Significant music rights acquisition lets individuals buy shares of songs

Hipgnosis Songs Fund has acquired the copyright in around 33,000 songs including a 50% share in All I Want For Christmas Is You, and Let It Go (from the Frozen soundtrack).
Hipgnosis allows individuals to buy shares in a portfolio of music rights, generating royalties (much like buying a share in an investment fund). The consumer will not own individual shares in individual songs (which would be too expensive for most retail customers), but they can instead buy tiny fractions of those shares as part of a large portfolio including some very famous, and some very niche, songs.

Hipgnosis is the brain child of Merck Mercuriadis, a stalwart in the music industry. This latest batch of rights is purchased from Kobalt Music Copyrights – the rightsholder company for Kobalt Music – which will continue to administer, assert, and enforce the copyrights in the songs under a long-term license arrangement.

This innovative use of music rights, which essentially creates a mini stock market of copyrights, is certainly creative, and given the scale of this acquisition, it is clearly going very well.

If you have any questions about copyright or any other intellectual property issue, please get in touch with the team on 0191 281 4000, or by email at legal@mcdanielslaw.com.