The music company BMG says organic revenue grew 8.1% in the first half

BMG reported revenue of EUR 444 million for the first half of 2026, up 4.9% year on year, and up 8.1% on an organic basis once acquisitions, disposals and currency movements are taken out. Music Business Worldwide published the figures on 28 August.

The gap between those two numbers is the useful part of the report. Organic growth strips out anything bought or sold during the period along with exchange rate effects, so it measures what the business already owned actually did. A company growing faster organically than in headline terms is one whose reported figure is being held down by disposals or currency rather than propped up by deals.

Publishing carried a visible share of the half. MBW named Jelly Roll and Bruno Mars among BMG's standout publishing clients for the period, two writers whose catalogues have been working hard across streaming and sync.

The larger item in the report is structural rather than financial. BMG's merger with Concord is now expected to close in the third quarter, a revised timetable that would fold two of the biggest independent rights companies in the business into a single entity.

Both halves of that combination have been busy on their own account. BMG has kept buying, including the publishing and recorded rights of Wolfmother frontman Andrew Stockdale, and it broke ranks with much of the industry by signing a global licensing deal with the AI company Suno, terms that were later revised to add download caps and watermarks. Concord, meanwhile, is running the other argument in court, in the lyrics case where Anthropic has moved to have part of the claim dismissed.

Whether the merger actually closes on the revised third-quarter timetable is the thing to watch, since the two companies arrive at the AI question from opposite directions.