Rae
@raescott
Rae
In the 1990s, as the musician and indie label founder Jenny Toomey wrote recently in Fast Company, a band could sell 10,000 copies of an album and bring in about $50,000 in revenue. To earn the same amount in 2024, the band’s whole album would need to rack up a million streams — roughly enough to put each song among Spotify’s top 1 percent of track... See more
Marc Hogan • Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
Hipgnosis Songs Fund bought a 50 percent stake in the funk star Rick James’s catalog, which includes his irresistibly catchy 1981 hit “Super Freak.” To monetize its prize, Hipgnosis found a lightly modernized update of the “Super Freak” track, had Nicki Minaj assemble a songwriting crew and voilà: In 2022, Ms. Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl,” essential... See more
Marc Hogan • Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.
Yash Bagal • A New Funnel for Music
Key Takeaways
Private equity firms buy and overhaul companies to earn a profit or break them up and sell off parts.
Capital for acquisitions comes from outside investors in the private equity funds the firms establish and manage, usually supplemented by debt. Some or all of the debt is often placed on the balance sheet of the company being acquired.
The private equity industry has grown rapidly; it tends to be most popular when stock prices are high and interest rates are low.
Depending on the private equity firm's skills and objectives, a private equity acquisition can make a company more competitive or saddle it with unsustainable debt.
“secondary sales will just expand the field for what is in play,” a publishing executive pointed out. A market for publishing assets inevitably means that not everyone will succeed — but it should also provide other buyers. A certain amount of consolidation may be inevitable, but it might not be so bad.
Robert Levine • What Does Private Equity Mean for the Music Business Long-Term?
On what happens when the catalogue a PE purchased runs its course for them
The reason private equity has such a bad reputation is that it usually buys assets with considerable leverage and holds them for a limited amount of time, which can often result in layoffs at companies in which they invest.
Robert Levine • What Does Private Equity Mean for the Music Business Long-Term?
As interest rates have risen, the surge has faded. In February, word surfaced that the private equity behemoth KKR was beating a quiet retreat from the music space. More recently, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the owner of “Super Freak,” cut the value of its music portfolio by more than a quarter in the wake of a shareholder revolt.
Marc Hogan • Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
Aye yay yay.
Tonight I saw a Story shared by the great @the_dead_dirtbag who spotted a strange looking band on his Spotify.
The “band” is Velvet Sundown - a clearly obvious AI creation with a chatGPT style bio, 300k followers, and two weeks of existence.
We ta... See more
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