With a renewed potential for profit in the streaming era, the music industries are subject to new financial predations, such as those by investment firms like Hipgnosis, Round Hill, Shamrock, and other “song management” firms that have turned music catalogs and publishing rights into an asset class. The effects of this financialization on the production and circulation of music are the same as they are in the wider American economy: a corrupt infrastructure, a plutocratic ruling class, a growing precarity for workers, and vast inequality.

XREF: Connects to the financialization of other asset classes (real estate, patents) and the broader rental economy critique common in contemporary political economy writing.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 50