Sony’s global music copyright business surpassed a significant financial milestone in the calendar year of 2024, according to MBW calculations.
The company’s combined global recorded music and music publishing businesses generated USD $10.30 billion over the 12 months of January-December last year.
That was up by 10.6% YoY – or by $984 million – on the equivalent figure from 2023. It was the first-ever time that the annual number has topped $10 billion.
MBW has calculated Sony’s global music rights turnover across recent calendar years by converting each quarter’s reported music results – in Japanese Yen – to US Dollars at the prevailing quarterly exchange rate, as provided by Sony Group Corp.
In this calculation, we have included Sony’s global recorded music and music publishing businesses but omitted turnover from the firm’s ‘Visual Media & Platform’ division. (VM&P sits within Sony’s corporate global Music division but houses mobile games and animation projects.)
In doing so, we have created an annual picture of Sony’s results in music that is broadly like-for-like, operationally speaking, to those of Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group.
(Sony’s ‘ancillary’ music rights businesses – including music merchandising and licensing – sit within its reported ‘Recorded Music’ revenues, as represented in the chart below.)
Sony’s global Recorded Music operation generated $7.88 billion in calendar 2024, according to MBW’s calculation; the firm’s global Music Publishing division, led by Sony Music Publishing, generated $2.42 billion.
Substantial acquisitions at Sony will have driven at least some of the firm’s impressive growth in music over the past few years.
As MBW has previously noted, Sony Music Group – led by Chairman, Rob Stringer – has splashed more than $6 billion on acquisitions over the past decade.
Sony has financed these deals both directly and through partnerships with companies like Apollo and Eldridge Industries.
The biggest-money buys in Sony’s recent history include three acquisitions from the past 18 months: a comprehensive Queen rights catalog (estimated to have cost $1.2 billion), Pink Floyd’s recordings catalog (~$400 million), and 50% of Michael Jackson’s rights catalog ($600-$750m).
Sony, via Stringer, has also splashed nine-figure sums on the likes of AWAL ($430m in 2022) and Brazil’s Som Livre ($255m, also in 2022), while further acquiring stakes in companies such as Rimas Entertainment.
Other key deals over the past decade include the full acquisition of Sony/ATV (2016) and The Orchard (2015).
Of all the large-scale acquisitions sealed by Sony in music, one stands alone: the $2.6 billion buyout of the 70% in EMI Music Publishing (EMP) that Sony didn’t already own.
(Sony, which initially bought 30% of EMP in 2012, spent $2.3 billion on Mubadala’s 60% stake and a further $300 million on the 10% owned by the Jackson estate in 2018; Stringer and his executive team at Sony Music Group championed both deals.)
Sony’s EMP acquisition, finalized in November 2018, was highlighted today (February 13) as the greatest acquisition made by the firm during Kenichiro Yoshida’s tenure as the Japanese giant’s CEO.
Yoshida became CEO of Sony Corp in early 2018. As of April 1 this year, he will relinquish the role and be succeeded by Sony Group Corp’s current CFO/COO, Hiroki Totoki.
Yoshida will remain Chairman of Sony Group Corp, however.
Speaking to investors on an earnings call today, Yoshida said: “The most impressive investment for me [of Yoshida’s tenure] or for Sony’s management was the 2018 acquisition of EMI Music Publishing.”
Yoshida noted that Sony invested around $4 billion across all transactions to fully acquire EMP. He credited Hiroki Totoki with “mostly” handling the negotiation, presumably with Mubadala, to close the EMP buy.
“Music was the original starting point for the Sony company,” added Yoshida. “The name Sony comes from the Latin word ‘sonus’… [Sony then developed] the sound and tape recorder, and Walkman and CD… the EMI Music Publishing acquisition was like M&A based upon our origin.”
Other major Sony Group Corp acquisitions under Yoshida’s leadership have included video games developer Insomniac Games (for $229 million in 2019), digital TV provider Crunchyroll (for $1.175 billion in 2021), and video game marker Bungie for $3.7 billion in 2022.
As MBW reported earlier today, Sony’s global music rights operation generated USD $2.7 billion in calendar Q4 2024.
That figure was up 7.1% year-on-year (on the figure Sony reported in calendar Q4 2023) at US dollar-converted constant currency.Music Business Worldwide