Earlier this week Universal Music Group announced its first-ever share buyback programme, telling investors it would buy back €500 million of its own shares, as the company’s share price hit an all time low.
The major’s new Chief Financial Officer, University Of Birmingham alumnus Matt Ellis, told investors that the buyback is necessary because he sees a “meaningful dislocation in UMG's market valuation”, which is corporate gobbledegook for “our share price is in the bin and we’d quite like it not to be”.
Three weeks earlier, Universal used near-identical language to shelve its planned US stock market listing, citing “uncertainty in the market creating meaningful dislocation in valuations”. It looks like “meaningful dislocation” may become the Universal buzzword for 2026. The big question is what other dislocations - meaningful or otherwise - might be about to make themselves known.
The news of the buyback was a glimmer of hope for depressed investors who had put cash into Universal. But the real story was hidden in the company’s 2025 annual report which was published at the same time.
We read it - all 295 pages of it - and there are a few startling things contained within it, some other notable “meaningful dislocations” that Universal would probably rather people didn’t notice. Today we’re scrutinising three of them - and tomorrow we’ll delve into more.
Universal Music employs more women than men - but the gender pay gap is huge and growing
Universal Music employs 5566 women and 4961 men. So, women make up a slight majority of its workforce. But according to the annual report, the gender pay gap at Universal is a horrific 47.96% - and it has got worse since 2024.
We know that the median employee remuneration is €53,800 - more on that in a moment - which means that if a man is being paid €53,800 then a woman doing the equivalent job might be making just €27,998.
In 2024, Universal’s gender pay gap was slightly better, but still a horrifying 44.68%. In a single year, the gap widened by more than three percentage points, at a company where women outnumber men. The annual report offers no explanation for that deterioration and sets out no targets for how it intends to improve it.
Universal would likely argue that the gap reflects seniority distribution - more men in senior, higher-paid roles - rather than women actually being paid less for equivalent work. That may well be true. But if a company employs more women than men and the pay gap is 48%, the question is why men hold the better-paid jobs in the first place - and that is just a different kind of problem.
The annual report doesn’t break the numbers down by level, so there is no way to verify that, or test a hypothesis. What we do know is that for just the UK - as revealed by the most recently published statutory gender pay gap disclosures that are mandatory for companies in the UK with more than 250 employees - the vast majority of “upper” and “upper middle” positions at Universal UK are held by men - 69% of “upper” positions, and 59% of “upper middle”.
In its annual report Universal says that it is “early in our journey of collecting and analysing information” about the gender pay gap, and because of this the company has “not developed targets relating to pay gap or the annual total remuneration ratio” (on which more in a moment). That’s an extraordinary claim, and - without putting too fine a point on it - absolute bullshit.
In the UK gender pay gap reporting has been mandatory since 2017, and in the Netherlands proposals for mandatory reporting have existed since 2019, with EU wide legislation introduced in 2023 under the European Pay Transparency Directive. In France, gender pay gap reporting became mandatory for most companies in 2019. Universal is a Dutch company, spun out of a French company, with significant operations in the UK.
The gender pay gap in the music industry has been a hot topic for years now. For Universal to claim that it is “early in its journey” collecting gender pay gap information is nonsense - and says a huge amount about how much significance - or not - Universal is giving to this issue internally.
Lucian Grainge makes an astonishing 764 times the average salary of Universal employees - and netted a 12.5% pay rise while the company’s share price collapsed
Alongside its appalling gender pay stats, the annual report also discloses something called the “annual total remuneration ratio” - the gap between the highest-paid individual at Universal and the median employee. In 2025, that ratio was 764.38. In 2024, it was 720.59. Like Universal’s gender pay gap, senior executive pay is also going in the wrong direction.
In the report, Universal helpfully explains the way they calculate the annual remuneration ratio, saying “The annual total remuneration ratio is calculated using the following formula: Annual total remuneration of the highest paid individual divided by the Median employee annual total remuneration (excluding the highest paid individual)”.
The highest-paid individual is - unsurprisingly - Universal’s Chief Executive Lucian Grainge. His total remuneration for 2025 was a whopping €41,144,688 - up from €36,556,092 in 2024, a pay rise of roughly €4.6 million, or 12.5%.
Divide Grainge’s total remuneration of €41,144,688 by 764.38 and that gives us the ‘median employee annual total remuneration’ of €53,827.53. But, actually, that figure is for total remuneration - including any bonuses and other perks - not base salary. Which means that the base salary of the average Universal employee could be considerably lower.
That aside, it’s worth looking a little more closely at exactly what Grainge does to deserve his 764x multiplier over the people who work for him.
Over the period covered by the annual report the company’s share price began its slide downwards, which has resulted in more than €24 billion in shareholder value being destroyed. Despite that, the board gave Grainge a 200% bonus for hitting his “strategic objectives”.
Grainge’s pay breaks down as a base salary of €4.5 million, an annual bonus of €13.3 million and “long term incentives” of €17.9 million. 76% of his pay is classified as “variable”, meaning that it is supposedly tied to performance.
Fortunately for Grainge, that “performance” target is not coupled too closely with the company’s performance on the stock market - that was dealt with separately in his controversial $100 million megabonus.
Lucian’s “strategic objectives” for the year - which netted him his bumper bonus for 2025 - included “securing multi-year agreements with three major global DSP partners” - something you would have assumed was basically a prerequisite for being the CEO of the biggest music rights company in the world, in a market where DSP deals come up for renewal every few years.
Another “strategic objective” achieved was signing “first-of-their-kind agreements with AI platforms Udio and Klay”, which goes a long way towards explaining why “the superfan is the future” has turned into “AI is the future”.
Other objectives highlighted include that Grainge successfully spent some of Universal’s cash on a “strategic investment in and partnership with Stationhead”, and he agreed a partnership with NVIDIA “to use AI to improve music discovery, engagement, and listening”.
Which presumably means signing up to a deal with NVIDIA to develop an AI proof of concept so that NVIDIA can try and sell Universal some of its fancy H200 GPUs.
Nice work if you can get it, and enough to lock in the maximum possible payout for Grainge based on his strategic objectives. Which, if you’re a start-up negotiating with Universal, is worth bearing in mind: it could be your deal that helps Lucian lock in a multi-million dollar bonus. Next time you’re across the table from Universal’s negotiating team, price accordingly - and make sure they pick up the bill for lunch.
Universal is spending €5.3 million a year on Grainge's personal security - and it’s probably because of the Diddy lawsuit
Hidden in the weeds of the report, in the section that includes Grainge’s remuneration table, is another striking number. Lucian’s “other benefits” jumped from €2,381,640 in 2024 to more than double - €5,265,744 - in 2025.
The annual report says that this was “primarily driven by increased security costs arising from specific incidents and threats that prompted the board to review and approve enhanced security for Sir Lucian Grainge; an outside consultant was retained to create a comprehensive risk assessment and support the security upgrades”.
The report doesn’t say what those “incidents and threats” were, but a court filing made by Grainge himself sheds some light on things. In February 2024, producer Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones filed a sex trafficking lawsuit against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, and dragged in Grainge and UMG as co-defendants.
The allegations were serious, explosive and - according to Grainge’s own lawyers - “offensively false”. By May 2024 they had been withdrawn and Jones’ lawyer admitted in a sworn declaration that there was “no legal basis for the claims and allegations made against” Grainge.
The claims were dismissed with prejudice by the courts, meaning they cannot be refiled - but the damage to Grainge’s personal security was already done. In a lawsuit filed against Jones’ lawyer, Grainge stated that - as a result of being named in the lawsuit - he had been “subjected to antisemitic attacks on social media, had his home address publicised, and was forced to obtain enhanced security for his family”.
The allegations were entirely baseless, but the fall-out and impact on Grainge’s security - and what they cost Universal - can now be quantified.
