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At Universal Inside, held Wednesday (March 26) at the Tempodrom in Berlin, UMG Central Europe chairman/CEO Frank Briegmann showcased some of the label’s acts, updated attendees on the state of the German music market and offered a glimpse into the company’s future.
After an appearance by the pop act Blumengarten, Briegmann shared some good news about the German business. As streaming growth slows in other regions, Germany still has plenty of headroom, which is why the market grew 7.8% in 2024, surpassing the 2 billion euro mark for the first time. He also made the point that this was good news for artists, who one study showed increased their collective revenue faster than labels between 2010 and 2022.
Briegmann also laid out a plan for growth that relies on UMG’s “artist-centric model” to increase payments to acts that meet certain criteria, as well as the “streaming 2.0” idea that is intended to induce superfans into paying more for subscriptions. The label had an impressive 2024, accounting for five of the year’s top 10 albums, including Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish releases in the top two spots. Briegmann also pointed to the success of UMG’s classical label Deutsche Grammophon, where he is also chairman/CEO, as a particular highlight.
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Much of the potential for growth lies in superfans, Briegmann said, and pointed to the history of UMG’s efforts to identify, track and reach them directly. The latest iteration of that is a new in-house direct-to-consumer operation, SPARKD, which will offer artists a new service to reach consumers with both albums and merchandise sold by UMG’s Bravado, which will be integrated into the label business in Germany. Bravado will continue to do business with both UMG artists and others. The idea is to use existing data to drive more different kinds of business — which would, in turn, generate more data. Already, Briegmann said, Bravado had grown its German merchandise revenue by 50% in the last three years, thanks in large part to its direct-to-consumer business.
Universal Inside is never all business, and as usual, Briegmann introduced some of the label’s artists. He briefly interviewed German pop star Sarah Connor, who spent much of her career singing in English but will soon release the final album of a German-language album trilogy, Freigeistin. Deutsche Grammophon president Clemens Trautmann introduced the label’s star pianist Vikingur Ólafsson, and Gigi Perez played two songs on acoustic guitar.
The event closed with a brief speech from Berlin Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion Joe Chialo about the significance of the Electrola label, after which the German act Roy Bianco & Die Abbrunzati Boys played a few songs, joined for the classic “Ti Amo” by the schlager icon Howard Carpendale.
Though the RIAA has yet to release revenue numbers for recorded music in the U.S. in 2024, early returns from a handful of international markets are in — and they show that digital revenue maintained or gained momentum last year while physical sales slowed from 2023.
In Germany, the world’s fourth-largest recorded music market, total revenue grew 7.8% to 2.38 billion euros ($2.53 billion) in 2024, trade group Bundesverband Musikindustrie announced earlier this week. That was an improvement on the 6.3% gain seen in 2023 and the 6.1% gain in 2022. Notably, audio streaming, which accounted for 78% of total revenue, grew 12.6% to 1.86 billion euros ($1.98 billion), an improvement on the 7.9% gain in 2023 but below the 14.0% spike seen in 2022.
The full year ended with the same momentum Germany established in the first half of 2024. Through June, total revenue was up 7.6% and audio streaming was up 12.7%, while physical sales — which were down 11.9% through June — improved in the second half of the year, leading to a less-drastic 7.4% drop below 2023 revenue.
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On the physical front, Germany’s vinyl sales improved 9.4% to 153 million euros ($163 billion) in 2024, accounting for 6.4% of total revenue — though they cooled a bit from 2023, when sales increased 12.6%. However, CD sales fell 17.1% to 207 million euros ($220 million) last year, a markedly steeper decline than the 5.9% drop seen in 2023.
In Spain, recorded music revenue grew 9.4% to 569 million euros ($606 million), according to Promusicae, the country’s trade association for the record industry. That was down from growth rates of 12.4% and 12.3% in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Audio streaming totaled 376 million euros, up 14.1% year over year, and accounted for 66% of total revenue. But just as in Germany, physical sales plummeted. Total physical sales fell 13.3% to 54 million euros ($57 million), with vinyl sales sinking 4% after jumping 19.4% in 2023. Meanwhile, CD sales dropped 25.4%, a much sharper decline than in 2023 (when they were down 1.3%) and comparable to 2022 (down 29.2%).
The Spanish market slowed considerably in the second half of the year, leading to end-of-year gains that were six to seven percentage points lower than mid-year results. Through June, total revenue was up 16.6%, while the year finished with a smaller 9.4% gain. Digital revenue fell from an 18.8% gain at the mid-year mark to a 12.6% gain at the end of the year, and vinyl sales were up 11.9% in June but finished the year down 4% — a nearly 16-percentage point swing.
In Japan, the world’s second-largest recorded music market, physical audio sales rose 2% to 148.96 billion yen ($985 million), a worse showing than in 2023 (when they were up 8%) and 2022 (up 5%), according to the RIAJ. And physical music video sales fell 21% to 90.5 billion yen ($598 million), which brought the total physical market down 8% from 2023.
The RIAJ has not yet published year-end digital numbers, though total digital revenue was up 5% and streaming revenue was up 7% through the third quarter. Japan is unlike most music markets in that physical formats remain the dominant moneymakers. Through September, streaming revenue accounted for 35% of total revenue while physical sales — mostly audio formats — accounted for the remaining 65%.
In the U.S., another data point arrived Thursday (Feb. 27) when ASCAP announced that revenue increased 5.7% to $1.84 billion in 2024, with domestic royalties up 5.3% to $1.4 billion and foreign receipts growing 6.8% to $483 million.
As for U.S. recorded music numbers, RIAA figures are likely to be released in March, assuming the organization sticks to prior timings of its release. Mid-year RIAA data showed the U.S. market increased 3.9% to $8.69 billion, with paid streaming improving 5.1% to $5.22 billion. Physical revenue rose 12.7% and was driven by a 17% increase in vinyl sales. Year-end numbers should benefit from Spotify’s U.S. price increase in July.
The IFPI’s release of 2024 global figures, with a country-by-country breakdown, will offer a more complete picture of global trend lines and reveal how the U.S. fared against other nations. That report is typically released each March.
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Elon Musk has publicly backed a far-right political party in Germany on X, formerly Twitter, causing alarm to many observers.
Tesla founder Elon Musk is once again causing controversy as he publicly backed the Alternative für Deutschland of Alternative For Germany Party (AfD) in Germany online. The tech billionaire did so by quoting a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday (Dec. 19) by a right-wing German influencer, Naomi Seibt. The original post was a video criticizing the Christian Democrats party leader Frederich Merz and praising the libertarian Argentinian President Javier Millei. Seibt claimed that the German people should listen to Musk and Millei more than Merz, who saw its parliament dissolved earlier this month after a no-confidence vote. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote. He got an immediate response from AfD head Alice Wiedel, who wrote: “Yes! You are perfectly right @elonmusk!”
The AfD is a far-right populist party that has gained support within the past few years, despite being classified as a “suspected extremist party” by Germany’s judiciary. They were called out for a meeting with an admitted Austrian neo-Nazi and had one of its rising leaders fined heavily for using Nazi slogans during campaign stops in the country. Its platform is dedicated to the expulsion of immigrants from Germany and constantly spews anti-Islamic rhetoric. The party has seen heavy support in what once was East Germany, which has experienced prolonged economic struggles.
Musk was called out indirectly by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin at a press conference. “We have freedom of speech here. That also applies to multimillionaires. Freedom of speech also means that you’re able to say things that aren’t right and do not contain good political advice,” Scholz said. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was more pointed in his criticism in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Germany is set to hold elections Feb. 23, 2025. The AfD has nabbed the second position in election polls, but most of the nation’s parties have publicly vowed not to work in coalition with them. Musk’s post is another public foray into influencing another nation’s politics, after his exchanges with members of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party through X. It also comes as the U.S. is looking at a potential government shutdown after his demands of Republican politicians led to the failure of a revised bill in the House of Representatives.
BERLIN — GEMA, the German performing rights organization (PRO), today sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in Munich regional court, alleging that the technology company used without permission lyrics from songs to which GEMA licenses rights. This makes GEMA the first PRO to file such a lawsuit, although it controls some rights that U.S. societies do not. This also seems to be the first case involving only lyrics; the case does not involve recordings. In its announcement, GEMA described the suit as a “model action,” aimed at clarifying copyright law in Germany, and potentially all of Europe.
Since OpenAI offers copyrighted song lyrics in response to prompts, GEMA is alleging that the company trained its software on song lyrics that it has the rights to license, so it is suing the company for violations of the making available and reproduction right. (Making available is a right under European law that in this case is roughly analogous to the right of public performance, or in this case public display. It’s also alleging two infringing reproductions – one to ingest the lyrics for training purposes and another when they are output.) In the U.S., PROs do not control mechanical rights, so they would not have the standing to file such a lawsuit.
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So far, most of the music business lawsuits involving AI companies have been over the ingestion of recordings, although that by definition would also involve the underlying compositions. But OpenAI is already facing a considerable amount of litigation, including a putative class action from authors, a lawsuit from The New York Times, and one each from online publishers and other newspapers. The issue in the U.S. is whether or not copying to train an AI qualifies as a “fair use” exception to copyright law. The record label cases against Suno and Udio will involve the same principle.
European copyright law provides “exceptions and limitations” to copyright, rather than fair use, and the 2019 Copyright Directive allows text and data mining unless rightsholders opt-out. In this case, however, GEMA has opted out for all of the works it licenses. (GEMA does not license the lyrics for all the songs in its repertoire, but the lawsuit involves ones for which it does.) This lawsuit aims to clarify the law, and it has the support of some big German songwriters, as well as their publishers.
“Our members’ songs are not free raw material for generative AI systems providers’ business models,” said GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller in a statement. “Anyone who wants to use these songs must acquire a license and remunerate the authors fairly. We have developed a license model for this. We are taking and will always take legal action against unlicensed use.”
The lawsuit comes as rightsholders around the world are becoming more concerned about how AI will affect the value of their works, as well as how they should be compensated for how it is trained. At the end of September, GEMA presented a licensing model for generative AI software that would compensate songwriters and publishers. It has also sent letters to AI companies stating they must license GEMA works in order to use them.
Since OpenAI both operates servers and makes content available in Germany, it will presumably have to operate according to German law. This seems clearer than the U.S. system, where fair use often involves considerable uncertainty. However, European countries do not offer rightsholders the opportunity to collect damages as high as they can get in the U.S.
A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
Three people were killed and at least four were seriously wounded in a knife attack on Friday at a festival in the western German city of Solingen, police said.
Witnesses alerted police shortly after 9.30 p.m. to an unknown perpetrator having wounded several people with a knife on a central square, the Fronhof. Police said that the perpetrator was on the run, and that they so far had only very thin information on the assailant.
One of the festival organizers, Philipp Müller, appeared on stage and asked festivalgoers to “go calmly; please keep your eyes open, because unfortunately the perpetrator hasn’t been caught.” He said many people had been wounded by “a knifeman.”
At least one helicopter was seen in the air, while many police and emergency vehicles with flashing blue lights were on the road and several streets were closed off.
Mayor Tim Kurzbach said in a Facebook post that “this evening, we in Solingen are all in shock. We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now have dead and wounded to lament.”
“It breaks my heart that an attack on our city happened,” he added.
The local newspaper Solinger Tageblatt quoted Celine Derikartz, its reporter covering the festival, as saying that “the atmosphere is spooky.” She said a party atmosphere had turned to shock within minutes and she saw festivalgoers weeping.
The “Festival of Diversity,” marking the city’s 650th anniversary, began on Friday and was supposed to run through Sunday, with several stages in central streets offering attractions such as live music, cabaret and acrobatics.
Solingen has about 160,000 residents and is located near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf.
Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, recently proposed toughening weapons laws to allow only knives with a blade measuring up to 6 centimeters (nearly 2.4 inches) to be carried in public, rather than the length of 12 centimeters (4.7 inches), which is allowed now.
This story was originally published by the Associated Press.
Christoph Behm has been named the new CEO of Sony Music Germany, Switzerland and Austria (GSA), replacing Patrick Mushatsi-Kareba, who is exiting the company at the end of August.
Berlin-based Behm, who began his career at Sony Music in 2011 and has worked in a number of senior roles for the label over the past decade, including head of streaming and director of digital sales, will report to Daniel Lieberberg, president of Sony Music Continental Europe and Africa.
In a statement announcing Behm’s promotion, Lieberberg said the newly appointed CEO’s “deep understanding of our DSP partners and creativity as a leader will serve him well in his new role.”
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“Christoph has played an important role building and expanding our business across this region during the streaming era,” said Lieberberg. “He has worked closely with our artists to bring their music to new fans in innovative ways and has embraced continuous industry change to create opportunity despite rapidly shifting paradigms and business models.”
Sony Music did not provide any details about Mushatsi-Kareba’s departure from the company. The outgoing CEO has headed Sony Music’s operations in the GSA region since 2018 when he joined the label from Universal Music Germany. Prior to that, Mushatsi-Kareba spent eight years at Apple, where he was responsible for overseeing the tech company’s music business in multiple European markets, including Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland.
Although Sony Music GSA has enjoyed significant commercial success over the past six years, sources with inside knowledge of their relationship tell Billboard that Mushatsi-Kareba and Lieberberg did not always see eye to eye.
Prior to his promotion to CEO, Behm held the role of senior vp of Sony Music GSA’s commercial division, where he oversaw a large team, including the company’s family entertainment business. In the past two years, Behm’s responsibilities grew to also encompass oversight of catalog, sales and streaming departments in the region.
Top-selling frontline Sony artists in the GSA market include Apache 207, Nina Chuba, Rap Larue and Reezy.
“It fills me with pride to now lead the company that I have served in various roles for so many years,” said Behm, who takes up the CEO post on Sept. 1, in a statement. “We are at another exciting time for our industry, and I look forward with great confidence to this next chapter for Sony Music GSA,” he added.
Germany is the world’s fourth-biggest recorded music market in IFPI’s annual rankings behind the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom.
The star’s German residency features a Ferris wheel, fireworks and some performances with a pianist in front of 75,000 fans.
At the end of February, TikTok took down every song in which Universal Music Publishing Group owns a share, a complicated step in the escalating showdown between the two companies that started a month earlier during the week before the Grammy Awards.
We are now in uncharted territory: Never before has a major label used the “nuclear option” to withdraw both recorded music and publishing rights from a platform — an especially dramatic step because it includes any song in which UMG owns even a small share. (By Billboard‘s estimates, it affects over 60% of the most popular TikTok songs in the U.S.) What most people don’t know is that these negotiations might perhaps also be affected by a Feb. 9 decision from the Munich Regional Court about the German implementation of the 2019 European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market — the Urheberrechts-Diensteanbieter-Gesetz (UrhDaG). It will certainly shape future negotiations like this.
The case involved the Berlin-based film distributor Nikita Ventures, which operates YouTube channels and, coincidentally, TikTok. And although it wasn’t covered much by English-language press, it shows that negotiating leverage is gradually shifting from platforms to rights holders. “This verdict,” Matthias Lausen, a founding partner of the Lausen law firm, who represented Nikita told me, “shows that there is no safe harbor in Europe anymore for platforms.”
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In the case, Nikita said that it offered to license its content to TikTok in early 2022, at a cost of three euros per thousand views, an amount based on a published rate from GEMA, the German collecting society. (Licensees often seem to pay less than this.) By summer, TikTok had not responded with a counteroffer, and Nikita said that the content it had asked TikTok to block was available until August. TikTok said in court that it was still negotiating, that its filtering system is compliant with the law and that it responded to takedown notices. The court essentially ruled that TikTok didn’t make a best effort to negotiate, though, and held the company liable for infringement, with damages to be determined, plus required it to provide information about how many times the content in question was accessed, as well as its resulting revenue and profit.
Why does this matter? Until now, the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and laws like it have limited the leverage of rights holders in negotiations. Platforms that make available content uploaded by users have been free to build audiences, and businesses, as long as they have no direct knowledge of infringement and respond promptly to takedown notices filed by copyright holders. This has given platforms what some might call a “Free Ride,” and on a Feb. 28 UMG earnings call chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge said “there must not be free rides for massive global platforms such as TikTok.”
The 2019 European Copyright Directive was intended to address this, and it requires online platforms to make their “best efforts” to license content, as well as block content they haven’t licensed once rights holders have given them the necessary information. But this is the first court decision based on it.
Nothing will change overnight. The scope of this decision is limited, platforms could potentially get around it by better documenting their negotiations with rights holders, and it’s hard to imagine it will have a substantial effect on UMG’s negotiations with TikTok. But it shows that Europe is serious about forcing online platforms to negotiate on an even playing field, which should result in more favorable deals. (Since European countries do not have class-action lawsuits or high statutory damages for copyright infringement, though, this will not lead to a gold rush of litigation.)
Much of that is in the future, and some of these deals will involve platforms that don’t even exist yet. To get a sense of how this might play out, though, imagine a video-based nano-blogging platform that allows schoolchildren to record minute-long covers of pop songs. (I’m making this up, of course, but it’s not the dumbest idea I’ve heard this year.) That platform would have to approach rightsholders about deals early and often, then take serious steps to block the content they ask it to. That means it would have to license content before it got big — not once it’s already too big to fail.
Even now, TikTok needs to make a “best effort” to take down UMG’s publishing catalog. The company took prompt action, so it’s likely to be in the clear there, although it will be interesting to see what happens with recordings that are sped up and slowed down. At a time when songs are sliced and diced by influencers, how elaborate does a best effort have to be? Could we find out in a case that involves this dispute? The odds are against it, but stranger things have happened.
For the past quarter century, rights holders have had a hard time negotiating on an even playing field, which has arguably pushed down the price of content for both online businesses and, through them, for users. That dynamic is changing — slower than rights holders want and faster than platforms prefer — but steadily all the same. It will be hard to measure this, because these big licensing deals by their nature are complicated and intransparent. Finally, though – for good or ill depending on what side you’re
BERLIN — Deutsche Grammophon marked its 125th anniversary in Berlin last night (Dec. 6) at the first of three concerts to celebrate the classical music label’s legacy, as well as its current stars. At the city’s storied Konzerthaus, new signing Joana Mallwitz conducted her orchestra; violinist Bomsori Kim and cellist Kian Soltani performed Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Triple Concerto, and Bruce Liu played the German master’s Choral Fantasy. Liu, one of the label’s rising stars, in 2021 won the International Chopin Competition.
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The Berlin concert will be followed by concerts in Philadelphia and Seoul. The U.S. event, on Dec. 9, will feature María Dueñas, Hélène Grimaud and Moby, who has recently released some work on the label; and in South Korea, on Dec. 15, Vikingur Ólafsson will perform the “Goldberg Variations.”
“To this day, Deutsche Grammophon is home to the biggest classical stars of their time,” said Frank Briegmann, chairman and CEO of Universal Central Europe and Deutsche Grammophon, at a reception before the concert. “It is the guardian of a cultural treasure of incredible proportions.”
Deutsche Grammophon, a cultural institution in the classical music world, is the oldest operating record company. It was founded in 1898 by Emile Berliner, a German Jew who moved to the U.S. and in 1887 patented the “Gramophone,” a technology for recording and reproducing sound by engraving and tracing it with a stylus – initially on a cylinder and then on a flat disc. After licensing the rights to manufacture his invention, he sent his nephew, Joseph Sanders, to open a German subsidiary, which severed its relationship with the parent company in 1914.
In 1941, the company was purchased by Siemens & Halske, a corporate ancestor of today’s Siemens company. Over the next two decades, Deutsche Grammophone became known for its distinctive yellow logo and high-fidelity classical music recordings that were marvels of technology at the time and are still considered iconic today. As its rival recording companies shifted toward pop, Deutsche Grammophone focused on classical, and then also contemporary music. In 1962, Siemens formed a joint venture with the Dutch company Philips to run the company that became PolyGram International – which in 1999 was purchased by what was then the parent company of Universal Music Group and merged with it.
The company’s catalog, reputation and logo still endure, and about a year ago it launched Stage+, a high-fidelity subscription streaming service that includes access to performances on video. The label’s anniversary concerts will be shown on the service.
“Nothing has changed,” said label president Dr. Clemens Trautmann, referring to the company’s record for using the new technology of the time. “And everything has changed.”
Usually, when one says a label dominates an album chart, that means it has most of the top ten — seven, for example, or maybe sometimes eight. This week in Germany, however, UMG has all 10. This seems to be the first time this has happened in Germany, although it is hard to say this […]