From The Baffler, March 15:
I first heard about Hipgnosis from a pal of mine, who spent a long afternoon late last year being chased around the internet by Miley Cyrus. Specifically, her cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” He laughed it off at first, but as Miley returned for the third, fourth, and fifth go-round on YouTube’s “Next Up”—razzing him with that infamously long and sinuous tongue—he began to feel like the joke was on him. When ads for the song appeared on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, bemusement gave way to panic: it seemed that no matter where he fled she would follow him, “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” demanding that he subject himself to her brayed imitation of a fossilized pop standard.
My friend, whose music taste is (in his own words) “extremely Gabber-centric,” swears there was nothing in his browsing history that could account for this bizarre affliction. So what was going on? Some kind of glitch in the algorithm? Once he had regathered his wits, a little frantic googling yielded an intriguing discovery. The rights to “Heart of Glass”—as well as the other 196 songs in Blondie’s oeuvre—had just been purchased by an organization calling itself Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited. Coincidence? Well, as Blondie told us back in 1979, accidents never happen in a perfect world.
Founded in 2018 by former Sanctuary Records executive Merck Mercuriadis and Nile Rodgers from Chic, Hipgnosis is a UK-based investment fund that treats songs as financial assets. This means raising capital to buy the rights to songs from the people who wrote them, then doing whatever it takes to increase the value of said songs for their new owners, in this case the shareholders of Hipgnosis, many of whom are some of the UK’s biggest asset management firms. Music copyright is a notoriously knotty business, but from the fund’s perspective, owning song rights allows them to do two things. First, to passively collect the royalties that accrue every time the song is digitally streamed or featured in a TV show, film, or advertisement. Second, to actively market their songs to advertisers and producers, as well as to sanction new covers and remixes by pop megastars. To Hipgnosis, these two activities form a virtuous circle. Having acquired a musical property, Hipgnosis is incentivized to squeeze it for all it’s worth: more placements mean more streams. More streams generate more royalties for Hipgnosis, thereby increasing the return yielded by its assets, boosting its share price, and making more money for its investors. This is what Mercuriadis and his colleagues call “song management.” As he puts it, “We treat every song as if it was a business in its own right.”
"Hipgnosis, for all its bombastic claims of benevolent disruption,is really just a parasite feeding on a parasite."And as of late, Hipgnosis has been on a helluva buying spree. In January, they purchased the rights to the music of Colombian pop singer Shakira, 50 percent of Neil Young’s catalogue, as well as Jimmy Iovine’s production royalties from albums by U2, Dire Straits, Tom Petty, and others. Hipgnosis holds an interest in music by Ed Sheeran, Timbaland, and Barry Manilow. They own slices of “Uptown Funk,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Super Freak,” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” (Part-ownership is less than ideal for Hipgnosis, since it restricts their ability to arrange covers and synchs, but the fund is quite happy to passively accrue royalties when the numbers are big enough.) All told, they’ve spent over $1.67 billion to build a stash of nearly fifty-eight thousand songs, including 2,845 chart-toppers. Between April and September of last year, their net income was just over $62 million—and, for now, that figure seems set to grow....
....MUCH MORE
