The Mouse Takes More Cheese
Disney is the big gainer in Q1 market share
WE DON’T TALK about Bruno, but Disney is giving the music business something to talk about: its impressive gains in market share. As 2022 got underway, the soundtrack to the Disney film Encanto was the biggest album of the first quarter. The Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned collection of songs is the first album to pass 1 million equivalent album units year to date in 2022, according to Luminate, formerly MRC Data, and its success has boosted Disney Music Group into the top 10 of overall U.S. market share rankings for the first quarter, the most significant of several moves atop the rankings, year over year.
Interscope Geffen A&M maintained its spot atop the rankings for the first quarter, coming in at 9.76% and fending off a charge from No. 2 Atlantic, which closed the gap with a 9.49% share, up from 9.22% in the same period last year. They are the clear front-runners of 2022 to date, as 11 of the top 12 labels ceded some measure of overall market share points over the same period in 2021, while several other companies — most notably 300 Entertainment, Alamo Records and Disney — surged to big starts in 2022.
Those boosts weren’t enough to upend the established order, though. The same labels that ranked in the top nine in first-quarter 2021 remain, albeit in a slightly different
order. Republic Records held on to its third-place position at 7.91%, down from the 8.51% it held in first-quarter 2021, when Morgan Wallen’s Big Loud/ Republic album Dangerous:
The Double Album dominated. (Dangerous has staying power: It is the third-biggest album of 2022 so far, at slightly more than one-third of the 1.4 million equivalent album units in the same period last year; Republic has five of the top 10 albums this year to date.) Columbia Records (which includes indie distributor RED) and Warner Records (which includes catalog label Rhino, Warner Music Latina and the bulk of Warner Nashville) climbed to fourth and fifth, respectively, with market shares of 6.69% (from 6.79%) and 6.06% (from 6.32%). Meanwhile, Capitol Music Group slipped to sixth with 5.91%, down from the 6.98% that put it in the No. 4 spot in the first quarter of 2021.
RCA (4.92%), Epic (2.44%) and Def Jam Recordings
(2.22%) retained their spots from last year (in seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively), each down very slightly percentagewise. The success of the Encanto soundtrack, which ruled the Billboard 200 for eight weeks, boosted Disney Music Group’s market share from 0.49% in first-quarter 2021 to 1.96% this year, to round out the top 10.