As the third quarter of 2024 comes to a close, a familiar label is atop the current market share standings: Republic, which for the second straight quarter maintains a market share north of 15%, a remarkable achievement.
But while the story of Republic’s second quarter was the dominance of Taylor Swift — whose Tortured Poets Department remains far and away the biggest album of the year so far, more than doubling the second-placed title and still going strong — the story of its third quarter is the huge surge of Island Records, which is included under Republic’s market share alongside Mercury Records, Big Loud Records, Cash Money and indie distributor Imperial.
Buoyed by the breakout successes of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, Island posted a 3.81% current share (defined as released within the past 18 months) for the three months between June 27 and Sept. 26. If Island were broken out on its own, that would have been good for seventh among all labels for that period, which boosted its nine-month current market share to 2.15% — about 3.5 times higher than its current market share was through the first nine months of 2023, while that 3.81% mark for the third quarter was 6.5 times higher than for the corresponding three-month period in 2023. (With Carpenter’s Short N Sweet and Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess at Nos. 1 and 2 on the Billboard 200 in this first week of the fourth quarter, that momentum is likely to continue.)
That helped Republic post a 15.21% current market share through the first nine months of the year, itself a huge jump from its industry-leading 12.28% through three quarters of last year. But it wasn’t just Island: Republic itself is still floating on its TTPD high, while Post Malone’s F1-Trillion helped Big Loud and Mercury contribute to Republic’s share, too. And while Republic has receded slightly from the 15.72% it posted at midyear — when it outstripped the entire Warner Music Group — any label putting up a number higher than 15% is enjoying a massive year.
On the other coast, Universal Music Group’s other juggernaut, Interscope Geffen A&M, also saw a huge surge in the third quarter, which boosted its nine-month current share into double digits, as it posted a 10.13% share — up from 9.51% at the midyear mark and the 8.55% it held through the same period last year. The enduring success of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — which will get a Super Bowl-sized bump early next year, too — and Billie Eilish’s still-hot Hit Me Hard And Soft album helped Interscope become the only other label to reach higher than 10%. (Interscope’s share also includes Verve Label Group.)
The success of both Republic and Interscope — the two labels around which UMG reorganized earlier this year — helped parent company Universal improve more than two percentage points in current share over the same period last year, jumping from 34.61% through nine months in 2023 to 36.65% this year. That gain has come at the expense of the other two majors, which slipped a bit year over year: Sony Music Group dipped from 27.50% through the first nine months of 2023 to 25.89% through the first three quarters of 2024; while Warner Music Group dropped from 17.46% last year to 16.25% this year for the same period, though the latter recovered enough from its 15.68% mark at midyear to climb back above Republic Records.
Year over year, the indie sector by distribution ownership also grew, up to a 21.21% current share through the first nine month of this year, as opposed to 20.43% during the same period last year, a significant uptick; the biggest song of the year so far, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” was released by indie EMPIRE. (EMPIRE does not report its market share to Luminate, so its individual share cannot be broken out.) By label ownership, the indie sector remains the biggest segment of the business, racking up a 37.09% current share of the market, though that has come down somewhat from the 39.49% it had through the same period in 2023.
Beyond Republic and Interscope, there is more good news from Warner Records (which includes catalog label Rhino and parts of Warner Nashville), as it stays on the hot streak it has been on for the entirety of 2024. Its 6.54% nine-month mark keeps it in third place once again, a full percentage point above fourth-placed Atlantic (which includes 300 Elektra Entertainment), which posted a 5.51% current mark, better than its first two quarters but still down significantly from its 7.39% mark at the three-quarter period of 2023. (Remarkably, despite coming out of the gate so hot this year, Warner Records hasn’t cooled down: its 6.98% third quarter was its best three-month period of the year.)
In fifth and sixth are a pair of Sony Music labels that move up a spot in the rankings year over year, though both dropped in market share over the same period last year: Columbia Records, which includes some RED labels in its share, posted a 4.41% current mark, a slight uptick from its midyear 4.35% but down from last year’s 4.93% nine-month mark, when it was sixth; and RCA, at 4.30%, a dip from the 4.64% it had nine months into 2023, though it is up from seventh to sixth for this quarter. Capitol Music Group, in seventh place so far this year, posted a 4.04% current share; through nine months of 2023, it was in fourth place, at 6.01%.
Epic Records, with several high-flying hip-hop releases this year from Future, boosts its share from 2.39% three quarters through 2023 to 2.79% through the first three quarters of this year, rising to eighth place; while Sony Nashville (2.10%, down from 2.50%) and Sony Music Latin (2.05%, up from 1.96%), round out the top 10 labels by current share.
Overall market share — which combines all a label’s releases in the marketplace, rather than just those of the past 18 months — rearranges the board slightly, though Republic (10.49%) and Interscope (9.98%) still lead the way, both with slightly improved totals from last year’s period. Atlantic’s vast catalog means that it leapfrogs Warner Records into third, with a 7.66% overall share (down from 8.31% last year), while Warner’s 6.86% — up from 6.63% in 2023 — sees it move from fifth place last year into fourth this year. Capitol and Columbia come in fifth and sixth, though in a virtual tie at 5.87%; Capitol edged out Columbia by three thousandths of a percentage point, essentially a rounding error. RCA (5.03%), Epic (2.75%), Sony Nashville (2.07%) and Universal Music Nashville (1.84%) round out the top 10.
Among the label groups, overall market share remained largely static year over year: UMG and Sony each inched up, to 38.47% and 27.25% respectively year over year, while Warner dipped slightly to 18.42% and the indies, at 15.85%, remained flat. The catalog side is largely the same story: UMG dipped two tenths of a percent year over year, while Sony gained half a point and WMG and the indies were down slightly. Among the individual labels, Interscope took the top catalog slot, jumping above Republic to take a 9.93% share of the market, with Republic’s 8.87% edging out Atlantic’s 8.39%.
