Trailblazers is an MBW interview series that turns the spotlight on music entrepreneurs with the potential to become the global business power players of tomorrow. This time, we meet Cam Blackwood and Tom Tyler, founders of Rezonate Music Rights a fund launched with $150 million in backing from Bridgepoint Credit to acquire music producer royalty rights globally. Trailblazers is supported by TuneCore.
Producer catalogs are an underserved niche within the booming music rights investment landscape.
That’s according to longtime friends Cam Blackwood and Tom Tyler, who, identifying an opportunity in this space, launched producer royalties investment platform Rezonate, with $150 million in backing from Bridgepoint Credit.
According to Blackwood (co-founder and CXO) and Tyler (co-founder and CEO), the complexity of producer rights, with their fragmented ownership across multiple labels and projects, has deterred many institutional investors from splashing cash on this specialized area of the music rights business.
Via London-based Rezonate, they plan to buy music producer royalty rights globally, backed by Bridgepoint’s investment, while offering education and support services to the producer community.
Rezonate brings together the complementary expertise of Blackwood, the Scottish producer behind hits by George Ezra, Tom Walker, and Jack Savoretti, who provides industry credibility and access to the producer community; and Tyler, who contributes over 20 years of financial experience, including senior roles at the London Stock Exchange Group.
Their investment platform has already built up a portfolio of around 1,700 songs, after acquiring rights from high-profile producers, including catalogs from those who’ve worked with U2, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, The Weeknd, and Dua Lipa.
Rezonate has also acquired Blackwood’s own catalog, which has accumulated more than 8 billion streams globally. Bridgepoint Credit bought a minority stake in Rezonate’s management company as part of the partnership.
“We believe deeply in the vision Cam and Tom are building.”
Rohit Dhote, Bridgepoint
“We believe deeply in the vision Cam and Tom are building,” Bridgepoint Partner and Co-Head of Credit Opportunities, Rohit Dhote, tells us.
“We’ve been following the music royalties space for several years, but waited for the right moment and the right partner. Rezonate stood out because it’s building something entirely new: a platform by and for music producers, a segment that’s historically been overlooked.”
Bridgepoint, described as one of Europe’s “most experienced credit managers”, says it has invested more thanEUR €22 billion ($25bn) in over 350 companies since 2008.
Dhote says that “from a strategic perspective,” the investment in Rezonate and the producer royalty rights space “fits squarely within the type of opportunity we target at Bridgepoint Credit: high-quality, cash-generative assets in underpenetrated markets, where returns are uncorrelated to broader financial cycles”.
He adds: “Producer royalties tick all those boxes. They’re yield-generating, backed by long-life IP, and supported by macro trends toward the increasing dominance of streaming in today’s market.”
Looking to the future, Rezonate’s Cam Blackwood and Tom Tyler aim to deploy approximately $1 billion over the next five years.
Here, they explain their vision for investing in producers and producer catalogs…
Why have producer catalogs been undervalued or overlooked in the music rights space?
Tom Tyler: It’s probably three things. One is that, generally speaking, the size of the catalogs is smaller, and most of the funds are set up to work with larger catalog acquisitions. The average size of [a producer] catalog is sub-$10 million, and most funds are not set up to do that.
Secondly, there’s the perceived complexity. If you’re going to buy Bob Dylan’s catalog, you’re going to one label and one publisher. But we look at a producer catalog, with maybe 20-plus years worth of work, across 30 projects, across seven labels. Suddenly you’re dealing with all that information and data that you’ve got to amalgamate.
The third point is access. Music producers aren’t mainstream within the industry. They’re not signed to long-term contracts. They’re almost like peripatetic workers – they come in, they come out. So they’re not necessarily front and center when people think about [music rights investments], but they do hold very valuable long-term income streams.
When you combine those factors, you end up with a very appealing investment opportunity, but one that requires a business to approach it in the right way. It’s incredibly important for us that Cam is the founder with me, so we have credibility within the space and access to [producers].
How do you see valuations evolving in the music rights space? Do you see sustainable growth coming from more niche investment opportunities like producer royalties?
Tom: In terms of pricing, we’ve gotten to a more stable position. There was quite a lot of hype in the pricing in the run-up to 2020-2021, plus the interest rate cycle, which obviously impacted what is fundamentally a yield-based product.
“We’re in a relatively healthy place for both buyer and seller.”
Tom Tyler
We’re in a relatively healthy place for both buyer and seller. The data and the ability to value these assets are improving all the time, which helps with transparency and getting reasonably good valuations for people.
In terms of long-term value, it’s a two-sided market. The more buyers that understand the asset and are comfortable with it, the more buyers there will be. We’re seeing more financial institutions coming into the space. They may not necessarily express that through direct ownership, but this [partnership with Bridgepoint] is an example of that.
Could you walk us through your acquisition criteria? What makes a producer’s catalog attractive to Rezonate?
Tom: We are, and will always be, genre agnostic. We’re not trying to cherry-pick necessarily – we want to be a partner to all producers. We’ve valued over $300 million worth of catalog in the last two years, and what we’ve realized is that you don’t always know where the value actually is. It’s easy to assume that pop stars are the best, but they’re not necessarily – there’s not necessarily longevity there.
Generally speaking, we do look for catalogs that would be described as fairly fully decayed [in terms of their commercial peak]. The challenge of buying younger catalogs is that it’s quite hard to predict where they’re going to bottom out.
“We can do almost any size deal.”
Cam Blackwood
One of the brilliant things about producer catalogs is they’re naturally diversified anyway, because you’re not getting artist concentration – you get diversification on top of diversification because you’ve got projects, and then you’ve got groups of artists, time spans, differentiated artists as well.
Cam: Size [is a factor] as well. When I spoke to people about selling my catalog, it was just a very transactional thing focused on size. When we were talking to investors, we’d made sure they understood that we wanted to be able to execute smaller deals, because it’s important to support the smaller catalog owners as well as those with larger portfolios.
As such, we can do almost any size deal and have done deals in the hundreds of thousands, to [producers] earning only in the tens of thousands. I’m very driven by that because I’m trying to help the whole community. For younger people, 25 or 26 years old, who want to buy a flat, £100,000 would change their lives.
Beyond acquisitions, you’re also offering education and mentorship services to producers. How do those services fit into your business model?
Cam: I’ve already started telling all my community, explaining how the finance of the music industry works; what rights are, how rights are perceived within record labels and copyright, that the value is not the yearly income but the value as an asset that can be leveraged against.
Labels can borrow money against these catalogs. I’m explaining all that to the [producer] community because Tom and I have dealt with everyone in the finance world over the last few years, which has opened my eyes to it.
“We are developing solutions, both educational and financial.”
Cam Blackwood
We are developing solutions, both educational and financial. As part of that process, we are organising events—connecting producers and rights owners with industry experts from finance, legal, and music technology businesses to help them understand how it all works.
I feel that if we can empower all the writers, artists and creators to understand what they have and what value they have, it allows everyone to make a better decision about what they want to do.
The reason I wanted to sell was that I’d become a grown-up. I wanted to diversify away from just music, because my friends who work in finance said, “That’s quite a concentrated risk you have for your retirement.” I’d never thought of it that way.
Tom: This is quite an organic evolution, driven ultimately by the mission of the business to continue to be a service provider and supporter of the producer and creative space. Education is very much front and center of that – it’s amazing how many [producers] don’t realize what they actually have.
It also builds another organic pipeline for us. If we can identify people earlier and create a larger community of people making better, more valuable rights, then obviously, this will lead back into our business and make it more valuable.
Where do you see Rezonate in five years, and are there plans to expand beyond producer royalties to other areas of music IP?
Tom: The universe of producers – when you think about producers, mix engineers, vocal producers, writer-producers, artist-producers – that’s a very large community. In five years’ time, we have a target of deploying up to about a billion dollars worth of capital, and we think that’s achievable in the space.
The differentiator for us is that we are solving a very difficult problem. We’re building what is a best-in-class operating business. It is probably the most technically challenging bit of the rights space to work in. In any business where you are building best-in-class operations, it means that you can then look at other rights as well.
“We’ve already had quite a lot of expressions of interest and engagement from Asia, and some from Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Tom Tyler
We absolutely do not believe that we would only stick to producer rights. We have the skills and capability to acquire and move into other areas of rights acquisition.
From a geographic perspective, we’re quite focused in the UK and the US at the moment, and Europe, but we’ve already had quite a lot of expressions of interest and engagement from Asia, and some from Sub-Saharan Africa as well.
How will the rise of AI-generated music and AI-assisted production impact the long-term value proposition of producer catalogs?
Tom: From a historic perspective, our argument would be that this doesn’t have a great deal of impact on historic [catalogs]. A great record is a great record that’s already been made.
People still love The Beatles, Rolling Stones, whatever it might be. That’s not going to be affected by AI. So we don’t see that AI piece necessarily being impactful for buying historic catalogs.
Cam: I still work doing writing sessions and productions. AI has enabled us to work faster, but the thing is that AI can generate music, and it can do it very well. But what it can’t do is curate something that is truly individual.
I’ve ingested all the songs I’ve ever listened to, I’ve played them on guitar, I’ve played them on piano, I’ve sung them in my head, I’ve written them, I’ve listened to the words. All those songs are going into me, and I then output them in new music. But they’re ingested through me, through my unique personality, my upbringing, who I am, who I’m with. All those things make the output of that input different.
If you have a computer, yes, you can write algorithms to make it output different things, but it will never be truly based on the individual idiosyncrasies of my emotional personality.
There’s going to be two worlds. There’s going to be a world where library music is probably [made with AI]; cheap music that can be used on adverts, and that’s fine. But when you’ve got a brand like Amazon – this week I spent three days with them at sync camp at Metropolis Studios – they don’t want AI. They want something uniquely idiosyncratic. They want things that can’t be programmed in AI.
The uniqueness, the wonkiness of humans and the emotional understanding of that wonkiness – AI isn’t there yet. There’s something special about people still wanting to go and see a gig. It will be about experience. That is where artists will not die.
What advice would you give to producers who are considering selling their rights?
Tom: Firstly, send it to us. We genuinely think we are the best place for a producer to consider selling into because we have a unique perspective. We understand their rights, and we’re able to get a much better, granular understanding of them. Sometimes that in itself is quite helpful for producers – they don’t necessarily know what they’ve got.
Generally speaking, understand how many points you own, how popular those songs are now, what the stable streaming volumes look like. There’s a misconception that because it’s a popular song, it may not actually generate a great deal of income. Look at the entirety of your catalog, because there can be gems within there that are popular in different parts of the world that you just don’t know about.
“The key thing is understanding what you have and the value of it as an asset, not just yearly income.”
Cam Blackwood
The data is there if you can look for it. Things like Spotify for Artists actually provide pretty good data for people, but I don’t know how much people actually dive into that. It’s amazing how often people don’t realize a song is popular in Argentina or wherever.
And prepare yourself, get as much information to hand as you can. And also get a good accountant, maybe lawyer. Prepare all the statements, be prepared to answer millions of questions.
Cam: If you’ve got a great manager, it’s brilliant. If you’ve got a dreadful manager, it’s a disaster – it takes ages. There’s a lot of data to prepare.
The key thing is understanding what you have and the value of it as an asset, not just yearly income.
That allows you to make better decisions about whether you want to diversify away from the concentrated risk of just having music [as your retirement plan], or whether you want to hold onto it. But at least you’re making an informed decision either way.
Trailblazers is supported by TuneCore. TuneCore provides self-releasing artists with technology and services across distribution, publishing administration, and a range of promotional services. TuneCore is part of Believe.
