Catalog songs become abstracted financial assets decoupled from music production.

Evidence

“I founded Hipgnosis to give the investment community access to extraordinarily successful hit songs by culturally important artists and to establish songs as an uncorrelated asset class with attractive risk adjustment returns.” This is finance-speak for transforming music into a relatively low-risk grouping of investments (“asset class”) that can help diversify an investment portfolio. “Uncorrelated” with macroeconomic trends such as recessions because people will continue to listen to music, this is a way to abstract economic value away from music production and into the realm of financial circulation and speculation. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 228

Categorization

• DEFINE: Translates ‘uncorrelated asset class’ finance-speak: catalog songs as a portfolio-diversifying investment detached from music-making.
• SEED: Angle: when a fund manager like Mercuriadis speaks differently to songwriters (Nile Rodgers venue) than to investors, that dual discourse is itself a legible trace of financialization arriving in a cultural industry.