This week we pick up where that one left off- what happens after the price has been paid and the claim has to become a working reality across every system that pays. Operators should be under no illusion that once a deal completes- the paperwork is signed (with the lawyers laughing all the way to the bank), the cash has gone out and the press release is scheduled- the real work begins. On paper, the catalog now belongs to the fund- but of course the industry's systems don't

In the 1970s it took an average of 1.7 songwriters to write a hit, today it takes around 4.5. That's a 165% increase, and the number is still climbing- Beyoncé's ‘Heated' carries eighteen credited writers alone. Since the 90s there has been a slowly increasing trend to sample and interpolate, and it is quietly doing something to publishing data that the industry's registration systems were always unlikely to be able to absorb.

Every catalog acquisition starts in the same place. A data room opens, and inside sits the familiar furniture: a stack of royalty statements, some contract summaries, perhaps a seller-commissioned earnings report with a decay curve that always seems to flatten out at exactly the right moment (funny that). And at the centre of it all, the schedule of works- the document that defines what is actually for sale.

US termination rights have been somewhat of an industry secret in times gone by- and understandably so given their creator friendly purpose. For any not familiar, this is the legal right of a songwriter to reclaim US rights they have previously transferred (say under a publishing deal) after 35 years. These sit quietly inside a catalog for years, sometimes decades, looking like a future technicality rather than a present commercial issue.