, it’s impossible to put a price on the back catalogues of an artist as iconic as Bob Dylan. Except, with private enterprises and record companies recently stepping in to purchase back catalogues in their entirety, it seems you can put a price on such songs, or owning them at least.

This December, Universal Music stumped up a reported nine figures for Dylan’s back catalogue. The deal encompasses six decades of music from the Nobel Prize-winner and has been described by Universal as the “most significant music publishing agreement this century”. According to those close to it, the deal with Universal had been in talks for years, and Dylan had not approached other labels to ‘shop around’ his songs.

Record labels stand to profit by buying back catalogues and earning a revenue whenever a song is streamed, used in an advert or played on the radio. And Universal – valued at €30 billion in a stake sale last year – is not the only player in the game. The UK-based Hipgnosis Songs Fund raised £1.2 billion from investors with which to buy up old hits. To date, it owns 58,000 song rights, including works by Blondie, Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge. It is estimated the company currently owns around a third of Spotify’s 30 most played songs of all time.

To musicians, these sales represent a significant windfall, but it’s a double-edged sword. Publishing rights were often held in reserve for times of dire financial emergency, or passed on to the next generation. So, what’s changed?

The answer is multi-pronged. To begin with, the advent of streaming services such as Spotify, while notorious for paying artists minuscule fees per song stream, has succeeded in bringing older music to a wider audience. Writing for the 

, Nic Fildes explains that streaming services, alongside new social media platforms, are giving under appreciated songs a new audience, and hence, new value. Fildes points to the Fleetwood Mac song 

 which has gained new popularity after being used in a viral video on Twitter and 

. The popularity of the tune, and new interest in the band, must be at least partly responsible for Stevie Nicks selling her song rights to a company called Primary Wave.

“With the advent of Spotify, 30 million records woke up and got a new life,” Amy Thomson, Kanye West’s former manager, told Fildes. “A lot of musicians will have no idea how rich they now are,” added Hartwig Masuch, chief executive of the German music rights company BMG Rights Management, which owns song rights by artists including 

, The Rolling Stones and The Cranberries.

The second reason why so many artists are selling up is that, after decades of declines in CD sales and online piracy, off-loading your back catalogue is a sure-fire way to finally get paid.

According to Hignosis’ own calculations, for ever £1 generated through services such as Deezer, Spotify or Apple Music, 30p will go directly to the streaming service, 58.5p to the label and performer, and 11.5p to the publishing companies.

But, according to sources interviewed by the 

, the value of back catalogues has doubled since 2015 with investors seeing shares in companies like Hipgnosis as something to back. In other words, musicians can sell their catalogues for an up-front payment while companies like Hipgnosis gamble on recuperating that investment through song streams and other usage rights in video games, films and at sporting events, for example.

Nile Rodgers at V Festival 2014. Credit: Drew de F Fawkes


“Great, proven songs have predictable, reliable income. It is better than gold or oil,” Merck Mercuriadis, the 57-year-old co-founder of Hipgnosis told Fildes. By re-modelling the music business, Mercuriadis hopes to turn music shares into an asset class to rival property or traditional stocks.

Hipgnosis certainly seems to be going places. Its 2020 revenue was reported at £65.66 million, perhaps boosted by Covid-19. With the music industry ground to a halt, artists have been desperate for income. For many, without touring, selling their publishing rights was the only viable solution. Hipgnosis has a valuable insight into the musicians psyche in the form of co-founder 

, predominantly known as co-founder of the hugely influential band Chic, and as a record producer in his own right. It just so happens Mercuriadis is also Rodgers’ manager.

Speaking with Music Business Worldwide, Rodgers describes his role with Hipgnosis as an advisor. “I’m the chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame here in the United States, and my long-term goal is to have the role of the songwriter respected as it should be, because we haven’t had a raise in 75 years – and that is outrageous, because without our songs, there is no music industry,” he says.

He echoes Mercuriadis’ opinion that music stocks are “just as viable as gold… possibly more so” and goes on to explain that he believes Hipgnosis to be a safe bet for investors, “Look at the [stock] market right now, and how crazy it is, and it’s going to get worse – and we’re only one point off our [share price] high. And for 49 of our 52 investors, Hipgnosis is their best performing stock. Think about that.”

With Hipgnosis listed on the FTSE 250 Index since March of this year, and with more and more musicians no doubt inspired to follow Dylan’s example and cash in, Rodgers’ evaluation could well be bang on the money.

Of course, companies like Hipgnosis, BMG and their competitors can be seen to be ushering in a brave new world of music management – one in which musicians and publishers get paid – but it is important to remember that the model is still in its infancy. Despite this, the move is not without precedent, of a kind. In 1997 music investment banker David Pullman pioneered a new kind of insurance bond for a slightly more famous David: David Bowie. Dubbed ‘Bowie Bonds’, the asset-backed securities covered current and future revenues for any of Bowie’s 287 songs recorded prior to 1990.

The bonds were bought for $55 million by Prudential, paying an interest rate of 7.9% over ten years. For a cash-strapped Bowie eager to buy back songs owned by his former manager, this was the perfect solution; by forgoing royalties for a decade he received a large up-front sum and when the bonds liquidated in 2007 there was no default and the song rights reverted to Bowie. Under the likes of Hipgnosis, musicians don’t have the option to regain control of their catalogue in a few years (but nor are many musicians as forward-thinking as Bowie was).

The two programmes share one common risk. Shortly after the Bowie Bonds were launched, MP3 streaming came along and tanked their value. This didn’t affect Bowie’s payout, but Prudential can’t have been best pleased with their investment.

We’ve spent the past 20 years talking about how our music industry is ‘in flux’ as musicians and labels seek to work with new technologies. While companies buying back catalogues certainly provides a useful injection of cash to musicians, Brexit and Covid-19 will surely make the future of music more uncertain. For companies like Hipgnosis, this is clearly a gamble. However, like gold, Mercuriadis is confident in music’s inherent value.

“A five-minute song is the only art form that can take you from feeling you want to jump off that [building] to making you feel invincible and that you can take on the world,” Mercuriadis told the 

. And that idea, at least, is something worth buying into.

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