With BMG’s release of mid-year results on Thursday (Aug. 28), the dust settles on the monthlong Q2 earnings season, and the curtain raises on Billboard’s awards show-styled recap of the companies who performed best.
While some companies stumbled through economic headwinds and systemic problems, most delivered strong results and proved that demand for music, in its various forms, remains strong while political and economic landscapes seem increasingly uncertain.
Here are the highlights from the latest earnings results. Check here for a complete rundown of all the music companies’ second quarter results.
Best Revenue Growth Rate, All Companies: JYP Entertainment
K-pop company JYP Entertainment posted a 126% increase in revenue in the second quarter. A record-setting world tour by Stray Kids can take some of the credit, but the gain was so large because the prior-year quarter was unusually weak. Revenue of 215.8 billion KRW was a record high, and the prior year quarter’s revenue of 98.7 billion KRW was the lowest in nearly three years. Runners up: fellow K-pop company SM Entertainment was up 19.3%, Tencent Music Entertainment was up 18% and Live Nation was up 16%. Fellow K-pop companies YG Entertainment and HYBE were up 11.6% and 10.2%, respectively.
Highest Revenue Growth Rate, Digital Service Providers: Tencent Music Entertainment
Despite years of ongoing chatter about superfan music subscription tiers, which upcharge consumers for additional features and perks not available at the basic subscription level, only Tencent Music Entertainment has gone to market with one. TME’s Super VIP subscription plan, which now has over 15 million subscribers, helped the Chinese music streamer’s revenue rise 17% from the prior-year period. (Spotify’s premium revenue was up 12%.) The number of subscribers rose 6.3%, meaning much of the incremental subscription revenue came from the high-priced premium tier. The total number of TME subscribers now sits at 124.4 million, second only to Spotify’s 276 million.
Related
Best Margin Growth: Tencent Music Entertainment and BMG
Music businesses have undergone significant transformations in recent years, cutting costs through layoffs and hiring people with the skills necessary for today’s streaming-dominated, social media-heavy landscape. Leaner operations have led to improved margins; price hikes by Spotify and other streaming services have helped many companies, too. But the pace of layoffs has calmed, and price increases are more sparsely seen than in years past.
Still, a couple companies had standout margin improvement in the last quarter. In the first half of the year, BMG’s EBITDA margin rose to 29% from 26.5% in the prior-year period. (The company does not reveal its gross margin percentage and reports half-year, not quarterly, results.) Tencent Music Entertainment also had a 3.5 percentage point improvement in its gross margin in Q2 — 44.4% versus 40.9% in Q2 2024. Honorable mention goes to Spotify’s gross margin percentage, which rose over two percentage points to 31.5% from 29.2% a year earlier. That was slightly lower than the 31.6% achieved in the first quarter, however, and well below Q4’s 32.2%.
Best Comeback: iHeartMedia
The radio business has been a tough slog in recent years. Companies have worked feverishly to build digital businesses to offset their eroding broadcast advertising revenues. It hasn’t always worked out. In the second quarter, Cumulus Media posted a 9.2% drop in revenue. But iHeartMedia had some bounce in its step. Last quarter, iHeartMedia revenues rose 0.5% to $934 million, beating guidance, while adjusted EBITDA rose 3.9% to $156 million. Investors rewarded iHeartMedia by sending the stock up 24.5% the day earnings were announced. That brought the year-to-date gain to 11.3%, a nifty turnaround for a company whose share price has been in a serious funk for three years. Another radio company, Townsquare Media, gets a nod for meeting its Q2 revenue guidance and exceeding its adjusted EBITDA guidance.
Related
Best Explanation of AI’s Impact: Spotify
Even though companies don’t quantify the exact financial impacts of artificial intelligence, they occasionally use earnings calls to explain the benefits. During Spotify’s Q2 earnings, co-president and chief product officer Gustav Söderström explained to analysts and investors the ways generative AI is helping the company work more effectively and gain insights into users’ experiences. In product development, Spotify uses AI to develop and test prototypes faster. In the user experience, Spotify uses the words spoken by users to effectively create a new data set that’s shaper than “blunt signals” such as song skips, which don’t tell Spotify about the situation — does the person hate the song, or are they tired of a song they like, or was it simply the wrong situation for a beloved song?
“We’re getting a new data set now,” he said, “which is what English sentence goes to this song, and that’s completely new to us, and it’s a very, very valuable data set that we are collecting very quickly.” AI also helps Spotify make better recommendations, which helps keep people listening longer. “User engagement is a critical metric for us, and as we rebuild our stack for the generative AI age and bring personalization to a whole new level, we’re seeing [user engagement] improve significantly,” said Söderström.
