Song management firms turned music catalogs and publishing rights into an asset class.
Evidence
With a renewed potential for profit in the streaming era, the music industries are subject to new financial predations, such as those by investment firms like Hipgnosis, Round Hill, Shamrock, and other “song management” firms that have turned music catalogs and publishing rights into an asset class. The effects of this financialization on the production and circulation of music are the same as they are in the wider American economy: a corrupt infrastructure, a plutocratic ruling class, a growing precarity for workers, and vast inequality. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 50
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Names and explains ‘song management’ firms — the exact catalog-acquisition instrument the reader wants to trace.
- QUESTION: Reader should ask how catalog-as-asset-class leaves fingerprints on which songs get licensed, remade, or pushed in playlists.
Related
- Investment firms have turned music catalogs into an asset class (similarity 0.94)
- Song management firms amass publishing catalogs to create a new asset class (similarity 0.87)
- Catalog songs become abstracted financial assets decoupled from music production. (similarity 0.87)
- Private equity backing turned song catalogs into uncorrelated financial asset classes (similarity 0.83)
- Catalog buyouts aim to create a tradeable new asset class from songs (similarity 0.82)
- Wall Street finance, not just piracy, drove music industry consolidation (similarity 0.82)
- Music’s many sub-industries now function as one market dominated by financiers (similarity 0.81)
- Music labels extract rents simply by owning catalogs (similarity 0.80)
- Streaming transforms each play into a financial transaction, inflating catalog music value (similarity 0.79)
- Financialization is the neglected force in music industry scholarship (similarity 0.79)
- Financialization, not piracy, drove music industry revenue losses. (similarity 0.78)