Thoughts.
A selection of our observations on industry trends.
Let’s not put a label on it
An important music industry deal made headlines this past month: Sony Music is acquiring AWAL from Kobalt for $430M. Kobalt is a rights management company long seen as…
The art of artist management contracts
The end to a chaotic 2020 is ushering in a flood of music industry headlines: from Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, and David Crosby selling their songwriting catalogs to the ongoing theatrics…
Ad Supported Video: Proving Skeptics Wrong
While headlines about the media industry are frequently dominated by reports of the “wars” between video subscription services, interesting developments are also transpiring…
Metallica & Market Timing
The end of a wild summer in the financial markets coincided with a music industry release that tipped its hat to another feverish era: 1999…
Advertising spend gyrations
We’ve been observing a healthy debate ripple through our industry: is media advertising spend doomed for a prolonged decline or will the COVID-related uncertainty simply…
Spotify and forced flashbacks of payola
Since the 1930’s, the music industry has battled payola, or the illegal practice of “pay-for-play” between record labels and radio stations, designed to influence airplay…
What would you pay
A thought exercise: what’s the most you would pay for an asset with the following unique characteristics…
Are Music Royalties Actually Uncorrelated?
Over the past couple of years, an unprecedented amount of institutional investor capital has poured into the acquisition of music royalty assets. From private equity firms…
Take this for subscription fatigue
The current buzzword du jour in the media industry is “subscription fatigue”. Accelerating over the past year, but undoubtedly culminating with Apple’s headstrong push into…
Pod Saves the Margin
The media industry kicked off 2019 with a flurry of transformational developments and headlines. While the digital publishing space remained in pain, with major layoffs…
“We’ve been in discussions with Netflix…”
It’s an expression we hear a lot at MEP Capital as we work with amazing content creators to bring their projects to life. The allure of birthing the next Stranger Things or…
Feelings, nothing more than feelings: re-assessing the sentiment of investing in music
Understanding prevailing sentiment of an industry is a critical tool for any investor. Fundamentally, our job is to seek out opportunities that others deem as scary and avoid…
Everybody, go berzerk, get your vinyls!
“Well, CD sales are down, but surprisingly, vinyl is doing really well.” That’s a sentiment we’ve heard time and time again from record labels recently, but at this point, can you…