The "Buy Catalogs, Win the Market" Rule of Music Publishing — Where It Breaks Down

The advice you hear at every conference panel and in every investor deck goes like this: if you want to grow in an emerging market, buy the catalog. Find the songs with proven streaming history, model the decay curve, pay a multiple of net publisher's share, and collect. Catalog is the asset. Everything else is noise.

It is good advice in the places it was written for. It is also the reason a lot of capital has walked into Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, looked around for a catalog to acquire, found nothing at the scale the spreadsheet wanted, and walked back out. The music publishing playbook that built the major houses in mature markets does not transfer cleanly to a market that hasn't generated its hits yet. The interesting deals happening now — the joint ventures, the regional partnerships — exist precisely because the buy-the-catalog rule breaks down where the growth is.

This piece is about where that rule holds, where it fails, and what the people deploying capital regionally are doing instead.

Where buying the catalog is roughly right

In a mature market, a recorded and published song is close to a bond. It throws off predictable income — mechanical and performance royalties, sync placements, streaming — and that income decays along a curve you can model with some confidence. A catalog of evergreen songs from a known era has years of payment history behind it. You can underwrite it. You can leverage it. You can sell it again later to someone running the same math.

This is why catalog acquisition has been the dominant move in the US, UK, and parts of continental Europe for the last decade. The asset is legible. The rights are (mostly) registered, the splits are (mostly) documented, the collection societies function, and the dollars arrive on a schedule. When the cost of capital was low, paying a high multiple for that schedule made sense, and the multiples climbed accordingly.

For a publisher with scale, there's a second reason the rule works: administration is a fixed-cost game. Once you've built the apparatus to register works, chase royalties across territories, and pitch for sync, every additional catalog you run through that apparatus costs you very little to service. Buying songs is also buying utilization of infrastructure you already paid for. That's a real efficiency, and it's defensible.

So the advice isn't wrong. It's narrow. It assumes the thing you want to buy already exists in a form you can price.

Where it breaks down in the markets that are actually growing

Now point that same logic at a market where streaming penetration is climbing 20 to 30 percent a year and the local repertoire is winning domestic charts for the first time. The growth is obvious. The catalog to buy is not.

Three things tend to be true in these markets at once:

• The valuable songs haven't been written yet. The streaming hockey stick is recent. The catalog with ten years of payment history is small or fragmented, often held informally, sometimes with rights that were never cleanly assigned in the first place.
• The data is thin. Underwriting a catalog requires a payment history you can trust. In markets where collection societies are young or under-resourced, that history is partial, and the decay curves from mature markets don't necessarily apply to local consumption patterns.
• The relationships are the moat. The people who know which 22-year-old producer in Medellín or Lagos is about to break aren't sitting in a fund's diligence team. They're local — managers, studio owners, A&R people who've been in the rooms for years.

So the value in an emerging market is not concentrated in a back catalog you can acquire and service. It's concentrated in the pipeline of writers and producers who will generate the catalog over the next decade — and in the local knowledge of who those people are. You cannot buy that on a multiple of NPS, because it doesn't have an NPS yet.

This is the structural reason the deals coming out of these regions look different. Instead of an acquisition, you see a joint venture. Instead of paying for songs that exist, the publisher is buying a position in the songs that will.

The joint venture playbook, in plain terms

Here's the shape these regional deals tend to take, stripped of the press-release language.

A major or mid-sized publisher partners with a local company that already has the relationships — a boutique publisher, a production house, sometimes a single well-connected founder with a roster. The division of labor is the whole point:

• The local partner brings A&R and signings. They find and sign the writers and producers. They know the scene, speak the language of the rooms, and can move faster than a foreign company filing paperwork. They handle creative development.
• The publisher brings scale and machinery. Global administration across territories, royalty collection through established society relationships, sync pitching into international film and advertising, advances against future earnings, and the balance sheet to fund all of it.

The publisher typically takes on administration for the partner's current and future writers and provides marketing and operational support. The local company keeps its identity, its creative autonomy, and a meaningful share of the upside. Both sides are betting on the same pipeline.

The operative product of these ventures, more often than not, is the writing camp. A publisher flies in or convenes a dozen writers and producers — some from the local roster, some international names who lend credibility and cross-pollination — into a studio for a week. The output is co-writes, demos, and song fragments, some of which get placed, recorded, and eventually pay out. When you read that a venture "ran a camp that produced cuts for [named artist]," that's the proof point. It's the closest thing to a measurable deliverable in a business that's otherwise about waiting for a hit.

Why name the wins so early and so specifically? Because in a market without catalog history, named placements are the only available substitute for the payment data you'd normally underwrite against. A cut with an established artist is evidence that the pipeline works — that the local A&R can identify talent and the publisher's machinery can convert it into a registered, paying composition. The investor reading the announcement isn't being told a story. They're being shown the one metric that exists this early.

What does a music publishing joint venture actually involve?

A music publishing joint venture is a partnership where a larger publisher and a local or specialist company share the costs and revenue of signing and developing songwriters, rather than one company buying the other's catalog outright. The publisher generally provides global royalty administration, marketing, sync pitching, and advance funding; the partner provides A&R, signings, and local relationships. Revenue from the songs the venture generates is split per the agreement, and both parties share the risk that those songs may or may not earn out.

The reason this structure exists, instead of a clean acquisition, is timing. You use a JV when the asset you want — a body of valuable, registered songs — hasn't been created yet, and the only way to participate in its creation is to fund and partner with the people who will make it. It trades the certainty of a priced catalog for a position in future output. That's the bet, and it's a different bet than buying a bond.

Where the joint venture model breaks down too

The honest move here is to point out that the JV doesn't escape risk — it relocates it. The thing you're buying instead of a catalog is messier to value and harder to control. Four failure modes come up repeatedly.

Founder dependency. A regional partnership is often, in practice, a bet on one or two people's taste and relationships. The local founder is the asset. If they leave, burn out, or fall out with the publisher, the pipeline can dry up overnight, and there's no catalog underneath to cushion the fall. The cleaner the acquisition would have been, the more dangerous this dependency is — you've swapped a documented asset for a key-person risk.

Attribution and split disputes. Writing camps are wonderful at generating songs and terrible at generating clean paperwork in the moment. Six people in a room, a beat that started as someone's old idea, a topline written on a phone — when that song becomes a hit eighteen months later, the question of who owns what percentage is suddenly worth real money, and the documentation from the camp may not answer it. In markets where rights registration is already informal, this compounds. Disputed splits don't pay; they sit frozen while lawyers sort them out.

Administrative and currency friction. The publisher's machinery was built for territories with functioning societies and stable currencies. Plugging a new market into it means reconciling local collection practices, dealing with currency volatility on advances and payouts, and absorbing the cost of chasing royalties through systems that weren't designed to be chased. The fixed-cost efficiency that makes acquisitions attractive in mature markets is partly eroded by the friction of operating somewhere new.

The lag. This is the one that surprises investors most. The distance between a writing camp and a registered split that actually pays is long — frequently two to three years from the room to the first meaningful royalty statement, sometimes more. A song has to be written, then placed, then recorded, then released, then stream enough to matter, then have its royalties collected and matched and distributed across the territories. A JV announced today with great fanfare may not produce a number worth modeling until the next fund cycle. Patience isn't a virtue here; it's a structural requirement, and capital that needs to mark up its position quarterly is poorly suited to it.

None of this makes the JV the wrong move. It makes it a move you should enter with the risks named, the same way you'd never buy a catalog without scrubbing its registration. The mistake is treating the partnership announcement as the win. The announcement is the start of the lag.

Acquisition, JV, or admin deal: matching the structure to the market

The three common structures aren't competitors so much as tools for different conditions. Here's the rough decision logic.

The admin deal deserves a mention because it's the underrated option. If you don't want to fund A&R and you don't believe you can price a catalog, administering a local partner's rights — collecting their royalties globally for a fee — gets you a foothold and a data feed without the development risk. You won't capture the upside of the breakout song, but you'll learn the market's actual numbers, which is exactly the data the buy-the-catalog crowd lacked when they walked back out. Several publishers treat admin deals as reconnaissance that later converts into a JV once they trust the pipeline.

The financial context, kept in proportion

It's tempting, in pieces like this, to lead with the big numbers — capital deployed, annual revenue, the scale that signals the publisher can absorb a bet that takes three years to pay. Scale does matter here, precisely because of the lag. Only a balance sheet that can wait can run this playbook; a thinly capitalized player who needs the camp to pay next quarter will mismanage the whole structure.

But scale is a permission, not a strategy. A large publisher with a global admin engine and the cash to fund advances has the option to enter emerging markets through JVs. Whether that option earns out depends entirely on the local partner's taste and the discipline of the paperwork — neither of which appears in the revenue line. When you read a deal announcement, the financial scale tells you the publisher can afford the bet. It tells you nothing about whether the bet is good. For that, go back and look at the named wins, the founder's track record, and whether the venture has run more than one camp or just the launch one.

The more honest version of the rule

So here's the rule, rewritten for the markets where the growth actually is:

In a mature market, buy the catalog. In an emerging one, you usually can't — the catalog doesn't exist yet — so you partner with the people who will create it, fund the development, accept a multi-year lag before anything pays, and underwrite the founder and the paperwork as carefully as you'd underwrite a decay curve. The asset isn't songs. It's a pipeline and the relationships that feed it.

That's less quotable than "buy the catalog." It's also closer to what the deals coming out of Latin America and beyond are actually doing, and closer to what the next decade of catalog will have been built on.

Something to try this week

Pick one regional joint venture announcement from the last two years — not the headline, the actual press release. Find the named placements it cited as proof points, then go check whether those songs are correctly registered and split in the relevant collection society's public database, or in a service like the MLC or a local equivalent. If the registrations are clean and current, the venture's machinery is working. If they're missing, partial, or in dispute, you've found the gap between the announcement and the payout — and you've learned more about how that partner operates than any executive quote will tell you.