The stock of Sphere Entertainment Co. gained 5.4% to $35.04 this week after Point72 Asset Management, the Wall Street giant's hedge fund Steve Cohentook a 5.5% stake in the company, making it one of the best performing companies this week Billboard Global Music Index.
Cohen owns the New York Mets professional baseball team. Sphere's sister company, MSG Sports — James Dolan is the CEO of both companies — owning two of the city's biggest professional sports franchises, the New York Knicks basketball team and the New York Rangers hockey team. The Sphere venue in Las Vegas will host its first sporting event on Friday night (June 28): the National Hockey League draft.
Elsewhere, radio companies Cumulus Media and iHeartMedia gained 9.1% and 9.0% this week, respectively, as radio stocks outperformed other listed music companies on the Billboard Global Music Index. Both Cumulus and iHeartMedia recovered nearly half of their losses in the previous two-week period. After falling 21.1% from June 7 to June 21, Cumulus ended at $2.04. Similarly, iHeartMedia had lost 21.1% over the previous two weeks and ended this week at $1.09. Townsquare Media, which is not included in the Index, rose 9.2% to $10.93, turning a 5% year-to-date loss into a 3.7% gain.
However, many radio companies still face a difficult 2024 as they struggle through a challenging advertising climate. Through June 28, iHeartRadio was down 59.2% and Cumulus was down 61.7%.
The Billboard world music index was essentially unchanged from last week, rising less than one point to 1,815.54. The index's year-over-year gain was also unchanged at 18.3%. Most of the stocks showed little movement as 16 of the 20 companies fell in the range of +2.1% to -3.4%. Although 12 of the companies posted gains, the biggest gainers are among the index's smaller companies, and those winners were outweighed by losses suffered by larger companies such as Spotify (down 1.1%), CTS Eventim (down 1.3%) ) and SiriusXM (down 3.4%).
Streaming stocks had the worst week of any sector, losing an average of 0.4%. The top streamer was Anghami, which rose 0.9% to $1.07. Cloud Music and Deezer lost less than 1%. LiveOne fell 1.3% to $1.57.
Reservoir Media was the week's biggest gainer after improving 11.9% — up 9.6% on Friday alone — to $7.90. The gain came without any major news or analyst comments. The last analyst to raise a price target on Reservoir was B. Riley on May 31, the day after Reservoir said its full-year revenue rose 18% to $145 million.
All K-pop labels had modest gains this week. HYBE gained 1.3% to 202,500 won ($146.60). SM Entertainment, also a member of the Billboard Global Music Index, rose 1.1 percent to 80,400 won ($54.21). Elsewhere, JYP Entertainment jumped 2.1% to 57,300 won ($41.48) and YG Entertainment sank 1.0% to 40,300 won ($29.18). All four stocks have fallen sharply in 2024, however, with an average year-to-date decline of 22.6%.
Major stock indexes had mixed results this week. In the United States, the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2% to 17,732.60 and the S&P 500 fell 0.1% to 5,460.48. South Korea's KOSPI composite rose 0.5 percent to 2,797.82. In the UK, the FTSE 100 fell 0.9%. China's Shanghai Composite fell 1.0 percent to 2,967.40.
