The article by Variety provides some speculation as to what ‘selling the catalog’ means: that it likely includes her royalties from the songs, as publishing rights appear to belong to Sony. And that she seems to have songwriting credits on forty songs in total.
These deals are rather confusing: the original TMZ article compares this sale to that by Justin Bieber to Hipgnosis Songs Capital (unrelated to the famous design group), which was originally founded to “change this system, where the songwriter–who provides the most important component in an artist having success–is the lowest person on the totem pole”. Not quite sure how they’re achieving that goal by buying rights to a bunch of music catalogs: I’d guess this must mean they’re getting publishing rights and not the royalties, but multiple acquisitions listed on the Wikipedia page include writers’ and producers’ royalties. The company was also publicly traded pretty much from the start, and raised considerable investment, so looks like the investors foresee plenty of money flowing to the company.
The article by Variety provides some speculation as to what ‘selling the catalog’ means: that it likely includes her royalties from the songs, as publishing rights appear to belong to Sony. And that she seems to have songwriting credits on forty songs in total.
These deals are rather confusing: the original TMZ article compares this sale to that by Justin Bieber to Hipgnosis Songs Capital (unrelated to the famous design group), which was originally founded to “change this system, where the songwriter–who provides the most important component in an artist having success–is the lowest person on the totem pole”. Not quite sure how they’re achieving that goal by buying rights to a bunch of music catalogs: I’d guess this must mean they’re getting publishing rights and not the royalties, but multiple acquisitions listed on the Wikipedia page include writers’ and producers’ royalties. The company was also publicly traded pretty much from the start, and raised considerable investment, so looks like the investors foresee plenty of money flowing to the company.