There’s Money In The Long Tail (If You Can Reach It)

There’s a recurring dichotomy in how music publishing ‘value’ is discussed. The media conversation clusters around the headline acquisition of iconic catalogs and blockbuster songwriters- the “big deals” naturally command attention. They are tangible, easy to explain, and fit the narrative that music IP behaves like a financial asset.

Photo by Timo Volz

However there is also a real engine of value outside those deals that make the music headlines. There is still material revenue to be found across the long tail- in the thousands of works earning small amounts, across fragmented usages and income types, distributed so widely that most of it has historically not been extracted.

This last factor is the key- the long tail has always contained value, the limiting factor has been the ability to access it.

Publishing is a Micro-Payment Business

Publishing is structurally different to master rights. Revenue from recordings typically can spike, surge, collapse and re-surge with far greater reactionary speed- based on cultural resets, virality, sync placements and algorithmic uplift. Publishing revenues move differently- generally more diversified and with much longer lead times on payment. This subsequently makes them slower-changing, and with lower volatility. They are built on accumulation rather than spikes.

For any single copyright the income will flow from many fractionalized sources and via many convoluted, gate-kept and frankly slow pipelines. It takes a while for income to pick up a head of steam, but once it does that income typically becomes incredibly resilient. The stability and compounding strength this provides to publishing is a great strength, and one that forms a core pillar to the ‘music catalogs as an asset class’ thesis.

These dynamics effect not only the hits in a catalog but also the long tail- the large volume of compositions that continue earning small individual pockets of revenue for years- not always loudly, but always consistently.

The problem with the long tail of a micro-penny business is that the economic value attributed to each individual transaction, for each individual copyright, is exceedingly low. The volume is high enough that the total value is material. The issue is not that the long tail lacks value- it is that the value it has is spread so thinly that historically the cost of retrieving it exceeded the payoff.

Why the Long Tail Was Historically So Difficult to Capture

The long tail’s challenge has always been operational. The complexity of music rights administration is enormous- not because it is intellectually difficult, but because it is structurally fragmented.

We all know the plethora of ways in which publishing data becomes disparate, and hence challenging to reconcile in a cohesive view. A single composition may:

• have multiple co-writers, with rights assigned to multiple publishers/CMOs

• be administered by different publishers in different territories

• have many derivatives, including samples and translated title variations

• exist under legacy registrations that are now outdated without being reconciled

• be matched to recordings inconsistently or incorrectly

• revert in one region but not another

Over time, these inconsistencies multiply and compound, becoming systemic. Societies process data differently, sub-publishers submit registrations differently (often without line of sight to ‘original’ data), works travel through the ecosystem with different fingerprints depending on where and when they entered. The result is income that should be attributable gets stuck in the system as:

• black box or analogy distributions

• unidentified usage

• unmatched publishing shares or disputed claims

• simply revenue that is never collected because the system cannot confidently route it.

The money exists, but there is a ‘fix’ required to correct the pipe and allow it to flow on freely downstream. The problem is that it costs the same amount of human time to fix an error worth £100 as it does to fix an error worth £1. With a historic lack of machine interoperability (and the prerequisite of database transparency) the fixes have had to be done manually, by human hand.

This is a scaling issue. Stakeholders of all shapes and sizes have been unable to reach ‘down’ into the long tail to retrieve value, because it doesn’t become worth it at a given point. If it costs £1 to retrieve or pay out £0.10, it is simply not worth doing. The incentive is to focus attention where effort meets return, typically in the catalog ‘head’.

Technology and the collapsing cost of recovery

This is where technology, and now specifically AI, can transform the micro-economics of publishing. Surfacing and resolving huge volumes of data fixes at once is only possible with technology. The more technology is developed that can sensibly manage this scale, the lower that threshold of economic recovery becomes, the further into the long tail the value can be retrieved. Technology is shifting the break-even point.

Tasks that historically required both human sight and manual manipulation (/emails to societies) can now be handled by machines guided by human oversight:

• identifying metadata inconsistencies

• linking recordings to compositions

• detecting duplicate work registrations

• resolving conflicting writer shares

The most important point here is not speed, but judgment. Humans are still a key ingredient- the tooling is simply now available so their oversight can achieve more.

Those who already understand the catalog, the rights structures, the data lineage, the CMO quirks, and the necessary edge-case nuances can affect dramatically more volume than before.

There is a sidebar here too. There are 2 other required ingredients- transparency and access. The former so that issues can be seen and surfaced, the latter so they can be corrected. This is worth a standalone newsletter in itself- with great moves recently being made by MLC, PRS/ICE and SACEM in this arena.

The Strategic Opportunity: Owning the Long Tail

If the cost of recovery is falling, and the distribution of revenue continues to broaden globally, then the strategic priority will shift. The value to be gained is no longer primarily in acquiring more catalog- it is in fully realising the value of the catalog already owned.

This reframes what competitive advantage in publishing looks like- not scale, brand or writer relationships alone. It’s these paired with, and amplified by clarity, accuracy, and operational excellence at scale.

The long tail is the layer where compounding value accumulates quietly, small incremental improvements roll up meaningfully and operational sophistication directly translates to economic performance.

We are entering a period where the long tail is newly accessible- but that does not mean it is newly simple. The systems that support publishing remain inconsistent across markets, and the data that underpins rights is still imperfect. Revenue flows differ meaningfully between territories, platforms, and repertoire types. The incentives of many stakeholders (and intermediaries) in the value chain are also not necessarily aligned to maximising recovery. 'Operational Excellence' means ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems, particularly with AI at play.

Back To The Future

The next era will be led by companies that:

• Know exactly what they control

• Understand where it is earning

• Can prove the provenance, and hence accuracy, of their data

• Can act on that knowledge with speed and repeatability

The long tail isn’t marginal, but it is structurally ‘baked in’ (mainly due to the mere exposure effect). Crucially it is where resilience resides- it has compounding value which can only be fully extracted by deploying technology with human oversight.

If you understand the data, the long tail is no longer a low-value frontier that isn’t worth your time. It is, with ever increasing speed, becoming more economically within reach than ever before.

Those who have the judgment to know where to look, combined with the leverage to move at scale, will unlock more of it than others.