Wall Street finance, not just piracy, drove music industry consolidation

Evidence

Nearly completely absent from this narrative is the role of the financial sector in this transformation. Financialization has had a dramatic but often unacknowledged impact on global music industries in the past two decades. This chapter documents detailed examples of the financialization of music, including shadow banking (asset management, private equity, and corporate venture capital), as well as industry-specific tactics, such as streaming service equity stakes, copyright cartels, and song management firms. All these factors contribute to further consolidation in the music industries, resulting in reduced opportunities for musicians in a system that increasingly only benefits well-capitalized superstars who can produce, as the title of Green Day’s greatest hits collection would have it, ­“International Superhits!” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 177

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the chapter’s key instrument categories: shadow banking, streaming equity stakes, copyright cartels, song management firms.