A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

And Sony made him gave that with pennies.

From one perspective, this looks like economically useless activity. And it could be. But it isn't necessarily so.

Historically, content creation and distribution were bundled. Distribution further bundled the content per se and performances. This was all an artefact of the up-front cost of manufacturing and distributing physical media.

With digitization, there is no reason a content creator shouldn't be able to essentially freelance. Make good content. Get paid for it. No requirement to promote yourself on social media, no need to perform for audiences. One could still do that. But it would be a vertical play, not the default.

A financial vector such as this one, which identifies good content, buys it, and then works out distribution, is one way to solve this problem.

I think it's harder to get to this point with e.g. writing, but it is possible. There have been more than a couple times I've thought to myself (while writing), "wow, this is actually what I had imagined in my head." Which is not to say that anyone else would be impressed with it. But there is definitely a certain satisfaction (and even in the moment, not just afterwards when you read it) in being able to tell your story instead of endlessly reading others' stories.

I'm not sure it's enough to keep me going by itself (honestly, I still like to think someone else may be able to enjoy it, eventually, even if this is probably unrealistic). But it's definitely a factor.

Plenty of people!

There’s a market. Not what it once was, because what was once the recording market was born out of necessity as much as anything else.

I, like a lot of other people, am definitely interested in the ephemera. I like owning records. There’s a tangible ritual to putting a record on, and there’s really something to be said for the sound. Even dirty records with their occasional pops and scratches. It’s a visceral appreciation for the medium, to be sure. That said I also buy a lot of paper books.

There’s also something to owning a copy. I use Apple Music these days when I’m commuting or on the road and it’s great. I can hear most anything I want for the price I pay each month, but I even still buy copies of albums I really love because they’re mine. It won’t go away if Apple decides to kill the streaming service, or if I decide to unsubscribe (which will be the case at some point because the stacking up of subscriptions wears on me).

On the whole? I don’t know. I’m curious about the data, too. But who is buying music? A lot of people! There is still a lot of people who don’t just see it as a commodity.

On that last note I’m not a great trend-chaser, so I probably have a certain lens I see the whole thing through—but I’m not the only one.

I’d actually argue the opposite. The way it is trending in with digitization, the owners of the commodity distribution channels decide what consumers prefer, through algorithmic manipulation, seeded content and artificial scarcity.

It essentially allows the distribution channel to dictate terms both ways. If you’re an artist, you can accept a pittance to produce things the distribution channel approves of (through algorithmic selection or explicit curation), or else you can make all your money from concerts and merch.

But if you “make good content” that the actual end users actually monetarily value, it won’t succeed except for the concert and fame cultivation route. Because the distribution channel is going to be a buzzsaw mowing down your created content on the way to whatever it decides to force feed the masses. It takes free will entirely out of content selection on the part of the ultimate paying customer. They pay for what they have been manipulated to think they chose.

The alternative is something like Bandcamp where the artist just posts music and the world decides to buy it or not. But through license & regulatory capture, catalog hoarding, etc., big distribution channels can easily use non-market forces to crush these things, and what’s left is such a low volume so as to not matter at all.

It’s a certain kind of irrational exuberance / maniac grab for stock returns that we lavish ridiculous overvaluations on media delivery businesses that empower them to build these types of moats, essentially de-risking themselves from having to participate in a market by delivering a market valued product by algorithmically manipulating the consumer to eat what they’re given so the distribution channel can have all of the negotiation power.

Frankly the same is true for app store distribution and tv distribution, delivery food distribution and many other things.

Just such destructive behavior by investors (both VC and everyday) who are bidding up these kinds of “delivery capture” businesses.