Good morning. It’s Thursday, August 13, and Culture builds up value gradually, whereas finance assigns a price all at once. A song passes on to a new generation, a team wins another championship, and a founder turns an audience into a lasting consumer business. The key issue is who holds on to sufficient ownership so as to take part in all the possible developments of the asset. The essay highlighted today makes the case, using the reported $12.5 billion sale of the Lakers, that outstanding music catalogs should be given the same amount of patience as exceptional sports teams. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, and over nearly fifty years, thanks to championships, stars, and cultural memory, this investment has become an asset whose history no other buyer can recreate. Likewise, the best music catalogs have this same quality in that each sample, sync, anniversary, and rediscovery contributes an additional season to their record.
The issue today also includes a discussion of control. Beyoncé has now bought up LVMH’s share in SirDavis, changing a partnership that had previously provided the early infrastructure into full ownership of the company, which she helped to make valuable. The agreement between BMG and Suno brings in another decision regarding ownership, allowing artists and songwriters to decide individually whether their work can be used as training material for artificial intelligence. One of the stories is about the patience needed in order to retain an irreplaceable asset, another is about the capital necessary to regain one, and the third is about the consent that must be obtained before an asset can be used in a completely new market. Taken together, they demonstrate that cultural value exerts its greatest influence when the people who are closest to its creation keep the power to decide what happens next.
The Lakers Could Teach Us How to Save Music Catalogs
The Lakers are once again changing hands. It has been agreed between Josh Kushner and Bob Iger to take over the team at a reported valuation of $12.5 billion, a figure that is about a year after Mark Walter’s valuation of $10 billion. The amount alone means that this is one of the largest transactions in the world of sports, but the history associated with the team provides an even more relevant lesson for the music industry. Jerry Buss purchased the Lakers as part of a $67.5 million deal in 1979, and then his family held on to the team for nearly fifty years through the era of Showtime, Magic Johnson, Shaq and Kobe, LeBron James, and ten championships during the period of Buss’s ownership. Each of those eras generated revenue and added another layer to the cultural memory which no subsequent buyer could ever recreate. Kushner and Iger are especially noteworthy as buyers because their careers have been based on this principle of compounding. Iger was responsible for transforming Disney into a repository of lasting cultural intellectual property through his work with Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, while Kushner’s Thrive Capital has invested in companies such as Spotify, Instagram, Stripe, and OpenAI. The investment vehicle called Thrive Eternal was created specifically to own iconic brands and cultural assets without having a set exit timetable.
People who own music catalogs should note that final point. The way catalog finance currently works is to calculate what an asset is worth today: buy it at one multiple, improve its administration and licensing, increase cash flow, and then exit at a higher valuation. A successful sale can deliver a very good return even while giving up the most valuable years of a remarkable asset. Excellent songs continue to generate income as they accumulate samples, syncs, anniversaries, references, new listeners, and historical significance, so time itself can act as productive capital. Think about selling the Lakers after the Showtime era, since the return had already been extraordinary; the seller would have made a lot of money and would have given up all that the team achieved afterward. The same consideration should apply to music: before deciding what multiple you can obtain today, you should consider whether you will ever be able to buy the catalog back. In the case of truly irreplaceable catalogs, the best way to exit might be not to exit at all.
In September 2024, Beyoncé launched SirDavis, an American rye whisky named after her great-grandfather Davis Hogue, a moonshiner during the Prohibition era, and she wasn’t working on it by herself. The brand was set up as a joint venture with Moët Hennessy, the spirits and wine division of LVMH, which provided her with the one thing that almost no celebrity spirits brand can create from the ground up – the distribution network and travel-retail presence that are already used to get Hennessy and Dom Pérignon into every duty-free shop around the world. This week, she purchased out her partners. On August 10 in Paris, LVMH confirmed the sale, without revealing the price, the amount of shares involved, or the valuation, and the company’s statement included the point that is important, namely that Knowles-Carter now has full ownership and control of the brand, so that SirDavis becomes a company which is owned by a woman, a family, and is Black-owned.
This is not just a minor point concerning alcoholic drinks since she has already taken control of it twice. Her haircare brand, Cécred, had followed a similar pattern: it had been launched with the support of an established partner in order to reduce the risks during the early stages, and then the business was fully taken over by the founder when it no longer needed that support. The timing makes this even clearer. Moët Hennessy has been reorganizing in response to weak demand for Cognac and Champagne, and when the intermediary is under pressure on margins and the founder has both the capital and the determination, the business is transferred to the founder. She didn’t purchase a whisky brand this week; instead, she bought the equity in a business for which she had already built up the customer base at the time her partner had reasons to sell it.
Sources: Billboard, WWD, The Drinks Business
BMG was the first of the major rights holders since Warner to enter into a licensing agreement with Suno, which was announced on August 12, covering both its recorded music and its publishing catalog of more than three million songs—this roster includes artists such as Jason Aldean and Jelly Roll as well as publishing rights associated with Mick Jagger, Bruno Mars, and John Legend. Suno is paying an amount that has not been disclosed; the deal resolves previous uses of BMG’s works and is part of a new label-supported model that will be launched later this year. The key point in the announcement is that it is an opt-in arrangement: BMG’s artists and songwriters must actively decide to have their work used for training and for the music that Suno users produce, and only those who choose to opt in will receive payment.
The entire matter can be summed up in that clause since it shifts the question of ownership from the company to the individual and implies that the value of the deal is equal to its participation rate, a figure which no one is making public. The catalog is no longer simply a collection of songs which generate streaming royalties; it has become a dataset, and this agreement is the means by which that dataset is valued, one artist’s consent at a time. According to Music Ally, gaining the artists’ agreement has proven to be a real difficulty, with their responses ranging from cautious interest to outright refusal, the firmest one being that of Madonna, whose manager stated clearly that she will never permit her music to be used for training. Each rights holder who signs one of these is carrying out the same experiment: discovering what a corpus of human-made music is worth when it is used as an input by a machine that produces more of it.
Sources: Billboard, Music Business Worldwide, Music Ally, Variety
IN THE KNOW
Music
Steve Lacy announced the 27-date Oh Yeah? North American tour, his first headline run since 2022, opening September 27 in Minneapolis and hitting Radio City, Red Rocks, and the Hollywood Bowl. Four years off the road and he goes straight to marquee rooms, which is what durable demand looks like when an artist lets it compound instead of chasing it. (Rolling Stone)
Jamila Woods announced a six-date tour marking the tenth anniversary of her debut Heavn, opening November 16 in Los Angeles and closing December 6 in her hometown of Chicago. Reactivating a decade-old record as a live event is the clearest sign that a catalog’s value lives in the room, not just the stream. (Stereogum)
Artists & Releases
Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats announced II, the sequel to 2018’s Unlocked, led by “Difference” featuring Yebba. Reuniting a producer-and-rapper pairing under a numbered title is a catalog move as much as a creative one, building a franchise fans already know how to value. (Stereogum)
Cleo Sol announced her fifth album Gentlewoman, continuing the quiet self-released cadence that has defined her run. The release date is disputed across listings, which for an artist this deliberate is usually a feature of the rollout rather than a mistake. (Complex)
Shaboozey’s concept album The Outlaw Cherie Lee debuted across multiple Billboard charts, extending the country-rap crossover lane he opened last year. Landing a narrative album on several charts at once is how an artist converts a one-hit moment into a durable format. (Billboard)
Business & Legal
Nielsen agreed to take ad-verification firm DoubleVerify private for about $2.15 billion in cash, a 30 percent premium, with the combined company projected to clear $4 billion in revenue. Measurement is consolidating into a single stack right as AI floods every channel with content that needs verifying, which is the pick-and-shovel play on the whole synthetic-media problem. (Variety)
Warner Music posted fiscal Q3 revenue of $1,864 million, up 9 percent reported and 11 percent adjusted, with subscription streaming up 12 percent and operating cash flow more than tripling to $142 million. The growth came from contractual wholesale price increases now covering most of subscription revenue, which means the easy pricing lever is nearly fully pulled and next year’s story has to come from somewhere else. (Billboard)
Technology & AI
Google’s Gemini crossed one billion monthly users. Distribution at that scale is the moat in consumer AI, and it reframes every music-and-AI licensing fight as a negotiation with platforms that already own the audience. (TechCrunch)
Twitch added a setting letting streamers opt out of having their streams, clips, and chat used to train Amazon’s generative AI, with the toggle switched on by default. A platform setting the default to yes and making the creator go find the off switch is the opt-out mirror of every artist-consent fight in music right now. (TechCrunch)
Industry & Policy
YouTube will double its Partner Program monetization requirements starting February 2027. Every distribution platform is tightening the gate between making content and getting paid at once, and the creator tier is where that squeeze shows up first. (Hypebeast)
Google’s Gemini crossed one billion monthly active users, its fastest product ever to hit the mark. (TechCrunch)
Vic Mensa launched The Vic Mensa Show, a weekly podcast premiering August 26 with Chance the Rapper as its first guest. (Billboard)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard shared “Kill for the Steel,” the third single from their 28th album Alien Metal. (Stereogum)
Adidas’s fully 3D-printed Climacool Laced sneaker takes roughly 24 hours to print, layer by layer, with no mold joins. (Yanko Design)
Ryan Hemsworth signed to Topshelf and announced Numbskull, his first solo album since 2018. (Stereogum)
Metallica release Metallica, the “Black Album,” which becomes their best-selling record and spawns five hit singles (1991)
Woodstock ‘94 opens at Winston Farm in Saugerties, New York, twenty-five years after the original (1994)
Prince plays his first-ever UK concert, opening a sold-out three-night run at Wembley Arena with The Revolution (1986)
The Moscow Music Peace Festival is held at Lenin Stadium, among the first times Western rock bands were permitted to perform in the Soviet Union (1989)
Lionel Richie closes the Los Angeles Summer Olympics with a nine-minute rendition of “All Night Long” (1984)
"The future of AI in music will be defined by whether artists and songwriters remain at the center of the opportunity and share in the value it creates. Choice is the guiding principle."
— Celine Joshua, EVP of Global Marketing & Streaming, BMG
Behind the Name. Flashlight exists to point light at the mechanics underneath culture: the deals, the incentives, and the systems that decide what gets made and who gets paid. The value is in the thinking.
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