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.
I believe negotiated rates are often lower than compulsory rates, for a variety of reasons I couldn't begin to fully comprehend except in the abstract.
This may be less true in the digital streaming realm, but it's hard to tell through all the rhetoric.
Makes sense given that making new music is easier than ever before—the people who do it for the love of music are probably already making good-enough recordings on a shoestring. Just look at Vulfpeck: they've had massive success just doing everything themselves.[0]
What have the labels got to compete with talented artists with a few grand of equipment in their bedroom? A bunch of commercially-minded manufactured acts pumping out me-too crap while countless layers of expensive executives and expensive "experts" polish away anything human from the art? Labels used to be successful because making recordings was expensive. Then it was because they held the keys to distribution and radio. Now it's... what?
There's a couple of BIG qualifications on your comments.
1) Vulfpeck slid through the YouTube music window about 2010-2012 that has since closed (that also produced Beiber, Jepsen, Psy with "Gangnam Style" etc.).
2) Vulfpeck were the backing musicians for Darren Criss who was very much a product of the standard system.
3) They are probably the antithesis that making new music is easier. They save a LOT of money because they can get away with doing minimal production because they are SOOO smoking good.
If you have to be at the level of Vulfpeck to make a living making music, then basically nobody is going to be able to do so.
I only mention Vulfpeck because they're at the pinnacle of their genre, not because they're the threshold. There's plenty of opportunity for anyone. Look at akageorge. (If you can—previously known as George Barnett, he seems to have reset his identity and thrown away much of his earlier material.) He's a self-evidently brilliant musician who can write and perform every part of a radio-ready hit. To the extent anyone makes money in music, he could make it if he bothered.
That guy is talented, but those songs aren't radio-ready hits. In large part because the music/recording is nowhere near the major part of what makes a radio ready hit. Radio hits are the result of advertising and marketing, not music creation and production.
Expensive marketing is effective for established acts that already have an existing audience—whether that be international superstars like Coldplay or relative newcomers like London Grammar.
But it's also true that traditional marketing is becoming increasingly less relevant for new acts. New music discovery used to be driven by radio, media and advertising. Those gatekeepers are now being challenged by algorithms and social media—and there's no sign of that trend slowing down yet.
———
To my original point: making music is now an order of magnitude cheaper than it was just a few decades ago. And venues where an act to break out are more accessible than ever. I'm not saying the industry is now or ever will be perfectly egalitarian, but the distance travelled is monumental.
I don't know why this is being downvoted, this is an excellent question. it's commonly known that companies/stocks are priced using all available information thus an advantage the company may have is already priced in, hence why some highly successful companies trade at very high PEs.
Replace “market” with “herd” and you already have an advantage over them. If EMH was really a thing, then everyone would stop investing period and index funds would rule the world. Clearly they’re not.
I like the concept. I believe the value of back catalogs will only increase. As they increasingly corner the market, there should be a corresponding value increase in stock. What's not to like?
The thing not to like is the current stock price, because everything that you like about it will have already been analysed in deep detail by the market, and priced in.
By investing in a public company, you are saying “I think the market is wrong about the potential for this company”, and I’m curious to know why you think that having read this public piece, you think the company is currently undervalued? The shares are at £109 — what price do you think they should be really?
Very similar to the attitude I take with sports betting (legal in my country). You don't bet on who you think will win, you bet on who is paying odds that don't reflect your view on the event. I only bet relatively small sums and I don't bet very often (since I don't often find odds that seem poorly priced) but I've won way more than I've lost.
If you see a coin on a street aggressively patrolled by hundreds of people whose fulltime job is searching for dropped coins, you’re better off assuming it’s not a coin
It's delusional you think you are the best person in the area at something you haven't put any effort into. Especially when the area is the whole world economy.
>everything that you like about it will have already been analysed in deep detail by the market, and priced in.
This sounds like some religious creed, with dogmatic status. You do realise that The Market, hallowed be its name, is just people, and people are (often) wrong. The recent high profile news about wework should be a great example of this, or indeed any regular observation of our world.
He just thinks the stock is going to go up in the future, based on his observations. What's so strange about that?
Boring. The word is boring. Boring companies whose stock prices do nothing for 30 years but gently drift up and down with the market (or not), steadily yielding 5% dividends year after year. Usually they sell things like toilet paper, soap, electricity or other boring everyday things. When it comes to long term investing, boring is good.
This analysis is definitely wrong, it's discussed in textbooks too. You need to seriously, properly consider the risk of the investment, and if your model of the stock price is that it gently drifts with the market while yielding 5%, then that's just wishful thinking on your part.
> Boring companies whose stock prices do nothing for 30 years but gently drift up and down with the market (or not), steadily yielding 5% dividends year after year. ... When it comes to long term investing, boring is good.
The S&P 500 has pretty consistently had yields of 10-15% over the last 100 years. It makes more sense to invest in a "boring" ETF that follows the market making 10% than a "boring" stock that yields 5%.
> I like the concept. I believe the value of back catalogs will only increase. ... What's not to like?
Termination rights. In the 1970s, a new copyright bill was enacted that said that 35 years after the creation of a work, the ownership of that work automatically reverts back to the original creator. The idea behind the proposal was to give artists control of their works later in their career, when they may no longer be a pop sensation, kind of like a retirement account.
For example, Lady Gaga may be super popular right now, but roughly around 2050, she will automatically regain the rights to her original recordings. She can then resell those rights to someone else, generating an additional bit of income later in life.
So as an investor, if you buy up the rights to a bunch of works, you need to know that your ownership has an expiration date.
Are you sure Lady Gaga and other corporate pop stars own the copyright to songs they sing? I'd expect these huge team projects to have corporate copyright.
> Are you sure Lady Gaga and other corporate pop stars own the copyright to songs they sing? I'd expect these huge team projects to have corporate copyright.
Lady Gaga almost certainly sold all of her rights to her label, a corporate entity, when she was signed. However, because of termination rights, 30 years later, that contract will lapse, reverting the rights back to the original artists. If 20 people created the Lady Gaga song, then it will revert back to all 20 of them jointly, and if a label wants to buy the rights, it will need to make deals with each one individually.
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.