A number of pretty important things missing from this article: 1. The administration of publishing rights is often really badly executed. Investors like Hipgno

A number of pretty important things missing from this article: 1. The administration of publishing rights is often really badly executed. Investors like Hipgnosis are really good at finding both historic uncollected revenues and making sure the catalogue is getting very penny it is due. 2. A lot of these investors are not “bankers”. The founder of Hipgnosis is a very shrewd and very successful music industry artist manager. Many of the other acquisitions are by music conglomerates. Eg Sony has spent a huge amount in the past year - hundreds of millions. 3. Aggregated data is hugely powerful in valuing catalogue. 4. Streaming is a market share game. If you have more market share you get a bigger slice of the pie. Streaming revenues from the significant platforms are not based on number of streams directly or minutes listened. 5. There are legislative changes going on just now which could radically shake up the publishers share. 6. A big big issue with publishing revenues revenue leakage and multiple commissions. A Collective Management Organisation handles local royalty collection - and takes a commission for doing so- but before those royalties hit the bank account of the rights holder there may be several other people commissioning. Rights investors can establish direct relationships on a territory level meaning double/triple commissions vanish, vastly increasing the value of the revenue streams. 7. It’s very easy to assign asset value to music rights because there’s a HUGE amount of detailed data. People aren’t simply sticking a finger in the air. 8. I personally believe that publishing rights are undervalued and will increase in value quite significantly as we enter the next phase of music consumption, linked to metaverse/tokenisation/digital fandom. There are huge opportunities around digital artefacts in the decade ahead. If you’d asked me a few months back what I thought about the metaverse and NFTs in the context of music I probably would have said “emperor’s new clothes”. I’ve spent a couple of months doing some pretty detailed research and I now believe there are really significant opportunities opening up. Kids who are 12 years old now - so younger than instagram - are growing up in “blended reality” where physical and digital existence are completely blurred, digital existence is a significant part of identity and physical artefacts may begin to be seen as inconvenient and unwieldy. That opens significant opportunities for digital exploitation of publishing rights. Want an interactive 3d music related artwork for your metaverse space? If that uses lyrics you need a licence.