So we all know that the big three / four (Sony BMG, Warner / EMI and Universal) are phenomenally huge companies that have been competing, acquiring and selling each other since day one. But what I thought might be interesting is to do a geeky comparison on some of the different competitive factors to see where exactly each major record label is currently prioritising its efforts.

Search Volume

First of all I thought I would use Google Trends to compare the search volume over the last five years of the four different companies. This shows that EMI are currently the most searched for major record label in Google.

Website Traffic

Just because EMI are receiving the highest number of branded searches in Google does not necasarily mean they are receiving the highest volume of traffic to their website, as many of those searches may lead to other websites about EMI such as newspaper articles. Below are the Alexa rankings for each of the major record labels websites. (the lower the number the higher the traffic). This shows that Universal receive the highest volume of traffic out of the four majors.

• Universal: 44,913
• Sony: 418,456
• EMI: 129,497
• Warner: 94,921

Gross Revenue

Another obvious metric to compare these record labels by is their income. Unfortunately, I could not find figures for net revenue so I have compared gross revenue, this appears to be another win for Universal Music.

• Universal: £6.14 billion
• Emi: £1.46 billion
• Warner:  £3.49 billion
• Sony: £2.3 billion

Market Share

This pie chart shows that Universal Music currently have the largest proportion of market share, at 31.71%.

I think from the data above, it would be fair to assume that overall, Universal Music are the current leaders out of the major record labels, although there are hundreds of metrics that you can compare them against (number of artists, percentage of positive publicity, and more.)

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