket. At those concerts, Swift sold an estimated concert merchandise sales of $132 million of merchandise. Her per-show average merchandise sales at roughly $2 million, based on Billboard’s reporting.
Swift’s music grossed an estimated $536 million from streaming royalties, purchases — tracks, digital albums, CDs, LPs and cassettes — and broadcast radio play through Dec. 7. Swift is this year’s leading U.S. artist in terms of on-demand audio streams, album sales and track sales.
Sales and streams accounted for roughly 86%, or $461 million, of her recorded music revenue. Most of that money was collected by her label, Republic Records, and the owner of her Big Machine Music Group catalog, Shamrock Capital. These amounts include the gross amount from music purchases (CDs, LPs and downloads) and includes mechanical royalties paid by record labels to songwriters and music publishers.
Swift’s songwriting catalog generated an estimated $75 million from streaming and radio play. (Publishing royalties from streaming are not counted in the recorded music gross revenue. Unlike the mechanical royalties from purchases, mechanical royalties from streams are not passed through record labels.) The radio royalties are paid to Swift’s performance rights organization, BMI, and will be distributed to Swift, her co-writers and the various music publishers and administrators that have rights to the compositions.
Additionally, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie has an international gross of $250 million, according to Box Office Mojo. In the U.S., the movie grossed $179 million and debuted at No. 1 with first-week ticket sales of $95 million to $97 million. Depending on the production costs, the movie could be a financial boon for Swift considering she circumvented the traditional Hollywood distribution system and made a deal directly with AMC, the country’s largest movie theater chain. Additionally, the film is now available to rent on streaming and Swift retains the rights to license to a streaming service — both of which will earn her even more money.
Swift’s true economic impact is far larger than her gross sales outlined here. Many experts have been thinking of Swift’s business as the center of a larger economic impact that expands like concentric circles around her fans’ insatiable demand and willingness to travel to experience her concerts. The U.S. Travel Association stated in September that it believed The Eras Tour’s total economic impact will exceed $10 billion. Swift’s tour reached 20 U.S. cities and her fans averaged $1,300 of spending on travel, hotel stays and food. The association figures Swift’s fans spent about $5 billion in those destinations. Including indirect spending by others “who came to join the action around the events but did not actually attend the shows,” the association estimates the total economic impact is twice the $5 billion of direct spending. Another estimated found that her six sold-out shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, alone brought an estimated $320 million to the Los Angeles area’s gross domestic product, according to the California Center for Jobs & The Economy and California Business Roundtable.
Spotify’s announcement this week that it was laying off 17% of its global workforce surprised a music business enjoying a renaissance. After all, Spotify ignited the subscription-streaming boom that saved the industry. And while the companies that depend on the online advertising business go through booms and busts — think of Meta cutting 21,000 jobs since 2022 — music business jobs have been relatively safe.
Spotify’s decision to eliminate about 1,500 full-time staffers shouldn’t have come as a surprise, though. As CEO Daniel Ek put it in a letter announcing the layoffs, “Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact.”
Over a decade and a half, Spotify pioneered a new model for music subscriptions by prioritizing growth over profit. While on-demand video streaming services such as Netflix frequently raised prices, Spotify left most of its prices unchanged until July. Digital music platforms have a notoriously tricky path to profitability, but Spotify’s share price soared thanks to a pandemic-era boost to streaming companies as well as high expectations for its nascent podcasting business. By February 2021, as Spotify poured money into acquisitions and pricey podcasting content, the stock was trading at $364.59 per share, valuing the company at roughly $71 billion.
By 2022, however, Spotify’s investors had run out of patience. The stock was trading at $110 on June 8 when Ek and CFO Paul Vogel shared their ambitious plan at the company’s Investor Day presentation: $100 billion in annual revenue, 40% gross margins and 20% operating margins. To get there, Spotify would continue to scale its podcasting business and lean on its audio content acquisitions — The Ringer, Parcast, Megaphone and Anchor — to help the format reach larger audiences. Now, Spotify also wants to do for audiobooks what it did with podcasts: piggyback on its massive base of music listeners, develop innovative products and build a bigger market.
Podcasts and audiobooks, as well as services sold to artists and record labels like merchandise listings and Discovery Mode, are important to reaching the targets of 40% gross margin and 20% operating margin. Given the nature of licensing deals with record labels and music publishers, music margins have little room to improve. Whereas video streamers like Netflix pay fixed costs for much of their content, Spotify pays a percentage of revenue to record labels and music publishers. That means as revenue increases, so do its content costs. And that’s not likely to change. “Our strategy is not predicated on trying to extract margin by negotiating better terms with the content partners we have,” Ek said at the 2022 Investor Day.
Over a year later, however, Billboard’s analysis of Spotify’s financial statements shows the company is still nowhere near its target margins. Since the first quarter of 2020, its gross profit margin has fallen between 24.1% and 28.4% while its operating profit margin has ranged from –8.8% to 3% and was below zero in 11 of 15 quarters.
Merely adding subscribers isn’t enough. (The company reported 226 million at the end of Q3 2023.) Reaching its targets requires Spotify to cut costs while investing in new growth opportunities such as podcasts and audiobooks. Ek said as much when explaining Vogel’s upcoming departure on Thursday. “I’ve talked a lot with Paul about the need to balance these two objectives carefully,” he said in a statement. “Over time, we’ve come to the conclusion that Spotify is entering a new phase and needs a CFO with a different mix of experiences.”
Spotify’s cost-cutting started in 2022 with a pause on new hires, layoffs in October and the cancellation of six live audio shows in December. This year, it laid off 6% of its global staff in January and in June merged two podcast production houses, Gimlet and Parcast, and further cut its podcast workforce by 2%. In August, it shut down Spotify Live, a short-lived live streaming app. Then on Monday, Spotify announced it would lay off 17% of its workforce. It also canceled two in-house podcasts, Heavyweight and Stolen.
As the graphs show, recent trends in Spotify’s financials made it clear larger cuts were necessary to meet the company’s ambitious targets. Personnel costs as a percentage of revenue rose from 13.8% in 2021 to 16.2% in 2022. Research and development expenses — which include some salaries — jumped from 9.4% of revenue in 2021 to 11.8% in 2022.
As Ek explained in the memo to employees, Spotify grew in 2021 and 2022 to take advantage of lower-cost capital. Today’s environment is different, however, and Ek believes Spotify’s “cost structure for where we need to be is still too big.” Indeed, Spotify’s head count steadily increased as it acquired companies, developed new formats and created product innovations that both resonated (Spotify Wrapped) and flopped (Spotify Live) with users. The number of full-time employees increased nearly 50% from 2020 to 2022.
This growth came without added efficiency, however. The revenue generated per employee peaked at 1.54 million euros ($1.66 million) in 2019 and declined to 1.4 million euros ($1.51 million) in 2022 — the lowest since 2017. The July price increase will help Spotify bring in more revenue without additional staff or resources, though the effectiveness of those increases won’t be known until Spotify releases full-year results in late January.
What’s more, Spotify’s gross profit per employee fell to a five-year low in 2022. Gross profit is what’s left after cost of sales — primarily royalties to labels and publishers — is deducted from revenue. It goes toward personnel costs, sales and marketing expenses, and general and administrative costs. But as Spotify added employees in recent years, gross profit per employee fell to 350,000 euros ($377,000) in 2022 from 391,600 euros ($421,000) in 2021.
An obvious way for Spotify to reach its target margins was to make larger cuts to its workforce and, as Ek phrased it, “become relentlessly resourceful.” Cutting 17% of its personnel costs would have resulted in savings of 323 million euros ($349 million) in 2022, based on total personnel costs of 1.9 billion euros ($2.05 billion). That savings would have halved Spotify’s 2022 operating loss of 659 million euros ($711 million).
Ultimately, the multi-billion-dollar question is simple: Can Spotify continue adding subscribers as fast as it has in previous years and develop its spoken word products into the higher-margin businesses it needs with far fewer employees? That’s the high-stakes situation the new CFO will walk into in 2024 and that will determine the company’s future from here on out.
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is poised to become the highest-grossing global tour of all time, according to Billboard’s estimates.
While no official numbers have been reported yet, Swift’s tour should pass current record-holder Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour with more than $900 million in ticket sales so far.
On Sunday (Nov. 26), Swift played her last scheduled show of the year, wrapping an intense run of 66 concerts in the United States, Mexico and South America. Representatives for The Eras Tour have not yet reported official revenue or attendance figures to Billboard Boxscore or any other trade journal or news entity, but the enormity of The Eras Tour is impossible to ignore, with a total that amounts to a staggering average of nearly $14 million per show.
Dating back almost 40 years, all Boxscore rankings are based on figures reported to Billboard. Data is reported from a variety of official industry sources, from artist managers and agents to promoters and venue executives. Reporting has always been voluntary, and some artists, venues and promoters opt to withhold data from representation on our charts. It is not uncommon for artists to not report — or to wait until the end of a tour, which is still more than a year away in Swift’s case — though it’s rare that such a well-documented blockbuster tour, in contention for top year-end honors, is not submitted. Swift’s abstention disqualifies her from appearing on year-end Boxscore charts.
Swift kicked off The Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17, playing 53 domestic shows before wrapping at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., outside Los Angeles, on Aug. 9. She hit a total of 20 U.S. cities, and 11 of those venues have provided attendance figures to Billboard. Based on those numbers, as well as estimates based on aggressive scaling at the other nine stadiums, Swift likely sold 3.3 million tickets over 53 shows in the United States, or an average of 63,000 tickets per show.
Sources close to the tour point to an average domestic ticket price of around $252. This is in line with the prices for the summer’s other major concert event, Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which maintained a $135 ticket in Europe and a $253 ticket in North America. While ticket prices might dip in certain markets and bloom in others, using that number as an average puts the U.S. leg of The Eras Tour at $838.3 million. That total gross spreads out to $15.8 million per show, a staggering figure that exceeds recent tours by Bad Bunny, Beyoncé, and The Rolling Stones, each of which had giant totals of their own.
Taylor Swift performs onstage during Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Levi’s Stadium on July 28, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif.
Jeff Kravitz/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
That projected $838 million haul is more than enough to make Eras the highest-grossing U.S. and North American tour ever. John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour holds the official Boxscore title, with $567.7 million in the United States and Canada. That total reflects 135 shows over a span of four years, compared to Swift’s 53 shows in less than six months.
Moreover, The Eras Tour’s U.S. gross would situate it as the second-highest grossing tour of all time based on global figures, before even crossing the border. John’s farewell tour remains the official record-holder with $939.1 million.
Since wrapping the Eras Tour’s U.S. leg, Swift played four shows at Mexico City’s Foro Sol (Aug. 24-27) and, more recently, nine South American shows, spread between Buenos Aires in Argentina and Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Those dates bring her much closer to John’s global record, even based on relatively conservative projections. But as we’ve seen with virtually every worldwide stadium tour in the last two years, the post-pandemic surge in ticket prices hasn’t been as severe outside the United States.
Further, these are Swift’s first shows in these Latin American markets. That means pent-up demand likely drove huge sales, though her base isn’t quite as explosive there as it is in the States.
Based on estimates considering the high end of grosses and ticket prices for each Latin American venue’s post-pandemic history, The Eras Tour likely earned another $60 million to $75 million and more than 750,000 tickets from those 13 shows.
In all, Billboard estimates that Swift has generated $906.1 million and sold 4.1 million tickets in 2023 across all shows in the United States, Mexico and South America. That would unofficially make The Eras Tour the biggest tour of 2023. And when considering Swift’s total revenue from the tour, it doesn’t even account for merchandise sales, sponsorships, music streaming and sales boosts, or her self-produced and released Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film.
Swift is scheduled to resume The Eras Tour on Feb. 7 with four shows at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. Then, she’ll play seven shows in Australia and six in Singapore. In May, she kicks off a 50-date run in Europe before returning to North America for 18 shows in new markets, including the tour’s first entry into Canada. In all, that’s 85 shows to go, with the possibility of more to come, considering her recent concert additions to runs in London and Vancouver.
These upcoming international legs are already more ambitious than any previous Swift tour. While this year’s 53 U.S. shows are in line with what she did on 2018’s Reputation Stadium Tour and 2015’s The 1989 World Tour, those treks included just six and seven shows in Europe, respectively — a fraction of next year’s slate of 50.
If we use the comparison between Beyoncé’s recent European and North American grosses as a north star, in Europe, Swift could be looking at $8.5 million per show, or about $420 million over the entire leg. And even if next year’s North American shows dip from 2023’s record-breakers, the U.S. and Canada shows could add another $240 million to 260 million. Including the 17 shows in Asia and Australia, The Eras Tour is likely headed toward a total gross of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion by the end of 2024. It will be the first in history to earn more than $1 billion in ticket sales and will set Swift far apart from her competitors. If figures skew toward the higher end of what’s possible, she could double John’s current record gross.
Representatives for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on Billboard‘s estimates at press time.
The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming Billboard Hot 100 dated Dec. 9), the now-annual holiday rush has begun on the Hot 100 – but for the first time, the usual pace-setter is in danger of being passed for the top spot.
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Mariah Carey, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (Columbia): Since the chart dated Dec. 12, 2015, Mariah Carey’s signature Yuletide tune has reigned atop Billboard’s Holiday 100 listing — 43 consecutive weeks (of its total 58 weeks at No. 1 among the chart’s 63 weeks of existence, dating back to 2011). And every December since first reaching the Hot 100’s apex in 2019, “All I Want” has returned to the top of the chart, most recently spending four weeks at pole position, from the surveys dated Dec. 17, 2022, through to Jan. 7, 2023. In all, it has spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, belatedly making the 1994 release the third-longest-reigning single of Carey’s storied career, and arguably her all-time signature hit.
Once again this year, Carey’s pop perennial begins the holiday season in the lead. It returns at No. 1 on the first Holiday 100 of the 2023 season (dated Dec. 2) and also zooms from 17-4 on the Hot 100, in its 60th total week on the listing. As per tradition, Mimi has come out in full force to re-promote the seasonal staple (and her own Queen of Christmas status) this month. That includes sharing a video of her being “defrosted” at midnight on Nov. 1, starring in a holiday-themed Victoria’s Secret campaign, debuting new themed merch, and of course performing “All I Want” on the Billboard Music Awards (while also accepting the Billboard Chart Achievement Award for the song’s longtime success).
“All I Want” returning to No. 1 on next week’s Hot 100 would be no surprise at all — the song has been one of the great inevitables on the Billboard charts for nearly a half-decade now. However, this year it might be neck-and-neck with another holiday fixture, one that’s been gaining on it in recent years and may finally be in position to pull ahead.
Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (Decca): While Brenda Lee’s Christmas classic is 36 years older than Carey’s, it has nonetheless been building steam over the past half-decade, firmly establishing itself as the perennial silver medalist of Yuletide pop. As “All I Want” has reached No. 1 on both the Holiday 100 and the Hot 100 every year since 2019, so has “Rockin’” climbed to No. 2 on both charts — returning to the runner-up spot on this week’s Holiday 100, while also re-entering the Hot 100 at No. 8, as the second-highest-ranking holiday title. And each of the last few years, the gap in performance between the two songs has shrunk, though Carey’s has thus far remained the decisive leader.
This year, however, the competition has gotten legitimately tight. While Carey remains the leader of the two in sales and official on-demand U.S. streams through four days of this tracking week, Lee is slightly ahead in official U.S. streams, per preliminary tracking data for next week’s charts, according to Luminate. Lee’s song is also growing in streaming at a faster rate than Carey’s — and does in fact lead it comfortably on Spotify’s Daily Top Songs USA chart.
With the distance between the two songs looking increasingly climbable, and with “Rockin’” celebrating its 65th anniversary this year, Lee and her UMG label family have increased their promotional efforts to get the song over the top. Earlier this month, a new music video for the song (with cameos from country stars Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood) premiered on CMT, while Lee will perform the song on NBC’s Christmas at the Opry special on Dec. 7. Lee also released the five-track A Rockin’ Christmas With Brenda Lee EP, featuring a new remix of “Rockin’” by dance producer Filous, and — of course — recently joined TikTok, where she’s been sharing daily posts reminiscing about the song and her career, and sharing her reactions to some of the new feedback and acclaim the song has garnered. (Lee even hopped on the plane intercom on a recent flight to perform the song, as captured by video shared on TMZ.)
With this major promotional push and an increasing public sentimentality behind the 78-year-old Lee — who, as one of the biggest pop stars of the pre-British Invasion ’60s, did top the Hot 100 twice, with 1960’s “I’m Sorry” and “I Want to Be Wanted” — this year should mark her best chance yet of returning to the top spot. If “Rockin’” doesn’t get there this week, it should be a week-to-week battle with “All I Want” throughout the holiday season — one that Lee herself recognized in a recent New York Times profile, quipping, “Now I gotta worry about Mariah… Get outta here, girl!” (She also added: “Oh, there’s room for everybody. Her song’s good, too. I love her singing.”)
IN THE MIX
Jack Harlow, “Lovin on Me” (Generation Now/Atlantic): Back in the secular music world, the reigning Hot 100 topper should still be a force to be reckoned with. Harlow’s “Lovin on Me,” his third No. 1 on the chart in three years, remains atop both the Spotify Daily Top Songs USA listing and Apple Music’s real time charts, and it also debuts at No. 32 on Billboard’s Radio Songs rankings this week, as it continues to grow on the airwaves, claiming top Airplay Gainer status on the Dec. 2 Hot 100. It may soon be buried under the holiday music avalanche, but Harlow and “Lovin” won’t hand over the reins to the chart without at least a bit of a fight.
Wham!, “Last Christmas” (Epic/Columbia): It’s not quite as exciting as the Mariah/Brenda showdown, but there’s also a race for No. 3 on the Holiday 100. That’s between Bobby Helms’ country-rock classic “Jingle Bell Rock,” which has been the annual No. 3 on the holiday Hot 100 since the 2019-20 season, and Wham!’s synth-pop staple “Last Christmas.” Wham! has creeped closer to the Big Three each year since singer-songwriter George Michael‘s death in 2016, hitting a new peak last year of No. 4 on the Hot 100. This year, it’s nipping at the heels of “Jingle Bell Rock” — they’re Nos. 13 and No. 12 on this week’s Hot 100, respectively — as it narrowly trails Helms’ hit in streams, and also follows in airplay, while leading it in sales, so far this tracking week.
For artists who choose not to sign with a record label, some may be independent and others will be do-it-yourself independent.
What’s the difference? Take Laufey, the Icelandic jazz artist whose latest album, Bewitched, reached No. 23 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in September. Laufey is signed to AWAL, the Sony Music-owned company that provides marketing and distribution services for independent artists. She hasn’t signed away the rights to her music, but AWAL helps promote her recordings at digital service providers and retail.
Oliver Anthony Music, on the other hand, is DIY independent. By all appearances, the “Rich Men North of Richmond” singer, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, has left his recordings on autopilot without any kind of marketing behind them since he broke into the national consciousness in August and topped the Hot 100 for two straight weeks. Following the success of “Rich Men,” Lunsford has released more songs without the usual promotional muscle required to get new music noticed. As he told Billboard earlier this week, he manages himself and is avoiding record labels as he prepares to record an album.
He’s clearly getting some help. Lunsford has a basic but professional website and an e-commerce store that sells a handful of variations on Oliver Anthony Music hats, T-shirts, bumper stickers and beer koozies. For concerts, Anthony signed with UTA for representation and has a year of touring ahead of him, starting in February with dates in Europe and the Eastern half of the United States. He has an informal publicist who helps with media requests. And he told Billboard he has encountered “many artists,” such as country star Jamey Johnson, who have lent support and guidance.
Comparing “Rich Men” to other tracks to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 this year, though, suggests being DIY creates some missed opportunities. Combined sales and streams of Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” and SZA’s “Kill Bill” dropped between 17% and 55% over the 10-week period after the last date those tracks were No. 1. “Rich Men,” in contrast, dropped 83.4%. It makes sense: A major label marketing machine is better than an independent artist’s system in helping a track get hot and maintain momentum over months and years.
With a little help, “Rich Men” could arguably have far more sales and streams. As a DIY artist, Lunsford uses social media activity to keep listeners engaged and depends on the continued interest of journalists to keep him in the public eye. As he told Billboard this week, becoming a full-time musician means “you’re essentially a business owner and an entrepreneur and a lot of other things, too. And those are things I’m not quite used to yet.”
But Lunsford has done extremely well taking the DIY route. Billboard estimates that “Rich Men” has grossed $2 million from recorded music and publishing royalties from U.S. sales and streams since its release in August. While his weekly download sales are down sharply from their peak in August, our estimates still put the track’s royalties at an impressive $60,000 per week. And because Oliver Anthony Music is a DIY independent artist who retains the rights to his master recording and publishing, he should be pocketing nearly all that money (less any fees for distribution and publishing administration).
Besides, Lunsford seems content being a DIY artist — even if that means leaving money and celebrity on the table. There’s something to be said about saying “no” to the usual impulses to staff up and scale a business as fast as possible. Lunsford can ease into stardom at a comfortable pace rather than jump headfirst into the music business’ shark-filled waters. Read through the YouTube comments to his videos and you sense that listeners put value in Lunsford not being an industry insider — it adds to his authenticity. At the end of the day, not being too much of a business is probably good for Lunsford’s business.
Surprisingly, “Rich Men” has held up better than a couple of other No. 1s in 2023: Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Jimin’s “Like Crazy.” Track sales and streams for “Try That” dropped 91.1% in the 10 weeks after it was No. 1. For “Like Crazy,” the first No. 1 for a solo member of superstar K-pop group BTS, track sales and streams dropped 92.9% over the same period. Although “Rich Men” has fallen far from its peak, its 83.4% drop in track sales and streams is considerably better than those other two hits.
There are obvious parallels between “Try That” and “Rich Men.” Both reached No. 1 because of widespread media attention. Both started conversations about social issues: race for Aldean, class for Lunsford. Both were celebrated as conservative anthems, although Anthony has distanced himself from political partisanship. Both are country tracks — Aldean’s a mainstream song built for maximum radio play, Lunsford’s a more old-fashioned slice of Appalachian roots music.
What’s more, both “Try That” and “Rich Men” did brisk business in track sales. As Billboard noted when “Rich Men” ascended the chart, artists popular with conservatives often have strong download numbers. In a typical week, the No. 1 track on the Hot 100 might sell 15,000 downloads, but when the culture wars stoke demand, the No. 1 will sell ten times that many. “Try That” sold 175,000 downloads in the week it was No. 1, while “Rich Men” averaged 132,000 weekly downloads in its two weeks atop the Hot 100.
Download buyers don’t offer the same consistency as streamers, though, and both “Rich Men” and “Try That” lost 99% of their track sales in the 10 weeks after they topped the chart. And because download sales were a big reason why those tracks reached No. 1, their total consumption (measured in both download sales and streams) dropped more than No. 1s that relied more on streaming. But heavy download sales were instrumental in getting each track to No. 1, and “Rich Men” still sells well, too: Last week, the track was the No. 41 most purchased track in the United States., according to Luminate.
Lunsford could easily ditch the DIY approach and assemble a team, but he’s in the rare position of not necessarily needing one. “Rich Men” succeeded without help from a marketing expert, social media guru or even a manager. Instead, Lunsford benefitted from an unprecedented groundswell of interest that gifted him an immense online following. His 1.15 million YouTube followers give him a similar audience as more established country musicians Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown Band, and twice as many as Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves. He has about as many Spotify followers as Bailey Zimmerman, a rising country star signed to Warner Music Nashville and Elektra Records.
When Lunsford eventually releases a new album, he won’t need many resources to instantly reach millions of fans — and he prefers it that way. “I think the most special thing about it being on the chart at all,” he told Billboard, “is that it made it to the chart without some big, corporate schmucky schmuck somewhere pumping a bunch of money into making it get there.”