As Streaming Growth Levels Off, Warner Music Chief Robert Kyncl Lays Out Plans for Next 10 Years
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music As streaming has returned the music industry to health over the past decade, with year after year of growth, people have not wanted to admit that, since the pandemic, that growth has slowed down significantly.
While we saw double-digit revenue increases for several years in the latter half of the 2010s, the average number of subscriptions through the first six months of 2023 grew just 6% to 95.8 million , compared with a growth of 10% to 90 million for the first half of 2022, according to the RIAA.
To that end, Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl sent an internal memo to the company this morning, laying out his plans for 2024, excerpts from which appear below.
While the points are very general — growing engagement, increasing music’s value via royalty changes and increases in streaming subscription prices, and evolving the company’s internal practices — in practice they show a broader plan to continue the industry’s growth without expecting it to come in the same ways as before. “Throughout the last year, I spent a lot of time with the leadership team – getting under the hood of the company to see how everything works and planning our next steps,” he wrote. “We’re showing that WMG can be the best of both worlds: Music and Technology, Global and Local, Scale and Speed, Data and Instinct, Individual Talent and Collective Impact…Today and Tomorrow.
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