Anyone who has ever caught themselves looking for their favorite song, which is many years old, on a streaming service like Spotify is not alone.

This is one of the reasons why financial investors have been showing increased interest in rights packages for some time, although not for reasons of nostalgia.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Easily calculable, long-term stable and increasing income alone due to the further growing market: music rights appear to be a worthwhile investment.

In practice, the equation is – as so often – a lot more complicated.

Rights management alone is a complex field, not to mention catalog marketing to keep songs popular.

But the basic appeal of catalogs as an investment can be summed up like this.

This has not changed with interest rates now rising again – for good reason.

Because catalog works are very popular.

A good year ago, the American music journalist Ted Gioia even asked whether old music "killed" new pieces.

The company Luminate records the developments for the USA, the largest music market in the world.

According to the report for 2022, the catalog share of total consumption, i.e. audio and video streams and digital and physical sales combined, was 72.2 percent.

Another increase after 69.8 percent in 2021 and 65.1 percent in 2020.

Catalog only sounds like "Oldie"

Music streaming market leader Spotify presented data at the end of September, according to which catalog songs accounted for 33 percent of the global weekly Top 200 charts between January and April.

A clear surplus of new releases, but here too there are increases in the catalog share. In 2021 the figure was 23 percent and in 2020 it was 13 percent.

With a view to the overall streams, catalog tracks have the upper hand anyway, according to the industry.

According to an evaluation published on Thursday by the German chart investigator GfK Entertainment together with the Federal Association of the Music Industry (BVMI), 47 percent of all audio streams in Germany last year were tracks published "since 2020".

The information is not narrowed down more precisely.

How this value has developed in a year-on-year comparison is also not disclosed.

Works from the 2010s accounted for 35 percent, 8 percent for the 2000s and 4 percent for the 1990s.

A comparison with the Luminate data is only possible to a limited extent, as this includes all formats.

The US market for music recordings is also more digital than the German one.

What unites both: In both the USA and Germany, the total number of audio streams as a core driver of industry growth has continued to rise: by 12,

1 percent and 8 percent respectively compared to the previous year.

There were around 178 billion audio streams in Germany, the US value is far higher at 1.1 trillion.