Volume 14, No 2, OCTOBER 2025 Editorial by Peter Tschmuck, pp. 47-48 Shauna-Kaye Brown: The Democratic Financialisaton of the Music Industries: On JKBX and the Assetization of Music Rights, pp. 49-59 Alfred Patrick Addaquay: Challenging the Stigma: A Global Case for Artist Autonomy, Self-Governance and the Manager-as-Employee Model in the Music Industry, pp. 61-82 Tathagata Ganguly: Small, Informal Music Venues Creating Performance Opportunities for Artists in a Minority Lang

While Hatsune Miku‘s voice was still generated by a vocal synthesiser, the voices of today’s music avatars is produced by artificial intelligence. One particularly successful project is “ABBA Voyage”. Using sophisticated technology, avatars of the four ABBA members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were brought to life on stage in London,…

While the first and second generations of virtual musicians required human singers to provide the vocals and studio bands to interpret the music, Vocaloid software, developed by Japanese synthesiser manufacturer Yamaha in the late 1990s, enabled the creation of purely computer-generated voices for the first time. This resulted in the creation of the music avatar…

The rise of generative AI has made it easy to create virtual musicians. Their look can be designed using AI, and the songs they perform and videos they appear in can be created using the right AI tools. However, the concept of virtual artists dates back much further than the recent rise of generative AI…

In the previous four parts (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) of the series on music investment marketplaces, we analysed many different business models, including those that have failed. In this fifth and final part of the blog series, we will summarise the findings from parts 1-4 and assess the economic potential…

JKBX, pronounced like ‘jukebox’, could be a game changer for the music investment markets. Rather than offering low-yield music catalogues from second-tier artists, JKBX sells profit participation rights to royalty streams from valuable catalogues, such as that housing the songs of OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder. By doing this, JKBX links the billion-dollar music rights market…

The second wave of music investment marketplaces started in Europe, particularly in Sweden, from 2021 onwards (for the first start-up wave see part 2 of the series). With Tangy Market, Master Exchange and Anotherblock three new players entered the Swedish market between 2021 and 2023. The wave of new companies continued with Bolero (2021) in…

When SongVest ceased operations in 2013 and Sean Peace started building Royalty Exchange (part 1), the first copycats were trying to establish music investment marketplaces in Europe. Unlike in the United States, it is not possible to sell music rights in most European countries; they can only be licensed to users. This is why big…

The five-part blog series “Follow the Money! Music as a Speculative Commodity” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5), examined the boom in the music rights market, fuelled primarily by large financial corporations. While billion-dollar investments in large music catalogues are only accessible to institutional investors, such as pension funds and…

Private equity projects, in which music catalogues are bought up for millions, could just be a transitional phase towards a new development in which music becomes a speculative commodity. The buzzword is securitisation. This means that financial giants are developing new financial products based on music rights and the income streams they generate. In business…

In part 1 of this blog series, we provided a brief history of the music rights sales boom and demonstrated that private equity firms are the main investors in music catalogues. In part 2, we introduced the key players, including major private equity firms such as Blackstone, KKR, the Carlyle Group, and Apollo Global Management.…

Shamrock Capital Advisors, a private equity company based in Los Angeles, made headlines with the acquisition of Taylor Swift’s first six albums from Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in October 2020. The deal, worth a total of US $405 million, resulted in a significant profit for Scooter Braun. However, Taylor Swift opposed the sale and planned…

In part 1 of the series, we traced the music rights sales boom since 2019. In this part, we will take a closer look at the companies that provide the financial resources to acquire music rights catalogues. These are some of the largest companies in the international financial industry. They include BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, The…

Two years ago, I wrote a blog series called ‘Music as an Investment’, in which I analysed the boom in music rights sales. In it, I highlighted the role of the newly emerging music IPR companies such as BMG Rights Management, Primary Wave, Round Hill Music, Hipgnosis and Reservoir Media Management. They have invested hundreds…

Volume 14, No 1, April 2025 Editorial by Peter Tschmuck, pp. 1-2 Carmen Berné, Manuel Cuadrado-García and Ana Múgica: Exploring the Relevance of Values Generated by Music Organisations in Consumers, pp. 3-11 Pavel Zahrádka, Rostislav Sliwka, Michal Tomčík and Václav Hodonický: Frontline Trenches or, Rather, Open Borders? The Multi-Territorial Licensing and Digital Export of Czech…

Volume 13, No 2, October 2024 Editorial by Peter Tschmuck, pp. 33-34 Fabian Cannizzo, Catherine Strong, Shelley Brunt: Australian Music Business Managers’ Views of Working with and Supporting Birth Parents After Career Breaks, pp. 35-48 Tim Kelly: Down, and Under Pressure: The Decline of Local and Non-Anglo Best-Selling Recording Artists in Australia 2000–2023, pp. 49-62…

The term “breakage” dates back to a time when records were made of shellac and could break during transport. Of course, a label could no longer sell these records, and so clauses were included in the label contracts at the time to ensure that breakage was not considered when calculating the artists’ share. However, the…

In addition to the pro-rata and user-centric models discussed in detail in part 14 , there are other alternative approaches to...

In addition to the pro-rata and user-centric models for distributing music streaming revenues, which were highlighted in part 15 , a...

As we saw in part 14 of the series on the streaming economy , most music creators receive so little revenue from streaming music that it...