MPs and Music Industry trade bodies criticise the pay of Universal Music boss Sir Lucian Grainge after it is revealed that he is due to earn more this year than all UK songwriters put together did from streaming and sales in 2019.
Grainge’s pay this year is buoyed by one-off cash bonuses that total an estimated £123m, following UMG’s successful stock market flotation in September, and the sale of an additional 10% stake of UMG to Chinese company Tencent.
They could push his total earnings for 2021 over £150m, the figure that the Intellectual Property Office, a UK government body, calculated, using average royalty rates, that composers and lyricists earned in 2019 from streaming, downloads and sales in the UK. We don't know if Sir Lucian Grainge maintains a Christmas cards list, but if he does, Musicians' Union general secretary Horace Trubridge won't be on it this year.
"To the best of my knowledge Sir Lucian has never played or written as much as a note of music. No one buys his records or queues for his gigs yet he enjoys rewards and riches beyond the wildest dreams of even our most popular artists and writers," said Trubridge in a statement. "There is no other industry anywhere in the world that would tolerate this gross unfairness and it has to stop now." Hear hear. Via The MU/The Guardian