Justin Bieber Just Sold His Entire Music Catalog And Why Companies Are Eager To Strike These Deals

Dylan had something to say and said it via writing his own music. Bieber had nothing to say, said nothing, and had everything written for him based on its commercial viability. The two of them couldn't be any more different. One is, at his core, an artist. There other is a businessman.

 

Probably depends on the song. I mean there might be lots of true 50-50 songs -- like "I Wish You Would" started from a guitar riff of his -- and other songs that maybe she had basically done that he didn't add as much to. I'd be surprised if they have a fixed arrangement for percentages but maybe they just split their pieces of the songs equally -- and of course some of their co-written songs have another collaborator so a different mix on those too. In terms of what he makes as a producer, that's probably a separate arrangement.

As to the acoustic "Anti Hero" versions, I didn't think that much of either. I think stripped down, the song reveals its musical shortcomings. It's definitely a song that works better with a rhythm and arrangement for me. But, as you know, while I'm a big fan of Swift's, I'm not a big fan of Antonoff. And you know, he had a big hit on Bleachers and he did the wonderful "Brave" with Sara Barielles which was a smash before he started working so heavily with Swift, so it's not like he was an industry piker at that point.

 

Adding to @chervokas's comments --

There are a number of very-well funded companies competing to buy music catalogues - Hipgnosis, Concord, Round Hill, Primary Wave, among others. The major labels have also become very interested in buying music catalogues. There is a lot of interest in consolidating catalogues, as the players think they can do more with a diverse, large catalogue of music. Even these music rights companies are buying each other to consolidate holdings, like Hipgnosis buying Kobalt. With lots of capital pouring into these companies, from private equity funds, pension funds or whatever, they are sitting on huge amounts of money to spend. The valuations on catalogues are going up because it's basically turned into a bidding war among the players all wanting to consolidate a bigger library of rights than the other guy. In many ways, it makes more sense to think of these players as private equity funds, rather than securitization firms.

A lot more stuff gets bundled, and sold off to investors, than many people realize: student loans, credit cards, equipment financing loans. Most forum members probably also have some retirement savings in ETFs, which bundle together a bunch of different public company stock. Music rights are based on some asset of value, whereas crypto is not based on anything underneath. All bundled assets are speculative to some degree: people default on student loans and credit cards. Although music rights are more speculative than loans in being able to map out what future revenue streams will be like, but not necessarily more than if you invest in a fund that covers the S&P 500 stocks or some industry group of stocks. The subprime mortgage crisis was built on bad assets, loans made to people who should never have been allowed to take out a mortgage in the first place, who signed up for low interest rates that changed to absurdly high interest rates they could never pay off, and a lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise how bad those loans were.

 

Not to stray too far off topic, but one of the things that happened in the '08 collapse was that the insatiable market for securitizations among funds and ibanks, the removal of risk for loan originators when they were selling mortgages immediately into securitizations (which led to lax risk assessments), drove lenders to push more and more high interest rate mortgages. There was a kind of set of perverse incentives that developed (also the belief that these CDOs and CLOs with this magic mix of higher and lower risk mortgages were so low risk in the aggregate that there was no danger in pile up so much leverage and so credit default swaps on top of it). I think the subprime mortgage crisis was more build on a dream at the top they they had immunized themselves from risk by virtue of these products and derivatives (when I ironically they were piling up so much risk that it was a house of cards), and that drove the excessive subprime mortage lending rather than the subprime mortgage lending really being the root cause of the crisis.

As to the market for music rights (and all kinds of media rights), yup, having a lot of players and so much cheap money (which suddenly isn't quite as cheap anymore) chasing a fixed collection of assets, especially the highest quality assets, obviously has driven up the valuations for these copyright bundles in the media biz. Good time to be a seller.