Stock Spotlight: Universal Music
FILMED IN OCTOBER 2025
With consumers spending about half of what they used to on music before the advent of streaming, Artisan sees strong potential for Universal Music Group to recapture lost value through pricing power and subscriber growth.
Dan O'Keefe (00:14): So Universal Music Group is the largest producer and distributor of musical content in the world. Last year, they had nine of the 10 best-selling artists in the world in their roster. And the real attraction of this company is that music as a service to consumers is fundamentally under-priced. (00:32): So consumers are spending today, in inflation-adjusted terms, about half of what they spent before the internet disrupted the music distribution model when people used to buy records and tapes and CDs. (00:45) And so we think there's a significant opportunity for Universal Music and its customers, who are the streamers: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc., to significantly increase price and recapture some of that 50% of the value that's been left on the table over the last 20 or so years. (01:03): So Universal believes that as a result of this latent pricing power, as well as still a large number of people who do not subscribe to music streaming services, that they can grow their revenue eight to 10% per year. We actually think that that's conservative, given the latent pricing power. We think there's significant premiumization and product segmentation opportunities that the company has, and we think they can actually do better than that. (1:29) But we're paying essentially 20 times earnings for a dominant business in a growing, attractive industry where we see years of strong growth. And we think that's very attractive in today's marketplace.