How the smartest buyers are valuing music catalogs in 2025
29 Oct, 2025
Is catalog value about owning the biggest hits, or knowing how to operate the rights you buy? This week, Sachin Saggar (Co-Founder, RedBrick Advisors) joins co-hosts Emma Griffiths, Tom Mullen, and Sam Morey of Standard Innovation to explain how the smartest buyers are pricing music catalogs in 2025. He breaks down the post-boom music rights market, explaining how smart money prices catalogs, where the next upside lies, and why better infrastructure, not bigger deals, will define the edge in 2025.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
We talked about:.
- 03:39 The post-boom reset
- 15:39 How “real money” values catalogs
- 16:24 Who pays the premium
- 22:13 The infrastructure catch-up
- 24:50 AI’s real impact: risk and upside
- 27:21 Where the next basis points hide
- 29:12 Trip hazards investors still underestimate
Top 5 takeaways:
The hype cooled, the cash flows didn’t
Between 2016 and 2021, capital flooded into music. Low interest rates, strong streaming growth, and yield-hungry investors turned catalogs into financial assets almost overnight.
That boom, amplified by the hype around Hipgnosis, pushed prices to record highs. When rates rose post-COVID, the market cooled, but not as sharply as many predicted.
Today, Sachin describes a stable, well-capitalized market: deals are happening, diligence is tougher, and the asset class is veering into the financial mainstream.
“There’s confidence around the cash flows and the income streams. And frankly, music is something that touches everyone. It creates its own interest.”
It’s that mix of steady returns and universal connection that gives the asset class its staying power.
When discipline meets FOMO
Pricing, says Sachin, comes down to who is buying and why.
Strategic buyers (majors/publishers) can stretch to higher multiples because they control marketing, distribution, and admin, and can borrow more cheaply. Financial buyers lean on yield and structure, and sometimes face pressure to deploy.
“There’s a valuation, and then there’s the reality of how competitive a particular catalog could be.”
Competition, plus dry powder, can push prices past the baseline.
Under the hood, discounted cash flow (DCF) remains the dominant method, with assumptions tuned to each catalog and to industry factors such as DSP price increases and royalty disputes like the MLC’s ongoing case with Spotify.
For investors, the trip hazards lie in the details: reversions, royalty escalations, legacy agreements, and messy rights data can quietly rewrite a deal’s economics overnight.
The devil, as always, is in the metadata.
There’s alpha in the B-sides
After years of megadeals, the iconic catalog space is crowded. The next wave of opportunity, says Sachin, sits in more niche corners like producer royalties, neighbouring rights, and emerging markets.
“There’s a whole ecosystem of value outside the obvious names.”
Meanwhile, NIL (name, image, and likeness) rights are increasingly being acquired to develop adjacent IP like films and docuseries that extend an artist’s story beyond the music itself.
With streaming growth plateauing in mature markets, Sachin encourages investors to operate, not just own. That means activating rights more aggressively, widening exposure beyond saturated territories, and looking for controllable levers of upside rather than waiting on macro tailwinds.
“If you own catalogs, then you’re going to have to work them in a different way rather than rely on tailwinds from music macro to carry you forward. You’ve got to really focus on how you optimize your revenue streams.”
Catching up to the capital
Even as capital poured into music rights, the infrastructure lagged behind.
That gap, he explains, is one of the reasons RedBrick Advisors was founded: to bring more structure and accountability to how catalogs are operated and valued.
“A lot of capital came into the sector, but the services and infrastructure around it hadn’t necessarily kept pace. That’s still true today.”
He compares it to another maturing industry:
“If you look at renewable energy, it’s had a ten-year story of building the right infrastructure. The ecosystem around music still lags, but it’s picking up.”
As investors grow more sophisticated, he sees the market adopting the same habits that transformed renewables, with better data, stronger governance, and more consistent reporting standards.
The smart money’s watching AI
“If I were an investor,” Sachin says, “I’d be keeping an eye on AI.”
It’s still early. “You’re not really seeing tangible elements in the data yet,” he admits, “but it’s going to have an impact.”
AI is already changing the creative process. Artists can now release songs in multiple languages or lend their voice to a sync without ever stepping into the studio.
But the more immediate opportunity lies in the unsexy stuff: rights and data. Managing sprawling metadata and inconsistent formats is a huge drag on efficiency.
“The starting point is consolidating, aggregating and cleaning all that information… different formats… 30,000 pages of data… it’s cumbersome but there’s tech coming to take away some of the more mundane aspects.”
That shift is part of a broader modernization of the sector.
“There’s a big tech component within music and analytics now. It used to feel old-school, but there’s a lot more investment and time going into it.”
For investors, AI is less about replacing artists and more about fixing the plumbing: cleaner data, better reporting, faster valuations. In this market, that’s where the edge lives.
Episode links:
https://redbrick-advisors.com/
https://standard-innovation.com/
Follow Sachin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachin-saggar-5a06792/
Follow Standard Innovation: https://www.linkedin.com/company/standard-innovation-ltd/