Music catalogs are more valuable than ever. Because of streaming, music now has significant potential to make money well past the initial sale or release. This means an artist or songwriter who hasn’t put out new material in a decade or two, yet maintains a significant fan base, can still generate healthy revenues year after year. For example, on this site we spotlight Heritage artists — which we define as averaging more than 500,000 monthly listeners with 80% of their streams from tracks more than five years old. This group of 3,400 artists, on average, generated $433,000 from Spotify alone in 2022 (and likely well over $1 million across all streaming services).
The rising value of artists’ and songwriters’ catalogs serves as another important signal of optimism for the future value of music.