A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song
When Mercuriadis was eight, an older cousin arrived from Greece to live with his family in Nova Scotia and brought with him a stack of records. “He knew everything about girls, he knew everything about drugs, and he knew an awful lot about music,” Mercuriadis says. “And I become interested in all three of those things.”
In 1982, determined to find a job in the music industry, he called the Toronto office of the then-upstart label Virgin Records every day for months until it hired him in the marketing department. But after three years at Virgin, Mercuriadis was itching to work on the artist side of the business. He moved to London to join Sanctuary Music, a rapidly expanding management firm whose initial client was the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden.
Mercuriadis became infatuated with maintaining Iron Maiden’s career after years of creative upheaval between its main songwriter and its lead singer. He endeared himself to them with his passion for the music, as well as his rapidly evolving marketing skills. For the launch of the band’s 1992 album, Fear of the Dark, Mercuriadis flew dozens of journalists, radio disc jockeys, and label personnel to London. The guests were ferried by double-decker buses to a site where an elaborate indoor casino and carnival set had been built, complete with pinball machines, card dealers, and extravagant food. The band played only one song. “It was surreal. I had one journalist say to me, ‘I feel like I’ve won an MTV contest,’” recalls Ellyn Solis, who at the time was the band’s publicist at Epic Records. “It had to have been six figures.” Afterward, while the guests partied in the hotel bar, Mercuriadis printed out the next day’s itinerary and went to every room and slid the paper under the door. “He’s like the Pied Piper. Everyone follows him because he has such a creative passion for what he does,” Solis says. “He’s a true music and artist guy, and he’s always one step ahead of everyone else.”
In 2000, Mercuriadis moved to New York to become the president of Sanctuary Music’s North American office. By this time, Sanctuary was a publicly traded company, and Mercuriadis was charged with developing a record label and publishing arm in addition to growing the management roster to eventually add Beyoncé, Elton John, and Axl Rose. Rose was still toiling on Guns N’ Roses’ sixth album, the long-delayed Chinese Democracy. But as the album’s release date continued to be pushed back, Sanctuary started hemorrhaging money in 2004, coming up woefully short on meeting revenue expectations and laying off a good portion of the company’s staff. Sanctuary was eventually sold two years later to Universal Records for $41 million. A manager’s single greatest skill is protecting their artists. After Sanctuary’s dissolution, most of Mercuriadis’ management clients left him, a rare setback for a man so committed to his artists and their art. “I definitely felt like a failure,” he admits.
When Spotify launched in 2008, Mercuriadis became intrigued by streaming music. Central to Spotify’s user experience was the ability to create personalized playlists by culling songs from all genres and artists. The start-to-finish thread of a full album was becoming less important to streaming adopters. In decades past, he observed, the majority of artists wrote their own songs. Kurt Cobain wrote all the lyrics and much of the music for Nirvana’s 1991 album, Nevermind. Contrast that with Adele, who worked with 10 different songwriters for her 2015 smash, 25. “It became clear to me that the power was shifting from the artist to the songwriter,” Mercuriadis says. “But the songwriters weren’t in a position to reap the benefits.”
Today, the music industry is in the midst of an arms race to tap the next song and artist who rockets into the pop culture. Columbia Records has thrown millions at Lil Nas X for “Old Town Road” and Arizona Zervas for his song “Roxanne,” both of which first exploded in 2019 on the video-sharing social app TikTok. A forward-thinking manager can find new ways to grow his clients’ reach. Take Moe Shalizi, who landed his EDM client Marshmello 10 million users when he played a virtual concert inside the world of the wildly popular video game Fortnite.
In 2018, he launched Hipgnosis Songs Fund with a head-turning acquisition: $23.75 million for a 75% stake in The Dream’s catalog — the songwriter behind hits like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
Despite the wellspring of fresh moneymaking opportunities for artists, Mercuriadis recognized that the structure of the music business has largely remained the same for the songwriter. Artists make most of their money by touring and selling merchandise, while the songwriter has access to none of that. But shouldn’t they? After all, it was the songwriter who gave the artist material to tour behind.
“I liken the music industry to an oil tanker,” says Vickie Nauman, who serves as an adviser to firms looking for a piece of the publishing market. “And there’s all these speedboats zipping around the ship trying to get it to alter course with new technology or ideas. But as history has shown, that oil tanker takes a long time to turn.”
With Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Mercuriadis bypassed all of them. Songwriters are able to generate revenue from three sources: mechanical royalties (the sale or legal download of a song), performance royalties (paid every time a song is heard in public, whether it’s a live performance, on TV, or in a movie; played in a bar or restaurant; or streamed), and synch fees (song licensing for use in movies, video games, and commercials). Mechanical royalties are the only stream with a set rate; performance and synch royalties are negotiated percentages. Synchs are often more lucrative for the songwriter, since they generally split 50% for the writer and the artist, with the label taking its cut from the artist’s piece of the pie. Synch is where Hipgnosis Song Fund could make them money, as Mercuriadis explained to the 177 hedge fund and private investors he pitched between 2015 and 2018.
Soon after launching, Mercuriadis made his first head-turning acquisition: $23.75 million for a 75% stake in The Dream’s catalog — the prolific songwriter behind hits like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring On It.” “He told me I could be the next Quincy Jones and laid out the plan. How can you not listen to him?” says The Dream (whose real name is Terius Youngdell Nash). “I’m recruiting people all the time.”
“He told me I could be the next Quincy Jones and laid out the plan. How can you not listen to him?”
Today, the business operates like a cross between an investment fund and a talent management agency. While Mercuriadis brokers the catalog deals, each of his 19 employees is responsible for monetization opportunities for a portfolio of songs. He plans to at least double the number of people working for him this year. “I want to get rid of the word ‘publishing,’” he says. (His preferred description: “song management.”) “Major publishers have small staffs working with hundreds of thousands of songs. We’re shooting for thousands of songs and having synch managers who are each responsible for a much smaller amount,” he says. “We’ll make a lot more money than anyone else.”
Plenty of artists are happy with their current publishing deals. But don’t think for a moment that songwriters aren’t seeing the fat checks Hipgnosis is cutting and pushing their managers to get a meeting. In 2017, the attorney for Justin Beiber’s songwriter Poo Bear cold-called Mercuriadis. After a few meetings, Poo Bear backed out of a different publishing deal. “I didn’t know who he was, but for Merck, it’s music, music, music, all of the time,” says Poo Bear, who has since sold Hipgnosis every song he’s written up until July 2018. “As an artist, I want to work with people that are as passionate about my songs as I am.” As for his future works? “I wouldn’t do a deal like that with anyone else other than Merck.”
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2T6L71V