14 MusicWeek 20.09.13 BUSINESSANALYSIS A&R IN Q2 2013
Q2 2013 UK A&R PERFORMANCE BY CORPORATE GROUP
A&R market shares are compiled from Top 100 Q2 charts of the biggest- selling non-catalogue singles and artist albums by UK-signed or A&R’d artists. Catalogue covers all retrospectives or studio albums two or more years old when the quarter began
Universal 43.8% SINGLES
sony 22.2% warner 13.7% parlophone label group 1.3% Nettwerk 8.4% ministry of sound 7.2% OtHERS 3.5%
ALBUMS Source: Official Charts Company/Music Week research
Universal 36.0% SONY 22.9% warner 14.8%
beggars group 4.9% parlophone label
group 2.5% OTHERS 19.0%
0
Q2 TOP 10 INDIE ALBUM LABELS BASED ON UK SIGNINGS/A&R’D ACTS
XL RECORDINGS 2.9% NETTWERK 4.9%
STYLUS 3.2%
COOKING VINYL 1.5% PIAS RECORDINGS 1.4%
INFECTIOUS 1.0% FIRST INTERNATIONAL 0.7% ROUGH TRADE 0.6%
FOURTH CHORD 0.7% WARP 0.9%
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A&R market shares are compiled from Top 100 Q2 charts of the biggest-selling non-catalogue singles and artist albums by UK- signed or A&R’d artists. Catalogue covers all retrospectives or studio albums two or more years old when the quarter began
Source: Music Week research/Official Charts Company data
and The Voice 2013 finalist Leah McFall’s covers of I Will Survive and Killing Me Softly. Sony’s UK A&R score for singles slipped heavily
between quarters from 36.6% to 22.2%, mainly because of a much quieter release schedule from Syco, which had got out of the blocks quickly in Q1 thanks to the likes of One Direction’s Comic Relief effort One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks). It did, though, enjoy a bit of a pick-up from Epic, which shifted nearly 300,000 copies of Olly Murs’ Dear Darlin’. Warner has one of the big UK breakthrough acts
featuring Ella Eyre. That sold 533,871 copies over the quarter.
Columbia ranked as the fourth top singles label for the second period in a row with its 6.7% share yet again dominated by Calvin Harris, although there were contributions from Tom Odell with Another Love and Hold Me. Ministry of Sound moved back into the Top 10
by taking sixth position with 5.1%, led by nearly 350,000 sales of Duke Dumont’s Need U (100 Percent) featuring A*M*E, while two Island Records labels made the Top 10 – PMR and the Island label itself. PMR contributions were a trio of Disclosure hits led by You & Me with Eliza Doolittle and White Noise featuring AlunaGeorge who alone also provided Island with its top UK- sourced track Attracting Flies. Universal’s control of the period’s 100 top UK-
sourced singles was almost identical to what it managed in Q1 with a 43.8% share compared to 43.6% last time. Its Q2 tally was greater than the combined efforts of Sony (22.2%), Warner (13.7%) and Parlophone Label Group (1.3%) and was reflected by Virgin EMI (16.9%) and Island Records (15.2%) finishing as the top two singles record companies for UK A&R. Universal-owned Polydor and UMTV were also
among the Top 10 companies, in ninth and 10th places respectively, with Polydor’s UK A&R highlights including The Saturdays’ first ever singles chart-topper, What About Now featuring Sean Paul. UMTV’s score took in the likes of the 3 Beat/All Around The World single Antenna by Fuse ODG
ABOVE Long Way Down: Tom Odell gave Columbia a No.1 album with his debut release
of the year with Rudimental and the group’s second singles chart-topper Waiting All Night was the main reason the major’s A&R market share raced from 7.3% in Q1 to 13.7% three months later. However, the addition to its score of Parlophone Label Group, which it took ownership of at the beginning of July, would have made little difference as PLG claimed just a 1.3% share through a trio of Gabrielle Aplin hits.
INDEPENDENT FOCUS
Passenger single-handedly transformed Nettwerk into one of the leading independents in Q2 after scoring the sector’s biggest-selling track and album. Until the release of the Brighton singer-
songwriter’s All The Little Lights no album by the Vancouver-founded company had sold more than 40,000 copies in the UK, while prior to Let Her Go its all-time top single in the market had shifted around 250,000 units. However, during the last quarter Passenger
delivered some extraordinary numbers for Nettwerk with Let Her Go shifting 604,700 copies across the three months, according to the Official Charts Company, and its parent album attracted 138,017 buyers. Both releases also made a considerable
contribution to the independent sector becoming the second biggest source of current album sales by UK-signed or A&R’d acts. Nettwerk contributed around a fifth of the sector’s 23.9% share, which is based on sales of the quarter’s 100 biggest-selling UK-sourced artist albums, excluding greatest hits titles and studio sets more than two years old when the period began. Nettwerk made an even bigger contribution to the independent A&R showing on singles between April and June with its 8.4% share – made up entirely of Let Her Go – getting on for half of the overall indie total of 19.1%. Similarly with albums, this is calculated from sales of the 100 biggest-
Q2 2013 CURRENT UK-SOURCED SINGLES TOP 10 POS ARTIST/ TITLE / LABEL 1 PASSENGER Let Her Go Nettwerk 2 NAUGHTY BOY FEAT. SAM SMITH La La La Virgin 3 RUDIMENTAL FEAT. ELLA EYRE Waiting All Night Asylum 4 DUKE DUMONT FEAT A*M*E NEED YOU 100% Ministry of Sound 5 CALVIN HARRIS FT. ELLIE G I Need Your Love Columbia 6 OLLY MURS Dear Darlin’ Epic 7 BASTILLE Pompeii Virgin 8 JESSIE J FT. BIG SEAN & DIZZEE RASCAL Wild Lava/Republic 9 THE SATURDAYS FEAT. SEAN PAUL What About Us Polydor 10 DISCLOSURE FEAT. ELIZA DOOLITTLE You & Me PMR
Q2 2013 TOP 10 SINGLES LABELS BASED ON UK SIGNINGS/A&R’D ACTS
VIRGIN 15.3%
NETTWERK 8.4% ASYLUM 8.2%
COLUMBIA 6.7% SYCO 6.0%
MINISTRY OF SOUND 5.1% PMR 4.9%
EPIC 5.3% POLYDOR 4.5% 0
ISLAND 3.5% 5
101520
Q2 2013 TOP 10 SINGLES RECORD COMPANIES BASED ON UK SIGNINGS/A&R’D ACTS VIRGIN EMI 16.9%
ISLAND 15.2% ATLANTIC 10.2% RCA 8.4% NETTWERK 8.4%
MINISTRY OF SOUND 7.2% COLUMBIA 6.7%
EPIC 7.1% POLYDOR 6.4% UMTV 5.3% 0 5 101520
selling non-catalogue singles of the quarter by UK- signed or A&R’d acts. A good chunk of the rest of the indie’s A&R singles score belonged to Ministry of Sound (7.2%) with successes including Duke Dumont featuring A*M*E’s Need U (100 Percent) and hits by DJ Fresh and Wretch 32. It meant between them Nettwerk and MoS made up more than 80% of the independent A&R share on singles, once again demonstrating how difficult it is for non-major labels to penetrate the top end of the singles market. But it is becoming increasingly a different story
on albums where a number of labels made the independent sector the second biggest domestic A&R source behind Universal. And most encouragingly perhaps for the independents it is not just the traditional non-major powerhouses that are helping to deliver this improving situation. One big new addition is Ignition, long a leading
artist management name with most famously Oasis, but now an increasingly important UK recorded music source, too. While principal Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher was an obvious starting point with his High Flying Birds solo album, Ignition has since scored a series of further album hits, most successfully Stereophonics’ Graffiti On The Train on the band’s own Stylus label. Primal Scream’s Q2-issued album More Light
on their First International label also came out via Ignition and was followed in Q3 by Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie’s latest solo release.
www.musicweek.com
Source: Official Charts Company/Music Week research
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