Topic
Music Catalogs and Investment
Buying, valuing and financing music catalogs and other music IP as an asset. 17 conversations with founders, investors and experts, newest first.
Episodes (17)
Michael Bizenov of Sound Royalties explains how music creators get cash advances against royalty income without losing ownership of masters or copyrights.
Yoel Kenan, founder of Africori, explains why African music consumption is high but revenue stays low, and where catalog and export investment should go next.
Alan Wallis, CEO of Dynamite Songs, explains why he avoids catalogs under ten years old, how sync licensing drives value, and how cost of capital shapes deals.
Lior Tibon, CEO and co-founder of Duetti, explains how the company funds catalog buyouts with debt and equity and changes the industry incrementally.
Yonas Aregai, chief of staff at Gold State Music, explains how the fund values and acquires music catalogs, using Alan Walker's career as a case study.
Xavier Péters, CEO of LeanSquare, explains how the fund picks late-seed music tech startups, why team matters most, and why Wallifornia helps validate deals.
Con Raso of Tuned Global and Andrew Batey, founder of Beatdapp, explain how machine learning catches music streaming fraud and why it pays real artists more.
Gareth Deakin of Sonorous explains why music tech startups struggle to raise venture capital and how founders can reframe to attract investors.
Marzio F Schena, Co-founder and CEO of A-Note Music, explains how the platform lets investors buy music royalties, from a 200,000 euro first catalog.
AI Jake reports on Blackstone's $1.5 billion acquisition of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, covering 40,000 songs and a $2.2 billion enterprise value.
AI Jake reports on Sony Music's advanced talks to buy Queen's catalog for a reported $1 billion, covering music, merchandising, logos and publishing.
Vickie Nauman of Cross Border Works explains industry market fit, why music tech startups fail, and how founders can de-risk music for investors.
AI Jake reports KISS sold its catalog, brand, and intellectual property to Pophouse Entertainment for $300 million, with plans for digital experiences.
Agnes Chung, co-founder of Musicube, on building AI-driven music search in Hamburg and why the startup chose to be acquired by Songtradr.
AI Jake reports on JKBX, a music investment platform backed by Spotify and Red Light Management that lets investors buy song royalties.
Jonas Krossli & Kristian Wredstrøm
Timbre co-founders Kristian Wredstrøm and Jonas Krossli look back on their failed music IP investing platform and what it cost to lack industry standing.
Stein Bjelland, chair of Music Norway, explains why artists must understand markets and how Norway could fund music firms without buying equity.
Questions these episodes answer
How do music royalty advances differ from a bank loan?
Sound Royalties gives advances against royalty income rather than lending against credit. It asks for no personal guarantee, no credit history check and no share of future profits, structuring each deal as a fixed payment over a fixed term instead of an equity-like stake.
From: The Business of Turning Music Royalties into Growth Capital
What financial profile qualifies a creator for royalty financing?
A creator needs about $400 a month in royalty income to qualify, and deals scale from small amounts up to eight figures. Underwriting weighs roughly 12 to 14 inputs such as catalog concentration, song age, genre decay curves and who is paying the royalties.
From: The Business of Turning Music Royalties into Growth Capital
Why doesn't Sound Royalties become a label or distributor?
Staying purely in financing keeps the company neutral, so labels, distributors and publishers refer clients because Sound Royalties never competes for their role. It also never takes a share of profits or a right of first refusal, which protects the trust that keeps referrals coming.
From: The Business of Turning Music Royalties into Growth Capital
How does Sound Royalties value future royalty income?
Instead of valuing a catalog like a stock, the company projects income deal by deal, applying decay curves based on genre, song age and whether income comes from one-off sync placements or steady long-term catalog performance, aiming to keep the advance below what a creator could struggle to repay.
From: The Business of Turning Music Royalties into Growth Capital
What is Michael Bizenov's advice for founders building music finance companies?
Start narrow rather than trying to serve everyone. Sound Royalties began working with only two payors, ASCAP and BMI, then grew gradually to more than 250 as it built expertise and reputation, reinvesting knowledge from each deal instead of expanding too fast.
From: The Business of Turning Music Royalties into Growth Capital
Why does African music generate so little revenue despite huge consumption?
Kenan says consumption across Sub-Saharan Africa is high but monetization lags badly. He forecast a billion-dollar recording market by 2017; thirteen years later it sits at about $110 million, held back by low-paying advertising-based streaming, weak telecom-linked subscriptions and unresolved rights splits.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Why is buying an African music catalog risky?
Catalog buyers face missing contracts, falsified reports and people who surface years later claiming ownership of recordings made decades earlier. Kenan says he was once given a falsified report and has faced rights disputes on other deals, so he now avoids catalogs whose sellers cannot produce paperwork.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Why haven't telecom companies succeeded with their own music platforms?
Telcos control payment and data bundles and have tried repeatedly to launch their own streaming products, but Kenan says none has managed to build a lasting music platform of its own, since users keep gravitating to YouTube and Spotify instead of a carrier's app.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Where would an investor get the best long-term return in African music?
Kenan would split money across catalogs whose audiences have not yet moved to streaming, such as gospel music, artists and songs with genuine export potential, and better marketing and data tools for the wider ecosystem, expecting returns only on a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
What is the difference between owning a song's copyright and owning a writer's share?
The copyright is ownership and control of the song, meaning the right to license it, place it in sync deals and exploit the underlying work. The writer's share is only an entitlement to a portion of the income the song earns, with no control over how it gets used, so it is pure passive income.
From: Music IP Rights — Valuing Catalogs, Due Diligence & The 10-Year Rule
Why does Alan Wallis avoid buying catalogs of songs under ten years old?
He says a song's income needs time to settle to an underlying, predictable level before he can trust it, and until then there is no way to know whether a young song will become an evergreen hit or fade out, so Dynamite Songs treats roughly ten years as its cutoff for a catalog to be credible.
From: Music IP Rights — Valuing Catalogs, Due Diligence & The 10-Year Rule
Why does sync licensing matter so much to a music catalog's value?
Sync is the one part of a catalog's income a rights holder can actively negotiate, since streaming and performance royalties are paid at fixed set rates set by others. Wallis says sync can reach 20 to 40 percent of an older catalog's income when the catalog is broad enough to place several songs regularly with music supervisors.
From: Music IP Rights — Valuing Catalogs, Due Diligence & The 10-Year Rule