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As some once high-flying streaming stocks limp toward the end of the year, music stocks have fallen far below their all-time high.
Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) dropped 11.0% to $18.93 after the company reported its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday (Nov. 11). TME reported strong growth in online music of 27.2% and music subscriptions of 17.2%. It’s not clear why investors reacted negatively, but it’s possible they have concerns that TME’s margins will suffer as offline (merchandise sales and performances) revenues grow faster than online revenues; as CFO Shirley Hu said during Tuesday’s earnings call, “offline performances and artist-related merchandise sales delivered triple-digit year-on-year revenue growth” in the quarter, adding that those offline revenues have a “lower gross margin.” Another factor was Nomura’s decision on Friday (Nov. 14) to lower its TME price target to $26 from $30 while maintaining its “buy” rating.
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Spotify was one of the week’s few winners, rising 3.1% to $635.81 and recapturing some of the previous week’s 5.9% decline. The stock reached as high as $668.49 on Thursday (Nov. 14) after news reports revealed the company unveiled a new Premium Platinum plan that will take the place of Premium Family in five markets, including India and South Africa.
Among streaming stocks, TME is up 66.2% year to date but has fallen 25.9% over the last 13 weeks. Spotify has gained 58.8% in 2025 but is $150 below its all-time high of $785 set in June. Similarly, Netease Cloud Music is up 64.8% year to date but has lost 30.8% in the last 9 weeks.
The 19-company Billboard Global Music Index (BGMI) fell 0.1% to 2,700.25, marking the eighth consecutive week the index has failed to post a gain; over those eight weeks, the index has dropped 12.9%. Only three of the index’s 19 stocks finished the week in positive territory, while two stocks were unchanged and 14 were in the red.
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StubHub, which is not included in the BGMI, dropped 23.5% to $14.87 after the company’s first quarterly earnings release as a public company on Thursday (Nov. 13). StubHub reported an 8% increase in revenue but declined to provide guidance for the fourth quarter, causing the stock price to fall 21.0% on Friday alone. After the precipitous decline, StubHub is now 36.7% below its $23.50 IPO price.
Warner Music Group (WMG) finished the week in positive territory, rising 0.4% to $30.36. WMG will report results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year on Thursday (Nov. 20).
HYBE dropped 2.6% to 297,500 KRW ($205.24). On Tuesday (Nov. 11), Nomura dropped its price target on HYBE to 354,000 KRW ($TK) from 370,000 KRW ($244.22) and kept its “buy” rating. The week could have been worse: HYBE shares rose 4.5% on Thursday (Nov. 13) on news that the members of girl group NewJeans will return to HYBE imprint ADOR after losing their legal battle to break away from the company. The stock jumped 18% in the week ended Oct. 31 after the court’s ruling.
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Universal Music Group fell 0.8% to 22.30 euros ($25.92). On Thursday, Sadif Investment Analytics trimmed its price target to 28.56 euros ($33.20) from 28.82 euros ($33.50) and lowered its rating to “hold” from “strong buy.”
On the radio front, Cumulus Media fell 28.8% to $0.0085, bringing its year-to-date decline to 88.9%. Cumulus reported earnings on Oct. 31 but could have been dragged down by iHeartMedia, which reported earnings on Monday (Nov. 10) and finished the week down 12.1% to $4.07.
Markets were mixed as investors contemplated an AI bubble and the likelihood of another rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve. In the U.S., the Nasdaq composite index fell 0.5% to 22,900.59 and the S&P 500 rose 0.1% to 6,743.11. In the U.K., the FTSE 100 gained 0.2% to 9,698.37. South Korea’s KOSPI composite index improved 1.5% to 4,011.57, bringing its year-to-date gain to 64.3%. China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.2% to 3,990.49.
On Friday (March 21), secondary ticketing marketplace StubHub filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with the SEC that the company hopes will value it at $16.5 billion.
A pioneer in online ticket re-selling, StubHub had “gross merchandise sales” (GMS) — or the total price customers paid for the transaction and fulfillment — of $8.7 billion in 2024, a 27% increase from 2023. For the year, it sold more than 40 million tickets from more than 1 million unique sellers across 200 countries and territories.
Revenue reached $1.77 billion in 2024, up 29.4% from 2023, while net loss was $2.8 million. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), which strips out non-cash expenses, was $298.7 million, down nearly 16% from $353.9 million in 2023. Long-term debt stands at $2.33 billion — nearly eight times last year’s adjusted EBITDA.
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Proceeds from the IPO will primarily go toward StubHub’s debt, with the remainder going toward general corporate purposes such as working capital, operating expenses and capital expenses. StubHub said it may use a portion of the proceeds for acquisitions or investments in products or technologies.
StubHub believes it is the leader in secondary ticketing, according to its S-1 filing on Friday. The company has also made a foray into primary ticketing, which generated more than $100 million in GMS in 2024. “We believe our value proposition, providing broadened distribution and superior pricing intelligence through an open distribution model, is well-positioned to attract more content rights holders to use our direct issuance solution,” the company stated in the filing.
StubHub does more business than most of its competitors. Vivid Seats had gross transaction value (GTV) of $3.9 billion in 2024 while Eventbrite, a primary ticketing platform, had GTV of $3.2 billion last year. Ticketmaster, which does not break out its primary and secondary ticketing, had GTV of $34.7 billion.
Launched in 2000 by Erik Baker, StubHub was acquired by eBay in 2007. Baker then launched a competing secondary ticketing platform in Europe, Viagogo, which purchased StubHub in 2020. Ahead of the IPO, Baker owns approximately 5% of Class A shares and 100% of Class B shares, leaving him with more than 90% of the voting rights. Other major holders of Class A shares include Madrone Partners (27.1%), WestCap Management (11.0%), Bessemer Venture Partners (9.6%), PointState Capital (5.6%) and Declaration Partners (5.3%).
StubHub is facing a lawsuit from Washington DC’s attorney general over allegations that the ticket resale platform foists “convoluted junk fees” on concertgoers after luring them in with “deceptively low prices.”
In a complaint filed Wednesday, Attorney General Brian Schwalb accuses StubHub of violating the District’s consumer protection laws by using the “drip pricing” — an “exploitative pricing scheme” in which a company requires consumers to pay fees that weren’t advertised in the initial price.
“For years, StubHub has illegally deceived District consumers through its convoluted junk fee scheme,” Schwalb said in a statement announcing the case. “StubHub lures consumers in by advertising a deceptively low price, forces them through a burdensome purchase process, and then finally reveals a total on the checkout page that is vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”
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The “hidden” fees imposed by StubHub total “upwards of 40% of the advertised ticket price,” the lawsuit claims, and DC consumers have allegedly paid $118 million in such fees since 2015.
In a statement, StubHub said the company was “committed to creating a transparent, secure and competitive marketplace” for its customers. “We are disappointed that the DC Attorney General is targeting StubHub when our user experience is consistent with the law, our competitors’ practices and the broader e-commerce sector. We strongly support federal and state solutions that enhance existing laws to empower consumers, such as requiring all-in pricing uniformly across platforms.”
Consumers have complained for years about “convenience” and “service” fees that are tacked onto the price of tickets for concerts and other live events. Laws requiring “all-in pricing” — the full, final cost, presented at the beginning of a sale — have been enacted by New York, California and other states in recent years. A federal bill (Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET, Act) was passed by the House of Representatives in May and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Hidden fees are also a key accusation in the pending antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation filed by the Department of Justice earlier this year. In that case, the DOJ has argued that such fees levied by Ticketmaster on American concertgoers “far exceed” those in other countries.
“Any fan who has logged onto Ticketmaster’s website to buy a concert ticket knows the feeling of shock and frustration as the base cost of the ticket increases dramatically with the addition of fees,” the DOJ wrote in its complaint against Live Nation. “Whatever the name of the fee and however the fees are packaged and collected, they are essentially a ‘Ticketmaster Tax’ that ultimately raise the price fans pay.”
In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Schwalb argues that StubHub imposes those same fees on its customers. Calling it a “a classic bait-and-switch scheme,” the lawsuit claims the final price of a StubHub ticket is only revealed after customers have “invested time and effort clicking through an intentionally long, multi-page purchase process” — which features a countdown clock to “create a false sense of urgency.”
“StubHub designed this unfair and deceptive scheme to make more money,” Schwalb wrote. “By forcing consumers to click through over a dozen pages before they see the real price, StubHub puts consumers in the position of having to choose between either paying those unexpected fees or abandoning the time and effort they have expended.”
In addition to springing such fees at the end of a transaction, the lawsuit also accuses StubHub of choosing deceptive names for them — a claim that echoes longstanding complaints about what vaguely-named ticketing fees imposed by many companies actually cover.
“What StubHub identifies as ‘Fulfillment and Service Fees’ are in fact influenced by factors unrelated to ‘fulfillment’ or ‘service,’” the lawsuit reads. “Furthermore, the fees vary wildly, and StubHub never discloses to the consumer how those fees are calculated or what services these fees fund.”
Read the entire lawsuit against StubHub here:
StubHub must pay more than $16 million in legal damages after a jury decided that the ticketing giant intentionally torpedoed a smaller company’s lucrative concierge partnership with American Express.
Following a month-long trial, a Los Angeles jury on Friday (May 24) sided with Spotlight Ticket Management — a tech startup that had sued over allegations that StubHub failed to pay Spotlight millions in commissions and then used false statements to “poison” the company’s relationship with Amex.
Leading up to the trial, StubHub had argued it paid Spotlight everything that was owed and that the smaller firm had killed its Amex deal itself by being an “unreasonable partner” to the financial giant: “The true cause of Spotlight’s demise was Spotlight itself.”
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But in Friday’s verdict, the jurors found for Spotlight on both issues. They ordered StubHub to pay $3 million over the commissions; $5.3 million over money lost from the terminated Amex partnership; and another $8.1 million that they said Spotlight would have earned from Amex in the future.
StubHub did not immediately return a request for comment. Amex was not named as a defendant in the case or accused of any wrongdoing. In a statement, Spotlight called the verdict “a victory for Spotlight, for affiliate partners more broadly, and for ticket purchasers across the country.”
Launched in 2007, Spotlight offers ticketing management software to help companies provide event access to their employees or customers. One of its major clients was Amex, which used Spotlight as part of its concierge system to buy concert and sports tickets for premium cardholders.
In its lawsuit, Spotlight claimed that it had successfully partnered with StubHub for years, sending as much as $85 million in ticket sales to the company’s platform and receiving a 7% commission on those sales.
But starting in 2016, Spotlight claimed that StubHub began underpaying those commissions. And when the smaller company raised the dispute, it claimed that StubHub retaliated by tanking its relationship with Amex with false and disparaging claims.
“StubHub gave Amex an ‘ultimatum’ that it could not work with Spotlight for these reasons and Amex would lose access to StubHub’s entire ticket inventory, crushing the availability of secondary market tickets to the Amex Concierge program overnight, unless Amex got rid of Spotlight,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a pre-trial briefing.
StubHub sharply disagreed. In its own filings, the company argued that it had paid Spotlight all the commissions that it was actually owed under its affiliate program. And it said that the smaller company had “destroyed its own relationship with Amex” through “erratic behavior.”
“Spotlight has taken a modest dispute about payment of affiliate commissions and morphed it into a conspiratorial web to support its claim for hundreds of millions of dollars,” StubHub’s attorneys wrote. “Amex witnesses have testified that they decided not to renew based on Spotlight’s unreasonable demands and that StubHub had nothing to do with Amex’s decision.”
But following a three-week trial, jurors believed Spotlight’s version of events, finding StubHub liable for breach of contract over the unpaid commissions as well as intentional interference with contract and intentional interference with prospective economic relations over the Amex partnership.
StubHub can appeal the verdict, first by asking the judge to order a new trial and then by taking the case to a California appeals court.
Online ticket resale platform StubHub is considering going public as soon as this summer if it can secure a valuation of more than $16 billion, according to media reports. The Information first reported on Friday (April 12) that StubHub is aiming for a valuation of $16.5 billion, or the valuation it received in 2021 during […]
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