ValuePunks has extended its catalogue valuation platform to music publishing.
It means that the platform now offers songwriters, composers and music publishers a free and transparent way to value their catalogues.
ValuePunks launched in July with its valuation service for recording catalogues.
Publishing valuations are based on composition income, which is scattered across mechanical royalties, performance royalties, sync and more, tracked through a web of societies and administrators.
ValuePunks values a catalogue based on each revenue stream, calibrated on royalty audits covering catalogues that earn more than €100 million a year and on consumption data across 120,000-plus catalogues and millions of songs. The audits are carried out through Royalty Radar, an audit platform owned by the Swiss company Tribe Music Group, which launched ValuePunks.
Mechanical royalties typically reach songwriters nine to 12 months after the music is actually played, with performance income processed over a similar timeframe, so any valuation based on those royalties would already be out of date.
“Because ValuePunks draws on live consumption data, it can value a catalogue on what it is earning today, not on what it earned the better part of a year ago,” said a statement.
The principle is the same on both sides of the rights equation: understand the cash flows first, then value the catalogue
Dr Nils Flaschel
According to ValuePunks, in the first 48 hours after launch, recordings rights-holders onboarded catalogues representing more than €50 million in annual royalties. The total now exceeds €300m.
“Giving this away free to artists and labels was a punk thing to do – and the same logic has to hold for the people who actually wrote and composed the songs,” said Constantin Thyssen, co-founder and CEO of ValuePunks. “They sit right at the start of the value chain and end up the least informed about what it’s worth. So publishing gets the same treatment: a real, professional valuation, free, for the writers themselves.”
Dr Nils Flaschel, co-founder, CTO and head of data science, added: “Publishing is a matching problem before it’s a valuation problem. You have to connect a composition to every recording of it before you can see what it earns – and only then value it, modelling mechanical, performance and sync income individually rather than compressing them into one generic multiple. The principle is the same on both sides of the rights equation: understand the cash flows first, then value the catalogue.”
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