Two months after launching a $500 million strategic alliance with Spirit Music Group owner Lyric Capital, investment firm Northleaf Capital Partners, via Crescendo Royalty Funding, is preparing to issue nearly $304 million in bonds backed by the catalogs of Tim McGraw, The Who, and more.
Source: Northleaf Capital Unveils $304M Bond Offering Backed by The Who, Tim McGraw catalogs
As catalog sales go, Springsteen’s reported deal tops the nearly $400 million that sources say Universal Music Publishing paid for Bob Dylan’s song catalog late last year, and dwarfs all other recent nine-figure deals. Yet one well-placed source tells Variety that the deal was actually closer to $600 million, although not all sources agree on that figure.
Source: Bruce Springsteen Is Boss With Music Catalog Sale at Half a Billion Dollars — or More?
Tenami is a Chrome extension and Windows package that allows Twitch streamers to ‘stream’ copyrighted movies and TV shows to their users, without actually distributing any copyrighted content. It does this by extending Twitch’s watch party feature to include support for several official streaming services which are synced and seamlessly delivered to Twitch viewers.
Source: Twitch Users Can Now ‘Stream’ Movies & TV Shows Without Fear of DMCA Strikes * TorrentFreak
Six-year-old BandLab announced the multimillion-dollar raise via a release on the website of Caldecott Music Group. BandLab’s parent company, BandLab Technologies, rebranded as Caldecott earlier this month (leaving BandLab Technologies in place as a tech division) and is also the owner of NME, Guitar.com, Uncut, and other news platforms.
A week after filing suit to nullify Maryland’s library e-book law, lawyers for the Association of American Publishers filed a subsequent motion for a preliminary injunction, arguing that if the law is allowed to take effect, AAP members will suffer irreparable harm.
Source: AAP Seeks Preliminary Injunction to Stop Maryland’s Library E-book Law
No-shows, as such concert-goers are called, have increased in significant numbers since the U.S. live-music business restarted this summer, music executives say. For some performances, as many as 20% or more of ticket-buyers were no-shows for major artists like George Strait, the Eagles and Dead & Company, according to industry insiders.
Source: Major Music Acts Are Seeing 20% No-Show Rates at Concerts
In 2015 one might have imagined that the major studios would simply shrivel up and die like so many other market-leading firms in other “disrupted” industries. But they haven’t. And the reason they haven’t reveals a path forward for managers in industries facing digital transformation.
You don’t hear much about a “war on Christmas” this year, but you do hear murmurings about a war on comedy. It’s a loggerheads that has Spotify under scrutiny for removing a significant number of comedy albums from its service, in response to many comics and their reps believing they have a right to the same kind of dual royalties that musicians have always gotten
Source: Are Spotify and the Comedy Community Headed Into Battle? What’s Behind the Faceoff
Hipgnosis Songs Fund (HSF), the UK-listed entity founded by Merck Mercuriadis, now owns a music rights catalog worth over USD $2.5 billion. That’s according to an independent valuation revealed within Hipgnosis’ new interim financial report, covering the six months to end of September 2021.
Source: Hipgnosis Songs Fund now owns a catalog of 65,413 songs… worth a combined $2.55bn
Spotify continues to beef up its audio product arsenal. Today, it announced the acquisition of Whooshkaa, a nearly six-year-old Australian company focused on helping radio broadcasters monetize, edit, and distribute their shows as podcasts. Radio networks will be able to prepare shows for publishing by capturing live broadcasts and using the Whooshkaa tech to edit and remove ads to make room for podcast-only spots.
Source: Spotify’s latest acquisition is about making money off radio shows turned into podcasts