Blog: music catalogue

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

The ghost of the 2000s lingers over the catalogue acquisition market

Kriss Thakrar

23 Jun 2025

Product Strategy

investment

music catalogue

Sign up here for MIDiA’s Masterclass webinar on catalogue investment, this Thursday June 26, 2025, with Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano. In the second quarter of 2025, a range of catalogue acquisition deals have broken the typical mould: Sony acquired Hipgnosis Songs Group from Recognition Musi...

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In generative AI and music, will nice guys finish last?

Tatiana Cirisano

22 May 2024

artificial intelligence

Generative AI

Record labels

Generative AI music company Suno has raised $125 million, one of the biggest music-tech funding rounds in history . Founders say they want to ring in “a future where anyone can make music”, but questions remain over whether Suno and its rival, Udio, have trained their models on copyrighted music...

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Music is not a level playing field — it is a field of all levels

Tatiana Cirisano

18 Aug 2022

Music streaming

Music fandom

fragmented fandom

We have heard it (and said it) many times before: the music industry has never been as competitive as it is today. But the challenge is not just that today’s landscape is ultra-competitive, it is also that new artists chasing success are competing against artists who came up before the landscape b...

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Is the catalogue acquisition market betting tomorrow's success on yesterday's metrics?

Tatiana Cirisano

5 Apr 2022

music industry

music industry investment

music catalogue

The music industry spent $5.3 billion on music catalogue acquisitions in 2021, according to MIDiA's most recent market report , not counting another $6.7 billion that was invested into music companies or music catalogue acquisition funds.

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What the boom in young artist catalogue sales says about the music market

Tatiana Cirisano

11 Feb 2022

music catalogue

music catalogue M+A

Streaming Music

The catalogue-sales boom is one of the most talked about music trends of the past two years. Most of the conversation has, understandably, revolved around aging icons, like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, whose catalogues have fetched hundreds of millions of dollars each.

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Songs are the golden eggs in music catalogues, but who is looking after the goose?

Keith Jopling

20 Jan 2021

Strategy

music catalogue

Marketing

Marketing Long Read Part 1: Catalogue & Song Management It will not have escaped your attention that music catalogues are changing hands for serious sums of money. The race to acquire the songwriters’ share is on, and it is speeding up.

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Music Publishing and the Catalogue Question

Zach Fuller

29 Jul 2019

music catalogue

Music publishing

Recorded music

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Somewhere in a field back in the summer of 2008, Rage Against the Machine used this line as the bridge in their opening song ‘Testify’ during their Friday headline act.

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Yesterday: The Beatles and the Economics of Music Catalogue

Zach Fuller

5 Jul 2019

danny boyle

music catalogue

Music publishing

The release of Yesterday this week, a film about an aspiring musician who one day discovers he is the only person in the world who remembers The Beatles is an interest test-case for catalogue in the streaming era.

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The Limitations of Music Streaming’s Globalising of Revenue

Zach Fuller

12 Apr 2019

music catalogue

Music streaming

Spotify

One of music streaming’s great promises is that it creates a more globalised industry. In many ways it is delivering: revenues are rising in markets previously deemed problematic to conduct business within and domestic markets are now flooding with languages other than English—both in no small p...

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Music Catalogue and Streaming

Zach Fuller

18 May 2018

music catalogue

rhino entertainment

When it comes to the music industry’s transition towards streaming, how the model has worked in the past requires a reconsideration of perspective. This is because throughout the business’s entire history, catalogue and copyright accounted for the majority of revenue, as breaking new artists was...

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