Hi all - sending you this article from Paris!
Met a RTC reader in Paris. Thanks for the picture Antoine!
October is gearing up to be a busy month with in-person events across ETA/indy sponsor dinner, AI for PE workshops, and trip to Dallas around MGW Conference. Plus, exciting job opportunities keep coming our way to share with you all…
Scroll to the mid-section for upcoming events and job opportunities in ETA.
Before we dive into this week’s topic,
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State of Play
This past July, Sony Music and GIC (Singapore's sovereign wealth fund) paid ~$4 billion (estimated) for 45,000 songs catalogue owned by Recognition (backed by Blackstone). That’s a lot of money and a lot of songs, which included shares of "Don't Stop Believin'", "Single Ladies", and "All I Want for Christmas Is You."
(And yes, this means you’ve been paying private equity every time you’ve streamed music).
Aside from the novelty of investing in music, what we can glean from music rights roll up:
1/ Aggregation alone doesn’t add (lasting) value
2/ Financial engineering is (often) temporary
Private equity has been called out for the 2021/2022 asset aggregation cycle, and in our opinion, Hipgnosis is an example of how gathering assets on financial engineering isn't a lasting strategy.
Let's dive in.