(m+) Investments in music rights: Why Pink Floyd is still worth half a billion dollars today

Enlarge image

Catalog for sale: Pink Floyd in the regular cast with

,

,

and

(✝) at the 2005 performance in London (from left)

Photo: JOHN D MCHUGH/ AFP

Who Gets Pink Floyd's Music?

The British band are in the process of selling the copyrights to their songs as well as the master copies, and a decision should be expected soon.

Industry giants such as Sony Music, Warner Music and the German Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) are among those interested.

But Wall Street is also interested: US investor Blackstone is apparently also involved in the auction.

The possible purchase price makes you sit up and take notice: the music of the band, which was founded in 1965 and some of whose members have already died or have been at odds for many years, is said to be worth up to 500 million dollars.

In 2005, Pink Floyd was last on stage with a regular cast at a reunion in London.

At the time, $500 million would have been unthinkable.

But the music world has changed dramatically since then.

Streaming has practically turned the business inside out.

It is a prime example of disruption: although the sale of individual CDs and, more recently, more and more vinyl records is by no means dead, streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer, Apple and Amazon are now responsible for the vast majority of sales in the industry.

Suddenly money flows every day

Figures published by the global market leader Spotify on its website "Loud & Clear" make this clear: According to this, the music industry around the world achieved almost 17 billion dollars in sales in 2021 from streaming alone than it did in the years 2009 to 2016, i.e. including other sources of income such as CD or record sales.

Industry leader Spotify itself transferred seven billion dollars to music rights holders in 2021 alone.

According to the company, this is more than any single salesperson has ever contributed in terms of sales.

Overall, according to the industry organization IFPI , the sales generated by the music industry worldwide with streaming and sound carriers increased by 18.5 percent to $ 25.9 billion in 2021.

Hartwig Masuch

(68) has witnessed the change in the music business up close, both privately and professionally.

The music manager has been in the business for decades, was on stage with a punk band when he was a student and later worked as a music publisher with Neue Deutsche Welle greats such as

(62) and Extrabreit.

Since 2008, Masuch has been head of BMG, the subsidiary of the Bertelsmann Group, which is the only German company to get really involved in the global music market (sales in the first half of 2022: 371 million euros, an increase of 25 percent compared to the same period last year).

"Ten years ago, if I wanted to hear Pink Floyd's album 'Dark Side of the Moon', I would go to the shelf, get the record and play it," says Masuch.

"This did not create any additional value for Pink Floyd because I had only bought the album once. That has changed with streaming, because music consumption generates new monetization every day, even for works with a long history."

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