Summary (key takeaways):
- The 2026 World Cup final featured the tournament's first-ever Super Bowl-style halftime show, an 11-minute spectacle headlined by Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira, BTS and Burna Boy, curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin.
- The closing ceremony added Robbie Williams, Post Malone, Nicole Scherzinger, Laura Pausini, IShowSpeed and a Tom Cruise appearance, turning football's biggest match into a global entertainment event watched by an estimated ~1.5 billion people.
- You can't invest in an artist, and most "record labels" roll up into just three listed music giants: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music.
- Of those, Warner Music (WMG) and Sony (SONY) are the cleaner US-listed ways to gain exposure to the music business, though each comes with its own risks.
- With Nemo.money app, you can explore these companies and global markets, and invest from $1 with zero commission.
For decades, the Super Bowl halftime show has been a cultural event in its own right, sometimes watched by more people than the game. Now football's biggest match has borrowed the playbook. The 2026 World Cup final between Spain and Argentina didn't just crown a champion; it staged the tournament's first-ever halftime show, a star-packed spectacle that signalled a new era for how the world's biggest sporting event entertains its audience.
It was also, beneath the glitter, a fascinating piece of business, and a natural jumping-off point for a question many fans never think to ask: can you actually invest in the music industry behind a night like this? Let's look at both the show and the stocks.
A new format: the Super Bowl treatment
Until now, World Cup finals opened with a ceremony and got straight to football. The 2026 edition changed that, delivering an 11-minute halftime show explicitly modelled on the Super Bowl's, and in some ways more crammed than its American-football cousin, with each headliner given roughly two minutes on a fast-moving global stage.
The symbolism matters. FIFA is signalling that the World Cup final is not just a match but a global entertainment property, competing for eyeballs and sponsorship dollars with the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the biggest music festivals on earth. When you turn a 90-minute game into a multi-hour entertainment event, you create far more advertising inventory, sponsorship opportunity and global reach, which is exactly the logic that made the Super Bowl halftime show a commercial juggernaut.
The lineup: a genuine who's-who
The show was curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin and tied to a charitable cause, the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, which had already raised over $50 million (helped by $1 from every match ticket sold).
The halftime headliners were a deliberate spread across generations and continents:
- Madonna opened the show with her hit "Music," making an entrance alongside footballing legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho.
- Justin Bieber, Shakira and BTS co-headlined, spanning global pop and the enormous K-pop fanbase.
- Burna Boy represented Afrobeats and the African audience, performing his chart-topping Shakira collaboration.
- Appearances from conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a children's chorus, and a dose of "Ted Lasso" and Muppets charm rounded out the spectacle.
The separate closing ceremony, before kick-off, was just as loaded: Robbie Williams performed the FIFA anthem "Desire" alongside Nicole Scherzinger and Italian star Laura Pausini, with Post Malone, streamer-musician IShowSpeed, and a special appearance from Tom Cruise. Jennifer Hudson sang the US national anthem.
It was, in short, one of the largest concentrations of global star power ever assembled for a single sporting occasion, and that is precisely what makes the business angle interesting.
The numbers behind the spectacle
The scale here is staggering, and it's the whole point. The halftime show was broadcast to what organisers billed as the most-watched halftime show in history, with an estimated audience approaching 1.5 billion people, more than ten times the roughly 125 million who watch a typical Super Bowl. Even before the tournament reached its quarter-finals, FIFA had already logged around 20 billion video views across digital platforms worldwide.
The choice of artists was a deliberate play for reach and engagement, not just prestige. Analysts described the lineup as a calculated pivot to capture the enormous global pop and K-pop audience that traditional football coverage alone can't guarantee, exactly the young, digitally native viewers sponsors pay a premium to reach:
- BTS bring one of the most mobilised digital fanbases on earth, their "ARMY" is estimated in the tens of millions of highly active social accounts generating billions of interactions.
- Shakira has a deep World Cup pedigree, her 2010 song "Waka Waka" set a Guinness World Record as the most-streamed World Cup song, and she performed the 2026 anthem "Dai Dai."
- Madonna, a seven-time Grammy winner, arrived with a new album freshly atop the Billboard 200.
- Justin Bieber, Burna Boy and the rest each bring their own vast, global followings across pop, Afrobeats and beyond.
Stack those fanbases on top of football's own audience and you begin to see why FIFA borrowed the Super Bowl model: it turns a two-team final into an event with a rooting interest for billions who might not care who lifts the trophy.
The business: why a show like this exists
A halftime show doesn't generate ticket revenue the way a concert does, so why stage one? The value is indirect but enormous:
- Attention. More stars means more viewers, more social media, more highlights, all of which raise the value of advertising and sponsorship around the event.
- Reach into new audiences. Booking BTS reaches a vast, highly engaged K-pop fanbase; Burna Boy reaches Africa; Shakira reaches Latin America. It globalises the audience far beyond core football fans.
- Brand halo. For FIFA, the sponsors and the broadcasters, associating with a cultural moment of this scale is worth far more than the performance fees.
For the artists, the exposure is the payoff, performing to a global audience of hundreds of millions is a career and catalogue booster that no amount of advertising could buy. And that catalogue point is the bridge to the investing angle.
So, how do you invest in music?
Here's where fans are often surprised. You cannot invest in an artist. There's no "Madonna stock" or "BTS share." What you can invest in is the companies that own the recorded music, the rights and the distribution, and in practice, the vast majority of the world's music rolls up into just three giant companies, often called the "big three":
- Universal Music Group (UMG). The largest of the three, home to a huge roster across many labels. UMG is listed in Amsterdam (and trades in the US via an over-the-counter ADR), so it isn't a mainline US-listed stock.
- Warner Music Group (WMG). The most straightforwardly US-listed of the pure-play music majors, trading on the Nasdaq. It owns a deep catalogue of labels and artists.
- Sony Music. Not separately listed, it's part of the Japanese conglomerate Sony Group (SONY), which trades in the US as an ADR. Buying Sony gives you music exposure, but bundled with PlayStation, films, sensors and much more.
Between them, these companies own or distribute a staggering share of the music you hear, including, in all likelihood, tracks from several of the artists who performed at the final. So while you can't back a performer, you can research the businesses that monetise their work.
Beyond the big three: other listed music names
The investable music world is broader than just the majors. A few other listed companies each offer a different slice of the industry, and several connect directly to artists who performed at the final:
- HYBE (South Korea). The company behind BTS, one of the halftime headliners. HYBE has reported record revenue driven by BTS's music and world tours, making it arguably the most direct listed link to a performer on the night. It's listed in South Korea (fellow K-pop firms SM Entertainment and JYP trade there too), so it isn't a US listing.
- Warner Music Group (WMG), worth a second mention for its roster: its labels (Atlantic, Elektra, Warner Records) are home to artists like Coldplay (whose Chris Martin curated the show), Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa and Cardi B.
- Spotify (SPOT). Not a label, but the streaming platform that pays them. Spotify is the listed pure-play on the streaming side of the shift that revived music, and, tellingly, the big three labels themselves hold small stakes in it.
- Live Nation (LYV). The live-music giant that owns Ticketmaster and controls a huge share of concert promotion and ticketing, exposure to the booming live side of music (tours, festivals, venues) rather than recordings.
- Sonos (SONO) and Sphere Entertainment (SPHR). Narrower plays, Sonos on the audio-hardware side, Sphere on immersive live venues, showing just how many different angles "investing in music" can take.
The point isn't which of these is "best." It's that music exposure comes in many listed forms, recorded music, streaming, live events, hardware and K-pop, each with a very different risk profile.
When a music brand becomes a business: the Beats example
Some of the most valuable music "brands" aren't labels at all, they're products and companies built around music culture. The standout example is Beats. Founded by hip-hop artist Dr. Dre and music executive Jimmy Iovine, Beats by Dre turned headphones into a fashion and lifestyle phenomenon, then was acquired by Apple (AAPL) in 2014 for around $3 billion, one of the most successful examples of a music-culture brand becoming a mainstream business.
For investors, Beats illustrates two things. First, that musicians increasingly build businesses, not just catalogues, from headphones to spirits to fashion lines. And second, that when they succeed, the exposure often ends up inside a giant: you can't buy "Beats" on its own, but Apple owns it, where it's a tiny part of a multi-trillion-dollar company. It's the same pattern we keep seeing, the cultural brand is exciting, but the listed vehicle is usually a much larger, more diversified business.
How we consume media, and why that made music investable
To understand why music is investable again, you have to look at how people now consume it, because that behaviour shift is the whole story.
For decades, music was a one-off purchase: you bought a record, a cassette, a CD. When digital arrived, piracy gutted those sales, and the industry shrank for years. Then streaming changed everything. Instead of buying an album once, hundreds of millions of people now pay a monthly subscription for unlimited access, and every single play generates a small payment that flows back to whoever owns the recording.
That's a profound change in business model:
- From one-off sales to recurring revenue. A subscription that renews every month is far more valuable and predictable than a one-time purchase, the same logic investors love in software and gaming's live-service model.
- Catalogues became long-life assets. Because old songs keep earning every time they're streamed, a back-catalogue behaves a little like a royalty-generating asset that can pay out for decades. It's why investment firms have spent billions buying up the rights to famous artists' songs.
- The audience went global and always-on. People now consume music on phones, smart speakers, in games, on social video, everywhere, all the time. The World Cup lineup's global spread (K-pop, Afrobeats, Latin pop, Western pop) reflects exactly this borderless, always-on listenership.
Spotify (SPOT) is the clearest listed embodiment of this shift, the pure-play on how we now listen. It doesn't own much music itself; instead it runs the subscription platform, pays the labels a large share of its revenue, and profits if it can grow subscribers and improve its economics faster than those costs. (Tellingly, the big three labels hold small stakes in Spotify, so they benefit both as suppliers and as shareholders.) It's a different bet from owning a label: you're wagering on the distribution model rather than the catalogue.
The same "how we consume" question is playing out in video and live entertainment too, from streaming platforms to immersive venues, which is why the way we watch and listen has become one of the most important themes in entertainment investing. It's a very different, and to many investors more appealing, profile than the old hit-driven, one-off-sale music business.
Beyond music: the wider entertainment chain
The record labels are only one listed layer of a night like this. A global broadcast spectacle involves a whole chain of companies, many of them US-listed, that profit from putting the event (and the show) in front of billions:
- The broadcasters. In the US, the World Cup's English-language rights are held by Fox Corporation (FOXA), which reportedly paid around $485 million and aired every match, while the Spanish-language rights sit with Comcast's (CMCSA) NBCUniversal-owned Telemundo. For both, a tournament like this is a rare bright spot of premium live programming in an industry otherwise worried about cord-cutting, more matches means more advertising inventory to sell.
- The streamers. Live sport is increasingly a streaming battleground. Fox streamed every game in 4K via its Fox One platform, and Telemundo's coverage runs through Comcast's Peacock. Looking ahead, the next round of US World Cup rights has reportedly drawn interest from Netflix (NFLX), Disney (DIS) and Alphabet's (GOOGL) YouTube, with the package potentially worth up to $2 billion, and FIFA has already handed Netflix the 2027 and 2031 Women's World Cup. So the "who shows the football" question is itself an investing theme.
- Live events and ticketing. The infrastructure behind mega-events, ticketing, venues and live promotion, is dominated by names like Live Nation (LYV), which owns Ticketmaster. A World Cup final isn't its event, but it sits in the same live-entertainment economy that a show like this showcases.
As with the labels, these are large, diversified businesses for which one match, however huge, is a single line item, not a share-price catalyst. They're named as examples to research, not recommendations.
But here's the other side of the story
As always, a great story is not a great investment on its own:
- These are examples, not recommendations. The companies named here are ways to understand the sector, not tips. Each has its own risks.
- It's rarely a "pure" music bet. Sony is a sprawling conglomerate where music is one division; UMG isn't a mainline US listing; even Warner faces the ups and downs of the wider market. You're rarely buying "music" cleanly.
- Valuations and competition matter. Streaming economics, negotiations with platforms, artist disputes over rights, and competition for listeners all affect these businesses. And, like any stock, a strong narrative can already be reflected in the price.
- A spectacular show doesn't move the stock. Just as a World Cup win doesn't reprice a sportswear giant, one halftime performance won't meaningfully change a music major's revenue. The show is a symptom of the industry's scale, not a catalyst for the share price.
Frequently asked questions
Can you invest in a musician like Madonna or Justin Bieber?
No. Individual artists aren't publicly traded, there's no "Madonna stock." You can only invest indirectly, through the listed record companies that own and distribute recorded music and catalogues.
What are the big three record labels, and are they listed?
Universal Music Group (UMG, listed in Amsterdam with a US OTC ADR), Warner Music Group (WMG, listed on the Nasdaq) and Sony Music (part of Sony Group, NYSE-listed as SONY). Together they dominate the recorded-music industry.
What's the most direct US-listed way to invest in music?
Warner Music Group (WMG) is the most straightforward pure-play music major listed in the US. Sony (SONY) also offers exposure but bundled with games, films and electronics.
Which other music-related companies are publicly listed?
Beyond the big three, options include HYBE (the South Korea-listed company behind BTS, alongside K-pop peers SM Entertainment and JYP), streaming platform Spotify (SPOT), live-music and ticketing giant Live Nation (LYV), audio-hardware maker Sonos (SONO) and immersive-venue operator Sphere Entertainment (SPHR). Each offers a different slice of the music industry. These are examples, not recommendations.
Can you invest in music brands like Beats?
Often only indirectly. Beats, the headphones brand founded by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, was acquired by Apple (AAPL) in 2014, so exposure to it comes via Apple, where it's a tiny part of a much larger business. Many successful music-culture brands end up owned by bigger listed companies like this.
Why has the music industry become more attractive to investors?
Streaming turned music into a recurring-revenue business. Labels that own catalogues earn a share every time a song is streamed, so valuable back-catalogues can generate income for decades, an appealing, royalty-like profile.
How does Spotify make money, and is it a way to invest in music?
Spotify (SPOT) runs the subscription streaming platform rather than owning much music itself. It earns from monthly subscribers and advertising, and pays labels a large share of its revenue. It's a way to invest in how people now consume music (the distribution model) rather than in the music catalogues themselves.
Did the World Cup halftime show boost music stocks?
It's very unlikely to have moved them meaningfully. A single performance, however spectacular, is a tiny event relative to a global music company's revenue. The show reflects the industry's scale rather than acting as a catalyst for share prices.
How can I invest in music or entertainment stocks?
You can research and buy listed companies such as Warner Music (WMG) or Sony (SONY) on investing apps like Nemo.money, where you can invest from $1 with zero commission. This is not a recommendation, and trading is risky.
Which entertainment companies broadcast the World Cup, and are they listed?
In the US, English-language rights are held by Fox Corporation (FOXA) and Spanish-language rights by Comcast's (CMCSA) Telemundo, which streams via Peacock. Both are US-listed. Future World Cup rights have reportedly attracted interest from Netflix (NFLX), Disney (DIS) and Alphabet's (GOOGL) YouTube.
The takeaway
The World Cup's first halftime show was a statement: football's showpiece now wants to be a global entertainment event to rival the Super Bowl, complete with Madonna, Bieber, Shakira, BTS and a supporting cast of superstars. It's a spectacle, and a reminder of the sheer scale of the modern music business. You can't buy a slice of Madonna's set or BTS's fanbase, but you can research the handful of listed giants, Warner, Sony and Universal, that actually own and monetise the world's music. As ever, enjoy the show for the show. When it comes to investing, look past the spectacle to the business underneath, and remember that a dazzling performance and a sound investment are two very different things.
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This is not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Your capital is at risk. See website for Risk Disclosure. Exinity ME Ltd (https://nemo.money) is regulated by ADGM's Financial Services Regulatory Authority.
