Nearly 80% of institutional investors whose portfolios include music assets expect firms to earmark more money for investments in music in 2026, according to a new study conducted by the London-based financial communications firm Fourth Pillar.
The Music Investment Barometer report surveyed individuals from 125 firms working across the private equity, private credit, investment management, pensions, insurance, legal and financial advisory, who combined have $3.24 trillion in assets under management.
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Music copyrights and royalty income streams are an increasingly popular investible asset over the past two decades as streaming income has grown and returns on music have held steady through repeated macroeconomic headwinds. In recent months, Sony Music Group and GIC, the Singapore sovereign investment fund, formed an investment partnership to acquire and market music catalog assets, mirroring earlier moves by Warner Music Group, which formed a joint venture with Bain Capital, and Universal Music Group, which invested in the catalog investment firm Chord.
These respondents expressed broad-based optimism about music as an asset class, with 86% saying they plan to increase their allocations to music rights in the next year and 66% saying they think there are more opportunities to invest in music intellectual property — like recorded music, publishing rights and royalty income streams — than last year.
“The music investment community, and interest in the music investment opportunity, has grown rapidly over the past decade; but reliable, comprehensive data on investor sentiment has been conspicuously absent,”said NMPA president and CEO, David Israelite, a backer of the report and organizer of the popular conference Music Investor Conference held in New York each June.
“Fourth Pillar’s Music Investment Barometer … findings validate what we have seen first hand at Music Investors Conference: capital conviction remains strong, deal flow is deepening, and institutional players are rallying to the platforms with a proven edge in the market,” Israelite said in a statement.
The study polled individuals mostly at the managing director level and above whose firms and banks, music publishers and labels and industry lawyers collectively completed 1,600 transactions in the prior 12 months. Roughly three quarters of respondents were based in North America, which has the world’s largest music market in the United States, with others coming from Europe, Asia, Oceania and South America.
Claire Turvey, managing partner at Fourth Pillar, which works exclusively with clients in the music and entertainment industries, said the study is intended to track sentiment among the biggest investors in music globally, including how they navigate a market “known for its complexities.”
“Fourth Pillar’s Music Investment Barometer has been created to bring much-needed data and transparency to a market that has, to a large degree, historically operated behind closed doors,” Turvey said in a statement.
The full report is available on Fourth Pillar’s website, and below are some key takeaways.
- 99% of respondents say music IP is increasingly recognized and treated like other major asset classes.
- 78% say they expect their total capital allocations to the music industry to grow.
- 86% plan to increase the capital their firms earmark for music rights investmentsthe coming year.
- 66% say they the number of deals coming to market increased year on year.
- The average deal was valued at around $87 million. Three quarters of respondents said valuations were achievable.
- 42% of respondents said their top concern in the coming year was the impact of AI on the music industry; a majority of respondents expressed they thought the impact would be neutral, and a third said they felt neutral, with an additional 21% saying they were unconcerned or not at all concerned about AI.
- 92% express optimism about the medium-to-long-term outlook for music as an investment.
