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Owning Songs

 Interesting reading about how artists used to value their songs and what they do now :

..artists once held on to their song rights until they needed a lump sum, perhaps to pay for a divorce or to ease into retirement when reunion tours were no longer possible. But that is changing rapidly.

When songs turn into an asset class, there will be a new type of money manager who can advise clients on good buys. No reason why ordinary people cannot buy stock of the song, their fortunes rising and falling with the random virality of a Tik-Tok video like the Fleetwood Mac "Dreams" song had happen recently. Which also means that making hits will turn into a for profit venture and the uses of serendipity will correspondingly disappear. The "music business" has been around for a long time but this sounds a lot for removed from art where Tik-Tok is the music taste-maker. 

But even though TikTok acts as a volcano constantly erupting with hit singles, it’s not purely a machine for creating new stars. Chartmetric is one of the first companies to chart TikTok activity, and when the company ranked songs that saw the biggest percentage gain in video count on the app over the last six months of 2019, it found that old songs are as likely to catch on as new releases

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