Tuesday, Sep 27, 2022 • 13min
Where are all the Kate Bush T-shirts?
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Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
https://www.volymusic.com/
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According to Spotify, Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was officially https://www.today.com/popculture/music/top-songs-of-summer-spotify-2022-rcna45538 its biggest 'Song Of The Summer' in the United States. In the three months from the end of May to the end of August, it racked up more streams in the States than even Harry Styles' As It Was (the biggest track https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/spotify-2022-song-of-the-summer-harry-styles-kate-bush globally in the period). Over in the UK, Running Up That Hill was also crowned 'Song Of The Summer' by the Official Charts Company, which said it was streamed and downloaded https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-62799443 more than any other track during the season. But now we're in autumn, the music industry seems to have failed to meaningfully capitalize on Kate Bush's resurgence, suggests Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide on MBW's latest Talking Trends podcast. Could basic economics be the reason behind for this inability to keep the commercial fires of Kate Bush's re-ignited brand burning? The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music https://www.volymusic.com/
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Tim Ingham
00:32
Where are all the
Kate Bush
t shirts? My name is Tim Ingham, the founder of Music Business Worldwide. And welcome to the Talking Trends podcasts, supported by our friends at Volley Music, where we dive behind the headlines to look at what's really going on in today's music industry.Share
00:52
So over the past few weeks I've done a bit of traveling for business, including spending some time in Berlin and new york and obviously enough in
London
and in each of these cities, I've noticed something that all young people seem to have in common. I haven't seen a single one of them wearing a Cape Bush t shirt.Share
01:14
And when you think about it, this is a bit of a surprise Because following that sink in
Stranger Things
, which premiered on May 27. Yes, the months are flying by Kate Bush
is running up that Hill spent the next three months basically laying waste to streaming charts According to chart metric data on Spotify.Share
01:33
Running up that
Hill
has secured 360.3 million plays in the past three months. That's obviously around 120 million plays per month. The same trend can be seen on Tiktok, where videos featuring the track have now been played a phenomenal 11.9 billion times. Again, that's according to chart metric data.Share
01:55
So enduring was running up that Hill success following the
Stranger Things
sink. Spotify officially crowned it as its song of the summer in the United States
, meaning it was the biggest song on the platform in the biggest market in the world in the three months to the end of August.Share
02:11
So running up that Hill, enduring success is not in doubt. As expected, there has been a decay curve in the tracks popularity on streaming services as
Stranger Things
placed at the center of the zeitgeist has inevitably waned. Yet running up that Hill
is still pulling in comfortably over two million plays a day on Spotify globally.Share
02:30
But what's weird about running up that
Hill
, soaring performance this summer is that it doesn't seem to have translated into any significant re ignition of interest in Kate Bush's
catalog or indeed in the mythology surrounding one of the most iconic and fascinating artists of the past few decades.Share
02:50
That idea isn't just proven by my anecdotal report of gawping at the T shirts that teenagers are wearing in major cities. There's a really interesting piece in The Guardian this week by Alexis Petraeus, in which he questions how our modern media diet most particularly Tiktok is affecting not only the discuss of new artists but of fandom itself.
Share
03:12
And what really caught my eye in this piece is where Petraeus notes that running up that Hill quote was a huge hit, but the rest of
Kate Bush's
over went largely unexplored by the people who listened to its close quote. He cites the fact that other than a brief appearance in the top 20 of the Billboard
200 for hounds of love.Share
03:31
That's the album that spawned running up that
Hill
and was pushed up the Billboard
chart by running up that Hill
success. There hasn't really been any kind of notable follow up success for Kate Bush
from her Stranger Things
inspired moment.Share
03:44
The stat that underlines all of this, is that Weathering Heights,
Kate Bush's
next most popular track on Spotify currently has 550 million fewer plays than running up that Hill
, half a billion fewer plays. And I'm starting to wonder is it that Kate Bush's
over, I'm going to be able to pronounce that word properly one day does doesn't have the mainstream legs of her biggest hit.Share
04:09
Is it that you simply cannot follow running up that Hill? Or is it in fact something more basic and economic? Is this what happens when
Kate Bush's
record company isn't getting enough of a commercial taste from her modern day success to throw the full weight of its marketing machine behind her brand.Share
04:29
So if you remember back in May or June when the running up that
Hill
phenomenon was starting to kick off Music Business Worldwide, ran a piece highlighting the fact that Kate Bush
actually fully owned her recorded music copyright for that track, and for her catalog, that catalog continues to be distributed by Warner Music Group, but on a distribution agreement basis for which it expects she's sharing perhaps a 15 15% commission on revenue with that record company.Share
04:58
It's possibly even a smaller number than that. If we're just talking about streaming royalties, remember running up that
Hill
did an average this summer of around 120 million streams per month globally. On Spotify, rough industry estimations suggest that would be worth somewhere close to around half a million dollars per month in collected recorded music royalties.Share
05:19
Let's then factor in the fact that Spotify has a market share of around a third of all music subs options globally. While accepting that
Kate Bush
and Stranger Things
, popularity will differ in various regions worldwide.Share
05:31
This is just the science bit, but basically, to get a very rough total audio streaming income tally for running up that
Hill
, it's probably fair to double the figure we're guessing it got from Spotify and that brings us out at a million dollars per month. That's a useful round figure. Now put yourself in Warner Music Group's shoes, you're getting a 15% cut of that million dollars a month.Share
05:53
That's $150,000 per month. But you're also paying out 85% of the money you're collecting from that song back out to the artist. Now, on the one hand, this is a great story for the emancipation of major label artists narrative
Kate Bush
owns her rights and she's leapfrog to the top of the global music streaming charts for a sustained period.Share
06:16
But it's what comes after that moment that suggests something is askew here because it could be argued that for the purposes of maximizing the return on this extraordinary pop culture moment and of maximizing and I guess elongating the interest in
Kate Bush
and her legacy, some blockbuster marketing was required from her record company.Share
06:37
In my view, in the wake of running up that Hill's second coming
Kate Bush's
catalog should have been pushed to streaming and to radio and direct to consumers in the same way that if a lizzo or harry styles was having a ginormous global streaming hit, their record company would be taking a huge swing at making sure that it wasn't the only hit from their current record.Share
06:58
And in that sense, perhaps Warner music group and the artist in this case weren't particularly very well aligned If
Kate Bush
is on a 15% distribution agreement.Share
07:11
And that's my guess, to be clear, it would obviously be commercially more prosperous for
Warner
to put its marketing dollars towards an artist with whom it had a 50% or 60% or 70% royalty share, especially if Warner
owned that recorded copyright and this is where the rubber meets the road because the Stranger Things
phenomenon has shown that any independent artist, particularly one with a proven hit from decades ago, can with the right sink or maybe the right Tiktok moment suddenly find themselves with hundreds of millions of streams and a global modern day certified smash hit.Share
07:47
And in this example I think the record company can take relatively little credit for that. Presumably Warner took the phone call from netflix or the
Stranger Things
music supervisor and said yes please and it's been collecting, it's 15% commission or whatever share it might be getting ever since. And that's easy money for Warner music group.Share
08:06
But I wonder if this low distribution margin ultimately dissuaded
Warner
from pumping more marketing dollars into Kate Bush's
next most popular track or Kate Bush's
potential biopic or Kate Bush's
fully re massive concert series etcetera etcetera, etcetera, millions of teenagers just discovered for the very first time Kate Bush
, this colossal, iconic, incredibly creative and mysterious artist and then arguably after snatching this hugely valuable captive audience of potential hardcore fans, they've just been allowed to be distracted back to whatever modern ephemera catches their eye.Share
08:44
And you can see this in the data when you research the worldwide google search trends for
Kate Bush's
name, There is this huge spike, as you'd expect in interest from the May 27 Stranger Things
moment onwards for the next week or two and then interest really begins to drop off.Share
09:02
I suggest it represents something of an industry failing that. By early September interest in the search term
Kate Bush
was nearly back down to what it was before the Stranger Things
moment exploded around the world.Share
09:16
I don't want to be misconstrued here. I'm certainly not saying that Warner deserved a bigger margin on
Kate Bush's
biggest record in 2022. After all, she wrote and produced and made and sung. And as far as I'm concerned, rightly owns the rights to that record. But has there been a breakdown in the incentive for her recorded music partner to make the most of an absolutely extraordinary moment in pop culture here?Share
09:40
Yes, I think there has been Is there another way this could have gone down? Yes, I think there is. And I think it's an interesting model when you think about the major music companies working with established superstar artists who also happen to own their rights in the future. That model is
Taylor Swift
and Universal Music group.Share
10:00
Now, the outgoing ceo of
Warner
music group of Warner
music group, Steve Cooper recently criticized this business relationship, suggesting that Taylor Swift
had a quote skinny, skinny distribution deal close quote with Universal
And in Steve Cooper's
view, he struggled to understand how it could be commercially prosperous and I think taken alone just as a sort of slice of the relationship alone, he might have a point there, Taylor Swift
owns her recent masters that are distributed by Universal and Republic for a small margin, especially when it comes to streaming in the United States
.Share
10:35
In that sense,
Taylor Swift
and Universal's
distribution relationship actually has direct parallels to the Cape Bush scenario that I've mapped out here.Share
10:43
But what was missing in
Steve Cooper's
description of the Taylor Swift
deal is that for the past few years, Universal Music group has followed up that distribution agreement by also signing a global Music Publishing administration deal and a multi territory merchandise agreement with Taylor Swift
. And what that means is if Taylor Swift
has a Stranger Things
moment are running up that Hill moment.Share
11:07
Even though
Taylor Swift
owns her copyrights, Universal
is economically incentivized to spend money to keep the momentum of that moment going.Share
11:17
Yes,
Universal
is taking a relatively small margin of Taylor Swift's business, but in fact, it's doing so in multiple Taylor Swift
businesses, it's getting a small piece of a bigger pie. Universal
doesn't need as big a margin in her recorded music. If it can pick up a portion of her merch and her publishing.Share
11:37
And the dream presumably for
Universal
is also to be in Taylor Swift
so called name and likeness business, that would give g a slice of any Taylor Swift
stage show or biopic that May come to pass, but this is the idea a global service company operating across multiple lines of a superstar's business.Share
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