It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual property and rent it out to the peasants.
Seems that's the way society ended up being structured. Perhaps we will all end up selling houses to each other and no one will have to make anything at all!
I swear, even the Aztecs had a less destructive system.
It's actually kind of brilliant. Mercuriadis et al are getting some of the rights to well-known intellectual property through the presumably underpaid, behind-the-scenes contributors. His competitors say he's paying too much, but is that just because they've been paying too little?
I was biased against the guy when I started the article, but if the status quo ante was other execs paying pennies to songwriters for their rights, and then doing little to nothing with them, maybe Mercuriadis is onto something.
You are correct, Piketty provides empirical evidence that supports this theory in "Capital in the Twenty First Century". Essentially the return on capital investment is always greater than labor. He also suggests this rule and feature of capitalism threatens capitalism itself as long as wage earners make no efforts to themselves invest their wages. There was a brief period post war where wage earners did invest their wages but that fad has ended, now we spend all our wages plus some. The 'plus some' is often at interest rates the mafia would be proud to charge. Any salary increases earned are generally spent to pay off this debt while incurring more debt to enhance our lifestyle. The dollar will collapse eventually, maybe not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, but it will happen.
He’s considering launching a songwriter’s union, something akin to the Screenwriters Guild, that would give songwriters more leverage to extract better deals from the industry’s power brokers.
This new moment of marketization is interesting to observe from the sidelines.
I'm a musician but I've never gotten paid for making music and don't want to be. This way, songwriting and playing music can remain something I do purely for the intrinsic joy of it. And it's not really so long ago that, if you wanted music in your house, you had to play it yourself.
I have nothing against recorded music or professional musicians, but it's interesting how much we seem to collectively forget that buying music isn't the only way to have access to it. Not everything we need has to be obtained as a commodity (still less through a monthly subscription).
I invested in this interesting investment trust back in February last year when it was featured the investors chronical and late last year when they had an offer for subscription at 100.
I look at it as an alternate bond like investment that is not corelated with traditional bonds - target yield is 5% I think
I think the goal is to launch the next ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and basically charge astronomical rates for songs people want to hear. Songwriters will love it and artists will have no choice.
This is pretty much a confirmation: "Along with owning a bigger chunk of the publishing market, he wants to continue altering it. He’s considering launching a songwriter’s union, something akin to the Screenwriters Guild, that would give songwriters more leverage to extract better deals from the industry’s power brokers."
It's a public company. I might want to buy some stock in it when I can.
One can turn that around. There is a lot of good music and talented people around but the machinery around music media and distribution and life style is such that most people end up listening the same few composers and artists world wide.
So it might look that the composer or artist themselves are somehow unbelievably special.
The talent shows for example have produced quite many popular artists here. One could see that as "see, anyone can be successful!". Or one can see that the machinery can choose which talented and hard working people they make "successful".
The journalism around music is especially naive. They constantly mix up people, phenomena, music, promotion and popularity happily.
People to a surprising degree like what they think they are supposed to like.
> I think the goal is to launch the next ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and basically charge astronomical rates for songs people want to hear. Songwriters will love it and artists will have no choice.
In US, for mechanical royalties, the rates are set by government. So yes, they could charge whatever they want for live and synch, but that would have much smaller impact on the general population.
So if I'm reading this correctly, this guy is saying that traditional labels put too much time and effort into album sales and completely ignore the money available from licensing and performance royalties (if they don't own the rights to a song why would they care to)
So by buying up the rights he has the incentive to push hard to sell licenses to that music and can build up teams of salespeople to do only that. What songwriter wouldn't want to sign up if they don't like the burden of managing those opportunities themselves and don't trust that labels will put the effort in.
He raised $1B of others' money; he hasn't spent anything close to that yet, even in aggregate. The article is extremely light on details of why this guy thinks he can turn a bigger profit off these song catalogs than the traditional publishers can, but I guess he's cutting a lot of fat compared to the big publishing houses? This seems positive to me because it's shifting more money towards the artists:
"In the music industry, paying for assets at a 10x multiple is considered top dollar. Mercuriadis is reportedly paying up to 20x, making it impossible for others to compete."
From one perspective, this looks like economically useless activity. And it could be. But it isn't necessarily so.
Historically, content creation and distribution were bundled. Distribution further bundled the content per se and performances. This was all an artefact of the up-front cost of manufacturing and distributing physical media.
With digitization, there is no reason a content creator shouldn't be able to essentially freelance. Make good content. Get paid for it. No requirement to promote yourself on social media, no need to perform for audiences. One could still do that. But it would be a vertical play, not the default.
A financial vector such as this one, which identifies good content, buys it, and then works out distribution, is one way to solve this problem.
I wonder why this guy thinks that the rights to a successful song are an "uncorrelated" asset. Wouldn't strong economic growth mean that people are far more likely to spend money on these things? Especially for 'sync' rights which mostly come up for things like ads, or derivative mass-marketed media (e.g. successful song X ends up in the soundtrack of movie Y)? Just seemed like a weird claim to me.
Concentration naturally builds in competitive markets. As each competitor is slain, you get the stuff they owned and add to your power. Nothing stops it except pressure from below. Allowing one man to own huge swaths of our cultural heritage is absolutely mind boggling insane, like a feudal king dictating what culture the peasants are allowed to have.
Its not a physical object. Songs are not going to be locked in some room and taken from society. Its just investment from his side and that seems totally OK in my book
If that is really what it would cost, then for 0.1% of the cost of the Iraq war, we could have had free culture, unencumbered by copyrights. I guess for 1%, the whole century's music production released in the public domain?
Surely, it would have made more for everyone's life comfort than the operation Iraq Freedom did?
Has he never heard of the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market? Supply & Demand dictates that prices can go higher than you are liquid.
> “We turn down 70% of what’s offered to us, and oftentimes we make the first move in finding writers whose catalogs aren’t publicly for sale,” he says.
> Ultimately, his goal with Hipgnosis — which went public on the London Stock Exchange in June 2018 — is to own 15% to 20% of the overall publishing market.
That's more like someone buying up the silver mining rights across large but carefully picked swathes of land. Then he rents those rights to miners for a fee he can use to buy even more mining rights.
I don't think you can really corner the market for songs, people can just make new songs. Also if you don't have a lot of media clout besides owning some pop songs IP there's nothing you can do to keep the popular taste aligned to your music portfolio.
This kind of posturing is nauseating but I find it to be bizarrely common.
I think if you are not an overly literal person it makes more sense though. It's social posturing which is meant to mean "I don't like the most extreme elements of consumer culture like designer belt buckles and luxury automobiles". To many people "believing in material things" means that and not what they are literally saying.
It seems like many people find this type of exaggerated speech to be really charismatic which I find really annoying.
What's to say he's not trying to provide an innovative service? It'd be interesting to be at least able to license most pop music from one place, not that this is an ideal way to get there. If he prices pop music out of the culture, then less popular music becomes a viable alternative.
and of course this guy is trying to associate his effort with the English art design group Hipgnosis[1] that specialised in creating cover art for many famous bands.
all this means is that musicians need to find a way to own their masters. You will never see Chance The Rapper sell his masters for the very reason this guy is buying up rights.
They’d need to acquire more and more music as the years go by because they are always competing with other hits and the more that hits the market the more competition they have that cut into their returns. It depends how good they are at squeezing dollars from each music.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMckenny|6 years ago|reply
I swear, even the Aztecs had a less destructive system.
[+] [-] stanferder|6 years ago|reply
I was biased against the guy when I started the article, but if the status quo ante was other execs paying pennies to songwriters for their rights, and then doing little to nothing with them, maybe Mercuriadis is onto something.
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NOGDP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Railsify|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teh_klev|6 years ago|reply
He’s considering launching a songwriter’s union, something akin to the Screenwriters Guild, that would give songwriters more leverage to extract better deals from the industry’s power brokers.
Is that such a bad thing?
[+] [-] decasia|6 years ago|reply
I'm a musician but I've never gotten paid for making music and don't want to be. This way, songwriting and playing music can remain something I do purely for the intrinsic joy of it. And it's not really so long ago that, if you wanted music in your house, you had to play it yourself.
I have nothing against recorded music or professional musicians, but it's interesting how much we seem to collectively forget that buying music isn't the only way to have access to it. Not everything we need has to be obtained as a commodity (still less through a monthly subscription).
[+] [-] Jerry2|6 years ago|reply
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5937f2f1bebafb1297678...
[+] [-] walshemj|6 years ago|reply
I look at it as an alternate bond like investment that is not corelated with traditional bonds - target yield is 5% I think
[+] [-] carbocation|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseleo|6 years ago|reply
I think the goal is to launch the next ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and basically charge astronomical rates for songs people want to hear. Songwriters will love it and artists will have no choice.
This is pretty much a confirmation: "Along with owning a bigger chunk of the publishing market, he wants to continue altering it. He’s considering launching a songwriter’s union, something akin to the Screenwriters Guild, that would give songwriters more leverage to extract better deals from the industry’s power brokers."
It's a public company. I might want to buy some stock in it when I can.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|6 years ago|reply
So it might look that the composer or artist themselves are somehow unbelievably special.
The talent shows for example have produced quite many popular artists here. One could see that as "see, anyone can be successful!". Or one can see that the machinery can choose which talented and hard working people they make "successful".
The journalism around music is especially naive. They constantly mix up people, phenomena, music, promotion and popularity happily.
People to a surprising degree like what they think they are supposed to like.
[+] [-] doh|6 years ago|reply
In US, for mechanical royalties, the rates are set by government. So yes, they could charge whatever they want for live and synch, but that would have much smaller impact on the general population.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
There was a leaked Sony memo that showed that most of profits come from back catalog and most of their losses are from new artist development.
The memo: https://sriramk.com/memos/goldberg-music.pdf
[+] [-] peteretep|6 years ago|reply
Why, what’s the information advantage you have over the market?
[+] [-] walshemj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aguyfromnb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanalltogether|6 years ago|reply
So by buying up the rights he has the incentive to push hard to sell licenses to that music and can build up teams of salespeople to do only that. What songwriter wouldn't want to sign up if they don't like the burden of managing those opportunities themselves and don't trust that labels will put the effort in.
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
"In the music industry, paying for assets at a 10x multiple is considered top dollar. Mercuriadis is reportedly paying up to 20x, making it impossible for others to compete."
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 years ago|reply
Historically, content creation and distribution were bundled. Distribution further bundled the content per se and performances. This was all an artefact of the up-front cost of manufacturing and distributing physical media.
With digitization, there is no reason a content creator shouldn't be able to essentially freelance. Make good content. Get paid for it. No requirement to promote yourself on social media, no need to perform for audiences. One could still do that. But it would be a vertical play, not the default.
A financial vector such as this one, which identifies good content, buys it, and then works out distribution, is one way to solve this problem.
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghastmaster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehjoker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perceptronas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iv|6 years ago|reply
If that is really what it would cost, then for 0.1% of the cost of the Iraq war, we could have had free culture, unencumbered by copyrights. I guess for 1%, the whole century's music production released in the public domain?
Surely, it would have made more for everyone's life comfort than the operation Iraq Freedom did?
[+] [-] lucian1900|6 years ago|reply
Although doing nothing at all would also be much better than invading a country and causing the deaths of more than a million people.
[+] [-] chiph|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
[+] [-] yorwba|6 years ago|reply
> “We turn down 70% of what’s offered to us, and oftentimes we make the first move in finding writers whose catalogs aren’t publicly for sale,” he says.
> Ultimately, his goal with Hipgnosis — which went public on the London Stock Exchange in June 2018 — is to own 15% to 20% of the overall publishing market.
That's more like someone buying up the silver mining rights across large but carefully picked swathes of land. Then he rents those rights to miners for a fee he can use to buy even more mining rights.
[+] [-] fastball|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaffeemitsahne|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilbetron|6 years ago|reply
Wants to own everything musical and starts up a billion dollar fund to do so.
[+] [-] anm89|6 years ago|reply
I think if you are not an overly literal person it makes more sense though. It's social posturing which is meant to mean "I don't like the most extreme elements of consumer culture like designer belt buckles and luxury automobiles". To many people "believing in material things" means that and not what they are literally saying.
It seems like many people find this type of exaggerated speech to be really charismatic which I find really annoying.
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trunc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaeljohansen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hipgnosis|6 years ago|reply
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipgnosis
[+] [-] gigatexal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setpatchaddress|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|6 years ago|reply