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Guest Essay
By Marc Hogan
Hogan is a freelance writer, journalist, and critic.
Does that song sound familiar on your phone, on the radio, or in videos?Private equity—the industry responsible for bankrupting businesses, cutting jobs, and increasing death rates in the nursing homes it acquires—makes money by gobbling up rights beyond successes and re-injecting them into our present. The result is a decidedly bland music scene, as financiers cannibalize the afterlife at the expense of the long term and make it even harder to create new artists whose contributions enrich our entire culture.
Take Whitney Houston’s 1987 hit, “I Want to Dance With Someone (Who Loves Me),” which was purchased in late 2022 in a $50 million to $100 million deal through Primary Wave, a music publisher subsidized by two private equity firms. The song was recently rebooted in our collective hippocampus through a film about the singer, titled, naturally, “I Need to Dance With Someone,” which helped propel the song and its collection of hits. Primary Wave, which has signed various deals with artists or their estates that would possibly come with publishing rights, symbol rights, and revenue streams due to recorded music, also helped introduce a signature Whitney Houston flavor and a non-fungible token based on an unreleased Houston recording.
Buying the rights to a shown hit, dusting it off, and disguising it as a movie would possibly impress at a shareholder conference, but it does nothing to contribute nothing to a sustainable and colorful music ecosystem. Like farmers struggling to get through the winter: Think of some other industry being turned upside down because of personal justice: we eat our artistic corn seeds.
Private equity firms have poured billions of dollars into music, believing it to be a reliable and developing source of income. Investors spent $12 billion on music rights in 2021 alone, more than in the entire decade before the pandemic. While this is a bit pocket cash for an industry with $2. 59 trillion in uninvested assets, the investments were welcomed by music veterans as a sign of confidence for an industry still in a streaming-led rebound after a dark decade and a half. Lost travel revenue and concerns about tax increases have made many artists, including Stevie Nicks and Shakira, for selling their catalogs, some for millions of dollars.
How big is the Wall Street acquisition?The next time you pay attention to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” on Spotify or Apple Music, fill the wallet of personal investment companies Carlyle, Blackstone, and Eldridge. A portion of royalties from Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” will go to Apollo. As for Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” hey, it doesn’t matter which one turns you on, but it’s cash. the money for HPS Investment Partners.
Like major Hollywood studios that continue to churn out videos tied to already popular products, the new music overlords are exploiting their acquisitions by building expansive media universes around songs, many of which were Cold War hits; Think concerts with holographic versions of songs long gone. videos, musicians, TV links, and brilliant celebrity biographies. While big money is bringing those old songs back into our cultural consciousness, artists in the lower echelons find themselves scrambling for algorithmic remnants, and music streaming giant Spotify recently scrapped bills for songs with fewer than 1,000 annual streams.
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