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capitalists-own-music-header.jpg

Every Single Sentence of This Article is Worse Than the Last

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | September 14, 2022 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | September 14, 2022 |


capitalists-own-music-header.jpg

I’m sure we’ve all seen the headlines here and there over the past few years.

Dylan Completes Sale Of His Songwriting Catalog.’

Springsteen Sells Rights To All His Music.’

‘Paul Simon Sells Entire Song Catalog’

And so on and so on.

It’s been a veritable frenzy. Musicians selling up and cashing in, handing over the rights to their music to publishing companies or private equity firms in exchange for dump trucks of money showing up at their houses. And in many ways both pragmatic and financial I’m sure it makes sense to them. How could dump trucks of money not make sense after all?

It also, in many ways, is depressing as fu*k.

Music has been big business for a long time, obviously, and we shouldn’t be putting on rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to appraising the industry. The old record companies were (and are) tyrants, exploitative and cruel and full of capitalists that are cut from the same cloth as those in the new, private-equity heavy sphere. Nevertheless, there did at least used to be an element of artist support that has now become atrophied. Labels being patient with bands for several albums that never made an impact, for example. Whatever opposition we might have to the brave new world of streaming—and I have many—the faults of the old system shouldn’t be swept under the rug. Nevertheless, it’s true that something has been lost in the transition to the new paradigm.

I dunno. Old man yells at cloud or whatever. ‘Neoliberalism bad’, bla bla bla, I know. But then you can’t tell me that seeing things like this doesn’t make the blood boil—well not even boil bust just evaporate out of despair (thanks a lot, Roxana):

What a grim collection of sentences, man. Jeez. That’s an extract from a piece in the Financial Times that covers the mad, gold rush-style entry of private equity vultures into the world of music, featuring benevolent entities like Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR, as well as our old friend, securitization—who, like Troy McClure, we might remember from such hits as, ‘The Great Financial Crash of ‘08’. Good stuff. You can read the full piece in the FT here, as it is interesting, bu you might also wish to go spelunking through a series of progressively worse extracts from it. Depends on your tolerance today I guess. Either way just look at the state of this sequence:


The result: the world’s biggest investors poured billions into what had been a staid sector and music royalty payments were turned into a recognised asset class.

The phenomenon was pioneered by a London-listed investment trust called Hipgnosis, named after an art group that designed album covers for Pink Floyd and others.
Amid the rush, groups including Investec Wealth & Investment, Aviva Investors and the Church of England’s fund manager, CCLA, gave their money to Mercuriadis’s London-listed investment trust Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which has spent it buying copyrights to more than 65,000 songs.
He waxed lyrical in interviews about how songs were “better than gold or oil” as an investment.
Blackstone executives believe they can extract more money from music through more sophisticated management, say people familiar with the matter. The rationale is that songs can be managed in a similar way to other assets: returns can be boosted by, say, persuading filmmakers to use songs from your catalogue, or bringing in royalty payments more quickly and efficiently.
Yet through it all, Massarsky is bullish. He cites new ways of making money from songs, such as payments when they are played on Peloton bikes or TikTok. “We are absolutely amazed at the growth,” he said in July, as stock markets lurched. “It is a basket of good.”