09 November 2015
Newsdesk
Almost half a billion pounds (£497 million) was invested by UK record labels and music publishers in writing and producing new music, signing and developing artists and songwriters, and promoting records, according to figures for 2014 released today by leading music organisations, BPI and the Music Publishers Association.
British record labels invested an impressive £178 million in A&R in 2014 – equivalent to a quarter (25.4 per cent) of their annual revenues – while a further £157.4 million supported label marketing and promotion (22.5 per cent of label revenues). This combined label outlay of over £335 million means that last year just under half of record label revenues (47.9 per cent) went into signing, developing and marketing artists. Such investment helps to break new artists and has helped build the international careers of award-nominated acts such as Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Alt J and Royal Blood. The £178 million A&R figure represents a 19 per cent increase on the £149 million outlay in 2013, and is the highest level of Artist and Repertoire (A&R)1 investment as a proportion of revenues since records began in 1992.
A similar industry survey by the MPA reveals that its members invested £162 million in the careers of songwriters and composers last year. As a result of such sustained investment, the UK music publishing sector generated revenues of over £400 million in 2014.
This means a total of £497 million was invested collectively by these two sectors in discovering, nurturing, developing and promoting music talent – helping to fuel a global boom in British music which, as evidenced by the recent UK Music report Measuring Music, contributed a total of £4.1 billion to the UK economy in 2014. http://www.ukmusic.org/assets/general/Measuring_Music_2015.pd
New artist signings reach a 5-year high in the UK: At such an exciting time for British music, major record labels have increased the number of artists being signed. The number of new artist deals signed by Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music according to the BPI topped 156 in 2014 – up 30 per cent on the 120 signed in 2013 and the highest annual total since 2009, when 164 new deals were signed.
Music publishers drive UK music exports: Meanwhile, music publishers can claim to be responsible for one quarter of the UK music industry's £2.1bn exports in 2014, contributing £519 million of the sector’s total. This is borne out by earlier MPA research that revealed British songwriters and composers contributed to more than 1 in 3 of Billboard's Year End 100 US albums for 2014, including those by Taylor Swift, Eminem, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson – the third year in succession this threshold has been crossed.
R&D investment in British music outstrips other leading industries: The A&R investment by UK record labels, when taken as a percentage of their revenues (25.4 per cent in 2014), is significantly greater than the proportion of revenues spent by other leading industry sectors on their product research and development. As a comparator, the European Commission’s EU R&D Scorecard shows that Biotechnology (17.4 per cent), Software (14.8 per cent), Pharmaceuticals (13.2 per cent) and Automotive (5.4 per cent) industries all invested less as a proportion of their sales in Europe than the recorded music sector did in the UK.
