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Artists selling their music-rights

Annita

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The number of artists selling their music rights is really inflationary. Turner, Timberlake, Jagger, Dylon, Guetta, Motley Crue, Collins with Genesis, Shakira, Springsteen, the Estates of Bowie and James Brown and the next will probably Bieber.
Isn't that strange. The pandemic, which brought great loss of income for the artists, is generally cited as the a reason again. Especially with younger artists like Bieber, it seems to me to be incredibly short-sighted. It's a big cash sum at first, but certainly not the value that his rights will bring him for decades to come.
What do you think about this developement?
 
Don't really understand the Bieber thing - it seems too early for him to be doing it and $200m is a drop in the ocean. He seems to be having cash flow problems so maybe that's why.

For legacy artists I can see why they'd do it. They lost loads of touring income during the pandemic, obvs. In some countries - well, the US - they can get some great tax benefits if they flog their music rights and get a big lump sum. If they wanna divide their assets amongst their kids a big lump sum is easier to divide than annual royalties. I did read somewhere that some artists have sold their rights for up to 25x - 30x the value of their annual royalties but not sure if that applies to all of them or just the lucky few.

I think the whole thing of physical sales vs. digital has got something to do with it but I'm fuzzy on the details.

Maybe the lump sum makes it easier to decide what investments you wanna make. Annual royalties are not 100% predictable.

But there's clearly a benefit or so many of them wouldn't be doing it. Whether it makes sense only for legacy artists and not younger ones I'm not sure.
 
I always wonder what the companies buying the publishing and/or master recordings are getting out of it. I don't see how they can make their money back. Maybe it would make more sense when more of the mainstream audience were still buying records, tapes, & CDs. But artists today make very little from streaming & downloading. It's the streaming services and maybe the record labels that are making the money.

Most popular artists have only a few songs that companies would want to use for licensing for commercials, movies, TV shows, stage plays, etc. In the same way oldies radio stations & classic rock radio mostly play a few songs from an artist over & over, no matter how many hits they have. There's many artists & old hits that do not get any airplay at all today. Also, what can the purchasing companies do with the songs that were never hits and just album tracks? That is part of what they are buying. Or odd/avant-garde songs like Revolution 9 by The Beatles, few if any singers/bands are going to cover or sample that kind of material. Contestants on American Idol/The Voice are not going to perform it either. šŸ˜ Also it was more common decades ago for many artists to record the same songs. So the songwriters and/or publishing companies could make a lot more money, especially if the different versions became popular hit singles or contained on a well selling album, even if it wasn't a single. The majoriy of hits today (in the USA) are hip hop songs, which are generally not remade, unless you count Youtube covers.
 
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