Blog: 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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 part down to streaming.

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, and remains, an expensive endeavour very much in the VC model of investment, with a few large payoffs accounting for the overall cost.