Sublime

While musicians faced an existential crisis during a pandemic, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s ownership stake in Spotify climbed to be worth over $4 billion. In order to earn $4 billion, a musician earning the median wage of $25,000 would have to work for 160,000 years – in other words, they’d have to have started working before human history began.

Hellman & Friedman 's majority stake in Global Music Rights marks a watershed moment — private equity firms now control three major PROs (alongside New Mountain Capital's BMI and Blackstone's SESAC). Blackstone 's successful acquisition of Hipgnosis Songs Fund further cements institutional investors’ central role in the financialization of musi... See more

And so what you've ended up with, not surprisingly, is a few key players that happen to own the majority of the IP that is kind of a must have in this industry to have a product offering and a handful of distributors that have gotten scale on distribution of great user experiences like a Spotify, Amazon, a YouTube, whoever you might want to think a... See more

Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, says the top 4 percent of titles drive 60 percent of the profitability. That goes for the rest of them too: