Concord affiliate buys over 145K music copyrights including works of Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, others
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Downtown has sold the copyrights to the songs of artists such as Lady Gaga to an affiliate of Concord. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File)Matt Sayles/Invision/AP
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An affiliate of Concord Music Publishing has purchased 145,000 owned and co-published copyrights from Downtown Music Holdings.
The copyrighted works include songs by a wide range of top musical talent from Lady Gaga to Beyoncé to Stevie Wonder.
Rolling Stone reports how Downtown sold its copyrights in order to focus more on its other services such as music publishing, sync licensing, and its songwriter royalties platform, Songtrust.
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Rock Creek Park, a natural refuge from D.C. s urban landscape, inspired the Blackbyrd s 1975 hit song of the same title. (Source: Wikimedia Commons user KimChee. Used via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)
If you’re from the D.C. area, you know Rock Creek Park for its hiking trails and scenic views. But if you’re from any other part of the country, you might recognize it best from the 1975 song, “Rock Creek Park,” which peaked at number 37 on the Billboard’s R&B charts in 1976 and has since been sampled by numerous artists, including Ice Cube, Nas, De la Soul, and Eric B. and Rakim.
Traditionally, songwriters have been reluctant to sell their publishing rights, which are often a source of personal pride as well as a revenue stream that can outlive them. That’s changing as the market heats up, tax advantages loom and touring could be stalled for some time, while music catalogs are reconsidered as not just a collection of artistic works but also as a collection of monetary assets and revenue streams, no longer the contents of a singular bag of tricks but rather the many threads of songs, eras and incomes that make up the bag itself.
In the past six months alone, Concord Music Publishing purchased Imagine Dragons’ own shares of its back catalog (while Universal Music Publishing Group retained its portion); Vine Alternative Investments acquired the rights to the 100-plus-song publishing catalog of Sean Douglas, a 37-year-old songwriter-producer whose credits include hits by Demi Lovato and Jason Derulo; 38-year-old songwriter-producer Louis Bell sold the songs
Neil Young has sold 50% of his 1,180-song catalogue
The Canadian icon is the latest musician to make this big move following the news of artists like Bob Dylan, Lindsay Buckingham and Lil Wayne selling the rights to their music to investment companies.
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