Articles — song catalogs

While consumers and fans of music know what songs they love, it turns out that big business really loves songs too. Especially song catalogs, which are bundles of songs that an artist created that include rights to exploit them. "Exploit them" means not only deriving the revenue from them when people buy a physical copy, download, or stream of a song, but also revenue from uses of a song in film or television, commercials, video games, and more. In fact, song catalogs have grown from niche music-industry curiosities into mainstream investment assets. Several factors have converged to drive this boom:...