Why Gold Records Are Like Gold Bullion In These Rocky Times

Gold and multi-platinum records, including golden oldies, are generating more streaming revenue than ever, and music professionals say hot music catalogs will continue to shine even as more traditional investments fade in a rocky and roiling economy.

Music is a good investment in the current climate not only because “digital goods are unaffected by tariffs,” says a report from TD Cowen released earlier this month, but because spending on music streaming is trending up, with a 12% YoY bump in 2024. That upward trend is expected to continue for at least the next two years, says the report.

“It’s been a bull market for music catalogs for a long time, probably longer than a lot of people expected,” said Jeff Biederman, a music business attorney at Greenberg Traurig, who was a recent guest on the Music Law Beat podcast hosted by the author. “Regardless of your political stripe, in rocky times music is an escape valve and it’s probably a great investment now.”

Burnout from nonstop news cycles about all manner of manure hitting fans, may be turning news junkies into music fans, driving increasing demand for feel-good music including golden oldies.

So with Bob Dylan’s sale of his music publishing catalog of some 600 songs to Universal Music Group for more than $300 million in 2020 and Bruce Springsteen’s sale of his song and recording assets for well over $550 million to Sony Music in 2021, we may not have seen “peak catalog sale” yet.

“My personal belief is that we have not reached the peak. We will see other peaks,” Laurent Hubert, CEO of Kobalt Music, told the author. His company’s clients include Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters, among others.

In 2024, global music streams increased by 14 percent over the previous year from 4.2 trillion to 4.8 trillion, with 73.3% being “catalog” music – meaning music more than 18 months old – and only 26.7% of streams being newly released hit songs, According to a 2024 year-end report from Luminate, which provides data for the Billboard music charts.

Old music is killing new music, as evidenced by a scary statistic for any current pop artist or label exec: the 200 most popular new tracks accounted for for less than five percent of total streams in 2022, and that’s down from about 10% three years earlier, according to music industry commentator Ted Gioia.

Gioia blames music executives for the failure of newly released music to rule the record charts, but he fails to point out that some 80% of streams are from music released after 2010. The term “catalog,” as used by Luminate, refers to music released 18 months ago, not 18 years, ago. Music from the 2020s makes up almost 50% of streams, while 1960s music only makes up 0.7% of it, according to the Luminate report.

Gioia writes: “The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true, their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that is exactly what’s happening. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music. How sad is that? Of course, the decision makers need to pretend that they still believe in the future of their business, and want to discover the next revolutionary talent. But that’s not what they really think.”

But was the music industry’s resistance to change any different in the ‘60s than today? Yes, but only during a short window in the mid to late ‘60s when psychedelic rock was blowing up the then-current charts. In the early ‘60s, the Beatles couldn’t get released in the United States until a few rogue DJs played imported singles that caught the ear of the public and forced Capitol to release the Liverpool band’s music Stateside, as detailed in former Columbia Records president Steve Greenberg’s mind-blowing book How the Beatles Went Viral In ‘64. After that, the industry went back to promoting less risky fare, as Gioia correctly points out is the same old story today.

So if most of the music streaming today – almost 80% – is from 2010 and after, why are music catalogs from Dylan, Bowie and Springsteen selling for hundreds of millions of dollars?

Said Hubert on the author’s podcast: “My observation is that more recent repertoire is not subject to the same level of demand [from catalog buyers] as established repertoire … [because it’s more difficult to predict] what the earnings curve on new music will be going forward, and that’s vastly different than if you’re buying an existing repertoire that has a history of decades of earnings, and you have a sense of how this is going to perform going forward. So the complexity around a younger vintage is different, and the dynamics are different, which pushes a lot of buyers away.”

However, Hubert says Kobalt is indeed looking at more recent vintage catalogs “because we have a deep understanding of earning curves, and we feel comfortable doing that in some cases.”

While in past decades there was a stigma around artists selling their catalogs, and the catchline was always “hold onto your publishing,” just as Jim Morrison famously threatened to burn a Buick onstage after the band attempted to license a Doors song to the car maker without his approval, the mind set is vastly different today among many music creators.

Indeed some newer artists are getting nine figures for catalogs that don’t even encompass their whole career, Hubert says. For instance, One Republic frontman Ryan Tedder sold a catalog of his music from recent years to KKR for a reported $200 million in 2021.

Younger superstars believe, more than older iconic artists who are being honest, that they can sell a current catalog and then go on to create a new one with hits that soar even higher out of the ballpark. “They believe, and some of them are making the right bet, that they can do it again,” Hubert says. “So they are taking advantage of the market and essentially capitalizing on what they are building and writing at intervals that are very different than it used to be.”

How the future pans out is uncertain, but in today’s fluctuating rushes and rapids of economic instability, streaming music assets promise investors and rights holders – artists, labels, songwriters and music publishers – gold bullion in the billions.