Composium Digest: Level up
№33 | Anouk Dyussembayeva | April 19, 2022
Composium Digest is a newsletter-only addition delivered once a week. Get overviews of interesting stories happening in the music industry, stay informed of various opportunities music startups and companies offer and catch up on some of the Composium articles you might have missed.
The catalog craze is leveling up
Wall Street has been buying up catalogs and investing in music industry-related assets for some time now.
Concord is raising the bar and challenging the wolves by selling itself — and it wants a lot of money.
The company, whose primary business revolves around catalogs, had its advisers talking in $6 billion for the sale. While Concord received a number of offers, it still won’t budge as it’s set on getting that predicted $5-6 billion.
What makes this case interesting, as Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw writes, is that this is an unusual notion in the music industry: the “seller … wants more than a buyer will pay.”
Whether or not Concord sells for the price they originally hoped for remains unclear, given the current state of the global economy. That doesn’t matter as much though, since the situation is signaling a new era for the industry.
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Metaverse + music + gaming + virtual = ?
All of the major artists, from Justin Bieber and Marshmello to Travis Scott and Lil Nas X, have participated in a virtual concert experience of some sort. Whether that be Fortnite or Roblox, all of the main gaming companies have served as platforms for these events.
For many, this was a chance to share this experience with their favorite celebrity for the first time. Now, thanks to the metaverse and web3, this is slowly becoming a reality. Even though we’re slowly going back to pre-pandemic live performances, concerts are never going to be the same. Welcome to a new era of the music industry.
Rolling Stones notices that this isn’t the first time we’re seeing artists experiment with the virtual world — some have been doing it as early as 2005. But gaming platforms have pushed it further, developing spaces never created before.
There’s another advantage of partnering with them too: it allows popstars to reach a younger audience. As per Deloitte’s 2021 Digital Media Trends survey, Gen Zers claim video games to be their “No.1 entertainment activity”, with 87% of them playing weekly and even daily.
While some argue that this opportunity is currently open to only the top 1% of artists, services such as Genies and MetaHumans are accelerating the process. Add that to the whole metaverse talk and that becomes a very possible scenario where all musicians can participate within the next decade or so.
As I wrote before, we’re going to be seeing a lot of music x gaming partnerships. Now that Epic bought Bandcamp — both are giants in each of their respective industries — the lines are becoming even more blurred... the metaverse, NFTs, and web3 are catalyzing the process.
The seed is sprouting (who raised a round)
P. Diddy invested in Proto, Inc. The holoportation company just raised a Series A funding round of $12 million, with investors ranging from Quavo to Tim Draper
Stats
Latin music maintains its steady growth, aggregating a historic revenue of $886 million for 2021
Deloitte says that around half of US gamers in their 2022 survey regularly find new music while playing games
Other links to check out
HYBE’s Bang Si-hyuk explains the BTS phenomenon and the company’s next steps