With the 3rd annual RightsTech Summit approaching, RightsTech co-founder Paul Sweeting was interviewed by the Copyright Clearance Center‘s Christopher Kenneally for CCC’s Beyond the Book podcast.
Sweeting and Kenneally discuss the growing investor appetite for rightstech companies, the emergence of securitized rights and royalties as a financial asset class, data and transparency, and plans for the RightsTech Summit.
“What’s happened in the last two decades at an accelerating pace has been a transformation of the primary mode of consumption from one based on ownership to one based on access,” Sweeting noted. “What that’s done to the media businesses and rights-owning businesses is it’s fundamentally changed how they make money. They no longer sell or they no longer predominantly sell copies of things. They have recurring revenue streams resulting from licensed access. That recurring revenue stream model has meant recurring payout obligations to those media companies.”
Where you have recurring revenue streams, Sweeting explained, “you have a measure of predictability of the returns on rights, because you can measure the recurring revenues and make projections with a reasonable degree of confidence as to what those revenue streams will be five years out, 10 years out. So where you have a measure of predictability in returns, essentially rights are becoming something like a financial asset class in their own right, because investors are always looking for predictability of returns.”
The full podcast is embedded below, but is also available on CCC’s website, and on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher Radio.
The full transcript is available here.