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

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

#101

Post by mrnobody_67 »

bagacrap wrote: post #14

He raised $1B of others' money; he hasn't spent anything close to that yet, even in aggregate. The article is extremely light on details of why this guy thinks he can turn a bigger profit off these song catalogs than the traditional publishers can, but I guess he's cutting a lot of fat compared to the big publishing houses? This seems positive to me because it's shifting more money towards the artists: "In the music…

His big bet is that the assets are undervalued...

Could end up exiting through the launch of a Music Royalties REIT. Liquid assets that trade always get a premium over illiquid limited partnerships. Could be an interesting asset class for diversification that's relatively uncorrelated...

Anyway, full investment prospectus for his fund is here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5937f2f1bebafb1297678...

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

#102

Post by Scown »

bagacrap wrote: post #14

He raised $1B of others' money; he hasn't spent anything close to that yet, even in aggregate. The article is extremely light on details of why this guy thinks he can turn a bigger profit off these song catalogs than the traditional publishers can, but I guess he's cutting a lot of fat compared to the big publishing houses? This seems positive to me because it's shifting more money towards the artists: "In the music…

Think the killer point is making "synch managers" responsible for far fewer songs than traditional publishers.

They're effectively treating each song as an artist with its own manager, so naturally that manager is gonna be much better able to see how and where to place "their" songs.

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

#103

Post by NOGDP »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #5

Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.

I think pop songs are a depreciating asset since new ones can be pumped out rather quickly like out of a factory.

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

#104

Post by beefield »

decasia wrote: post #15

This new moment of marketization is interesting to observe from the sidelines. I'm a musician but I've never gotten paid for making music and don't want to be. This way, songwriting and playing music can remain something I do purely for the intrinsic joy of it. And it's not really so long ago that, if you wanted music in your house, you had to play it yourself. I have nothing against recorded music or professional mu…

Sorry, but you do not exist. Everybody knows that we need to have IP because otherwise nothing currently under copyright or patents would be produced.

(Sarcasm.)

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

#105

Post by sb057 »

Animats wrote: post #95
neilwilson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need about 1% of people to grow the food and perhaps 9% of the people to make stuff we need. The other 90% then have to convince the 10% that do the actual work that they are worth the time to produce a surplus for. IP barriers are one way of doing that. Even farmers like pop songs.

Close. About 1.4% for farming and under 13% for all other tangible goods.[1] Take a close look at that table. It's really important. Growth areas: Health care and social assistance, educational services, leisure and hospitality, and construction. [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Bear in mind that the United States manufactures a fraction of the manufactured goods it consumes.

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

#106

Post by jedberg »

NOGDP wrote: post #103
lotsofpulp wrote: post #5

Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.

I think pop songs are a depreciating asset since new ones can be pumped out rather quickly like out of a factory.

And yet when you see a car commercial they use an old song.

You’re not accounting for the value of nostalgia and cultural significance.

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

#107

Post by stanferder »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #5

Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.

It's actually kind of brilliant. Mercuriadis et al are getting some of the rights to well-known intellectual property through the presumably underpaid, behind-the-scenes contributors. His competitors say he's paying too much, but is that just because they've been paying too little?

I was biased against the guy when I started the article, but if the status quo ante was other execs paying pennies to songwriters for their rights, and then doing little to nothing with them, maybe Mercuriadis is onto something.

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

#108

Post by goodmachine »

carbocation wrote: post #98
Jerry2 wrote: post #77

Here's their investing prospectus with the complete business strategy laid out: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5937f2f1bebafb1297678...

Hipgnosis is a beautiful portmanteau.

Pity the guy stole the name from Storm Thorgerson's design studio. Kind of a dick move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipgnosis

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

#109

Post by m3kw9 »

They’d need to acquire more and more music as the years go by because they are always competing with other hits and the more that hits the market the more competition they have that cut into their returns. It depends how good they are at squeezing dollars from each music.

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

#110

Post by netcan »

umvi wrote: post #68
lotsofpulp wrote: post #5

Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.

It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual property and rent it out to the peasants.

In a basic sense, that's what all wealth is. Income generating property. Debt produces interest. Company shares produce dividends Real estate earns rent. Capital produces revenue. It's all quite interchangeable.

The most famous rant on this is Marx & Engel's manifesto. Chapter one explains how history works, making similar comparisons from their day to older days. The second chapter describes communism's aims. It's also (largely) a rant about the bourgeois.

Anyway, like most Marx, it's hard to translate to concrete terms. One unambiguous line stands out though. "..the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." - Communist Manifesto

In the very next paragraph, ambiguity re-enters. Even in theory, it's very hard to flesh this out. ...It's especially hard in the context he's most interested in: urban industry/society. Replacing all property with a "commons" is easier to imagine in a rural/village context. Rural commons exist.

I think Marx got the idea from a rural context. Formal and informal privatisations of agricultural commons were part of his stated inspiration, iirc.

Anyway, I think the basics are trivial. Property is effectively income generating by definition. If aristocracy is immoral, then property owning is immoral.

To me, this is a reductio ad absurdum for fundamentalist thinking... kind of like the monty python witch trial.

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