Music Stocks
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A raft of equity analysts lowered their price targets for Spotify’s stock following the company’s third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, helping send the music streaming company’s share price down 13.1% to $84.42 on Wednesday (Oct. 26).
KeyBanc dropped its price target from $135 to $125, Barclays lowered its target from $164 to $135 and Raymond James cut its target from $150 to $110. J.P. Morgan analysts, who dropped the price target from $130 to $115, wrote in an investor note they were “encouraged” by fourth-quarter guidance on monthly active users and subscribers — 479 million and 202 million, respectively — but believes investments and foreign exchange will pressure fourth-quarter profitability. Spotify expects this quarter’s 300 million-euros ($303 million) operating loss to include a 95 million-euros ($96 million) negative impact from foreign exchange.
For most of its four-plus years as a public company, Spotify prioritized growth over profit and attracting new users. This year’s emphasis is winning over investors with larger margins while maintaining momentum. In an interview on Spotify’s For the Record podcast released Wednesday, CEO Daniel Ek admitted gross margins were hurt by “advertising [being] a bit softer than we would have liked” but insisted the results were fundamentally on point with the company’s expectations. “We still feel really good about the underlying core trends in the business,” he said. “We feel really good about where we think we’re going to end up over the next one to three years.”
That long-term vision is part of the company’s transition from a music-focused company to one that embraces many forms of audio entertainment. The early results show promise: Spotify users spending more time with the service and its churn rate – the fraction of subscribers that leave in a month – is “the lowest across our competitive set,” said Ek during the earnings call. Podcasting advertising is growing faster than music advertising, and the number of monthly active users that listened to a podcast great “in the substantial double-digits” year-over-year, according to a letter to shareholders.
But investors aren’t showing a great deal of patience — and not just with Spotify’s stock. Numerous tech stocks have fallen this week on less-than-stellar results and guidance. Alphabet’s stock price fell 9.6% after the company’s third-quarter earnings on Tuesday showed that revenue growth slowed to 6% from 41% a year earlier. What’s more, ad revenue at Alphabet’s YouTube, which beat Netflix in U.S. streaming TV viewership in September, according to Nielsen, fell 1.9% year-over-year in the third quarter.
Another bellwether of online advertising, Meta, fell 14.9% in after-hours trading Wednesday. The social media giant’s third-quarter earnings missing expectations on both revenue and earnings per share, according to Bloomberg, and its third-quarter revenue declined 4% from the prior-year period. Three months ago, Meta posted the first year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since going public in 2012.
Since Spotify is primarily a subscription business, it doesn’t face the same threat from advertising weakness as Alphabet or Meta. “Any headwinds in the advertising business for us, it’s just a lot smaller than it is for platforms that solely rely on ads,” Ek said during Tuesday’s earnings call. But advertising is crucial to the company’s podcasting business, an increasingly vital part of its long-term strategy to boost profitability. So far this year, Spotify’s heavy spending on its podcasting business has been a drag on margins. That’s to be expected, however, Ek and chief financial officer Paul Vogel repeatedly said during the earnings call and on the For the Record podcast. Next year, they pledged, podcasting will start to contribute to the bottom line.
Universal Music Group, Hipgnosis Songs Fund and other music stocks got a much-needed boost on Tuesday (Oct. 25) following news of Apple Music’s price hike, as investors bet it would trigger a wave of streaming subscription cost increases.
Universal Music Group’s stock closed 11.6% higher, Hipgnosis Songs Fund Ltd ended up 7.8% and Korean music companies SM Entertainment and HYBE finished the trading day 4.8% and 4.4% higher, respectfully, on Tuesday. On Monday, Apple announced that it was raising the standard U.S. and U.K. individual plan price to $10.99 from $9.99.
This 10% price hike — Apple’s first — comes amid high inflation and a darkening economic environment in many global markets. If Apple can raise prices at a time like this, that is a sign the music industry can charge more without turning off consumers, Wall Street analysts said.
“We see this as a further signal of the stickiness of music streaming subscriptions even in a weaker macro environment and believe the major markets will be able to absorb higher prices without leading to meaningfully higher churn,” Lisa Yang, Goldman Sachs’s head of European media & internet technology equity research, wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.
“We believe that other major DSPs will likely follow suit with similar price increases in the near future, implying further potential upside to our music industry forecasts.”
Competitors Spotify and Amazon Music have already raised prices in some markets. Amazon Music raised the price of its unlimited individual plan for Prime members to $8.99 from $7.99 earlier this year.
Spotify, which will report earnings later Tuesday, raised the cost of its individual plans in the Nordics in 2021, although its standard plan for U.S. subscribers remains at $9.99.
“Despite positive management commentary around churn (with regards to recent price increases on certain plans/regions) as well as management’s views on pricing power over the long term, Spotify has highlighted the broader macro environment as a key consideration in terms of implementing price increases in the near term,” Yang wrote.
Apple’s price increase could also have positive impacts on the majors because companies like UMG and Warner Music Group typically get 65% of music-related revenues from streaming companies with a “high incremental margin,” Goldman estimates.
Music stocks have suffered in 2022 as the major U.S. market indices have fallen around 20% so far this year.
UMG’s share price of 21.10 EUR ($21.01 US) is down nearly 14% year to date, Hipngosis Songs Fund Ltd traded at 91.06 penny sterling ($1.03 US) and is down 28% so far this year. Meanwhile, Warner Music Group’s stock traded at $27.16 US, off almost 37% year to date.