Music, which are the most expensive Italian albums of 2025 (and how they did)
Francesco Gabbani, Angelina Mango and Tiziano Ferro on the budget podium. Twenty-four of the top 50 projects do not make the annual Top 100
The podium is dominated by Francesco Gabbani with Dalla tua parte (licensed to Bmg), for which the management company A1 declared 510 thousand euro budget invested on the 'Dalla tua parte Tour'. Behind him Angelina Mango with Caramé (La Tarma), which cost 330 thousand euro, and Tiziano Ferro with Sono un grande (Sugar), a work of over 303 thousand euro. None of the three records appear in the top 100 positions of the Fimi Niq Top of the Music charts, but they are in very good company: analysing the 50 biggest-budget projects among those that applied for the tax credit, a good 24 records do not appear in either the album or the singles chart.
This is the first fact that can be grasped when reading the list of beneficiaries of the Tax Credit Musica 2025, published by the Ministry of Culture, the traditional list of record works that have had access to the measure thanks to which those who produce music can discount 30% of the investments sustained for a maximum of 75 thousand euros per work and 2 million per company over the three-year period. Thus, the production budgets of the works in question become public, unless the applicant record company - this is the case of Universal Music and Warner Music - has chosen to limit itself to indicating the maximum amount that can be incentivised (250,000 euro) in the application.
The year behind us holds several insights that can be read in the light of the dynamics of the record market. For a start, as far as we can see, there is a contraction of budgets: in 2024, the most expensive album (Free Love by Negramaro) was worth EUR 969,000, three years ago it was even EUR 1.08 million (with L'amore by Madame). Now we are more or less at half that amount.
The second cue concerns the chart 'performance' of the most expensive productions. The Top of The Music Fimi Niq 2025, for both singles and albums, is dominated by Olly, whose Tutta vita was released in 2024 (cost 264 thousand euro) and had been financed by the Tax Credit a year ago. The 50 high-budget productions of 2025 only in 18 cases appear in both the album and singles charts with at least one song (Sfera Ebbasta and Shiva, Alessandra Amoroso, Fabri Fibra, Achille Lauro, Damiano David, Lucio Corsi, Elodie, Bresh, Jovanotti, Marracash, Guè, Rkomi, Ernia, Annalisa, Rose Villain, Irama, Luchè and Brunori Sas), then there were four top spenders in the album chart alone (Tony Boy, Salmo, Sadturs & Kiid and Caparezza) and four for singles only (Shablo, Gaia, Giorgia and Sarah Toscano). Twenty-four records, on the other hand, do not appear in either chart.
It is the mirror of a market, that of music streaming, which in Italia sees listens and revenues growing for eight consecutive years, but at the same time intercepts a worldwide trend: the fruition of so-called "new releases" favouring catalogues is dropping in numerical terms. With the consequence that if you are an artist with major titles on your CV, you stand a good chance of getting a high budget for your new release. Which, once on the platform, may not live up to expectations.
