Fast-rising Hipgnosis Songs spent nearly $1.1 billion on 84 song catalogs over the year ended March 31, and raised another $215 million in its recent stock offering on the London Stock Exchange, according to statements released by the company this week.
Those catalogs include half of Neil Young’s song catalog, as well as Lindsey Buckingham, Deborah and Chris Stein of Blondie, Chrissie Hynde, Barry Manilow and many more. Since it was founded in 2018, the company has invested more than $2 billion in nearly 140 catalogs — and they are clearly not planning to stop any time soon. Cofounder and CEO Merck Mercuriades (pictured above, left, with cofounder Nile Rodgers) said in a statement about the new funds, “We will deploy this immediately into our pipeline of songs.”
According to the statements, the company’s net asset value has risen 11.3% to $1.68 per share, year over year, with total return since the company’s launched on the LSE rising to 40.7%. Streaming income climbed 18.4% in the second half of the year, over the prior six-month period.
“We will now have a portfolio of almost $2.5 billion of extraordinarily successful and culturally important songs, which offers a massive opportunity for us to add value with our song management, which manages these songs with bandwidth and responsibility,” Mercuriades said.
In an interview with PvNew in May, Mercuriades spoke about his strategy and the value he feels his company has accrued in the past three years.
“What we buy isn’t just successful — it’sextraordinarilysuccessful, and it’s also of cultural importance,” he counters. “Look at the songs we own that are less than 10 years old: [Songs co-written or recorded by] Beyonce, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Ed Sheeran, the Chainsmokers, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, but we also have Neil Young, Lindsey Buckingham and Dave Stewart’s songs with Eurythmics, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic sitting alongside those newer songs — and importantly, they reflect streaming consumption. It’s a very small catalog with an incredibly high ratio of success.”
He concluded, “I believe this is only scratching the surface. I’m not focused on short-term thinking: we’re all in it for the long haul.”
