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[Keeping Tempo With Music Biz] — The Most Expensive Mistake Rights Owners Make in a Music Catalog Deal: Op-Ed from Symphonic’s Michelle Garramone

I think and talk a lot about catalog value and long-term strategy. I spend most of my days talking to both buyers and sellers and listening to their pain points. One of the main reasons for focusing on this niche is that it’s the only thing standing between a catalog owner and what I see as a fundamentally positive future with potentially the greatest impact on legacy. I think that most people underestimate just how radical the upside of selling a catalog could be, just as they underestimate the downside. I am going to try to explain the downside clearly to reduce uncertainty and avoid the pitfalls I see happen. No catalog deal is immune to the pitfalls.

I am including a lot of detail mainly because as someone who came up from the music side and has worked with many artists & music business owners over many years, I think education and clarity do more to advance discussions than living in the abstract, in fear of change and not doing anything at all. I don’t think we have enough conversations about the upside of change in music. When it comes to a catalog sale, all we see are the headlines.

Yet despite all of the valid concerns around it, I really do think it’s important to understand what a world can look like utilizing this new financial option and strategy of selling catalog which is finally available to rights owners of all sizes, not just the top 1%.

The Framework
It’s helpful to first specify what I mean by a catalog sale. The architecture of a deal doesn’t have to mean the entire catalog gets sold. There are many different deal structures now than before; when you have the vision and the right framework, you can determine what structure is best for your sale. I believe we need vision and clear frameworks to think about these deals in a productive way. 

The most expensive mistakes in a catalog sale happen before an offer ever arrives, when a rights owner hasn’t decided what the sale needs to accomplish and hasn’t completely packaged the deal to give buyers clean, complete data. This means statements and mapping agreements to those statements. Without that, the value the owner expects is hard for any buyer to see, let alone pay for. Getting to the right price is not the hardest part; a buyer will get to a price rather quickly based on the data they are provided. It may not be the price a seller wants, and it’s usually in large part due to incomplete or messy data collection and delivery. This is where it starts to get frustrating for most sellers. 

Citrin Cooperman valued 566 music catalogs at nearly $13 billion in 2025, and established sound recording catalogs held multiples above 17 times earnings. MIDiA Research reports that catalog funds generated $1.6 billion in publishing revenue in 2025, up 14.9 percent. 

If the market gives rights owners plenty of reasons to move quickly, and capital is available and abundant, then why is it so hard to sell at a seller’s sale price expectation?

Buyers are pricing risk more precisely than they were a few years ago because the data gap between what a catalog earns and what the seller captures in a deal is usually decided by how prepared the seller is to transact, not by buyer appetite. And buyers are beholden to their mandates as well as rising interest rates, etc. that all need to be factored in. 

This isn’t an argument for or against selling catalog. It’s a case for building out the package properly so the catalog can be accurately valued, and it applies to anyone selling and pursuing the offers: artists, managers, labels, attorneys, brokers and advisors. 

This is the part most sellers don’t want to hear. A buyer is not paying for what the music means or how it makes them feel. They are paying for what it earns, and for how confident they can be that it will keep earning. They are paying for stability with possible growth. I understand why that lands hard for music creators, but it’s still not a reason to be skeptical of the impact a catalog sale can unlock. The seller’s job is to make sure the numbers tell the truest version of the catalog’s story, because the buyer will only pay for the story they can verify.

A music catalog is often someone’s life’s work, and no spreadsheet can capture the essence of that. A sale is not where that meaning gets measured.

Getting an unbiased catalog valuation is a good first step. In getting a valuation done, you are simultaneously procuring an organized data room and creating an opportunity to fill any royalty registration gaps, secure all agreements, and build out the Schedule A of the tracks included for sale. These documents are all necessary assets to getting a true valuation. Citrin Cooperman and Virtu are reputable resources for valuation. They are not free, but their valuations may help materially change the size of your deal in the end, and that could be very much worth it. There are other third-party tools anyone can use to get a sense of their catalog value as well. In the age of AI, I would not recommend using Claude or ChatGPT, but they can be helpful in getting a seller organized. A professional is highly recommended in the valuation and packaging stage. 

A valuation lets you go to market with a real sales price in mind. I recently spoke with a catalog owner who hadn’t had their catalog valued and wouldn’t share their sale expectation. They had a number in their head, but it was a feeling, not a figure they could support. Their plan was to wait and see what a buyer offered or what a broker thought they could get. I understand the instinct, but it skips the step that matters most. Without their own valuation, they had no way to judge whether a first offer was fair, generous, or well below what the catalog could support, or whether the number in their head was even realistic. A seller loses credibility when they go into the deal room like this. 

This kind of approach isn’t unusual in the seller sphere. Many sellers treat the buyer’s offer as the moment their catalog’s value gets decided and save their energy for negotiating the multiple once it arrives. In my experience, that gets the order backwards and weakens a seller’s position. 

When the seller has no grounded number of their own, every point has to be argued from scratch: the revenue, the decay assumptions, and the reasoning behind the multiple. That back and forth drags out the process and wears down both sides before a deal has a chance to take shape.

Good data unlocks value
Buyers don’t ignore uncertainty — they price it. Gaps in ownership, collection and reporting each show up as a lower price or less flexible terms; oftentimes, they show up as both. A buyer won’t pay full value for rights they can’t confirm they’re receiving.

Ownership proof, or chain of title, is usually where the trouble starts. Splits agreed on a handshake, co-writer agreements that were never signed, producer points nobody wrote down, reversion clauses buried in an old label deal, and registrations that don’t match the paperwork all raise questions. These gaps are even more common in emerging markets, where handshake deals are often standard and registration systems vary widely from country to country. 

It’s also important to know what exactly you are selling. One owner of a sound recording catalog wanted to sell 100% of the masters, which he said he owned. When we got down to packaging the offer, he realized he could only sell 100% of his share, which was not 100% of the masters. Both the deal size and the headline number expectation materially changed — in this case, the deal was now too small to be a fit for most buyers. Ultimately, the seller was not clear on what they were selling and the deal died right there.

Collection gaps are the quieter problem, and often the more costly one. Unregistered works, unclaimed neighboring rights, uncollected international income, and mismatched metadata all mean a catalog is earning less than it should. The scale of the problem is real. The Mechanical Licensing Collective received roughly $397 million in historical royalties that streaming services couldn’t match to their owners, and in early 2027 it plans to begin distributing unclaimed royalties by market share, which means money that owners never claimed will go to other rightsholders. That understated income is exactly what gets multiplied. An owner who sells before fixing collection hands the buyer the upside of that cleanup and still pays for it.

Summary reports of earnings sent as PDFs will not cut it. Raw reports from every income source included in the sale will show the full picture. Buyers want three to five years of raw statements, if not more, that tie to actual receipts, with clear explanations for spikes, dips, one-time payments, and any outstanding advances or recoupment. Without that, a buyer can’t tell steady, repeatable income from one-time spikes, so they value the catalog on the lowest number they can believe. Gaps in reporting statements don’t just slow diligence. They invite holdbacks, escrows, earnouts, and price adjustments late in the process, when the owner has the least room to push back. Many deals fall apart here and leave both the buyer and the seller feeling burnt out. 

I often compare this to selling a house. A great house can still lose buyers if the inspection turns up issues behind the walls that nobody flagged. The value was always there, but the mess is what costs the owner at closing. None of these issues make a catalog unsellable, but each one gives a buyer a reason to lower the price or tighten the terms, or ultimately move on to a cleaner opportunity.

A seller with vision can tell the difference between a good offer and the right one
Many sellers enter a catalog transaction without a clear answer to what the money actually needs to do. Liquidity for a new venture, estate planning, tax timing, paying down debt, buying out a partner, and funding the next five years of new music are all legitimate goals. They can also point toward very different deal structures. A seller who needs cash now and a seller planning for their family’s future may not be signing the same deal.

Without that clarity, rights owners tend to judge every offer on the one thing all offers have in common, which is the headline number. When price is the only thing a seller cares about, they’ll often give up more to get there.

Objectives also need to be personal, not just financial. Some rights owners care deeply about how the music is used after a sale. After all, this is art, and it carries the artist’s legacy. Those conversations are far easier to have before an offer is on the table. 

When a promising opportunity doesn’t close, most rights owners assume it came down to money. In my experience, that hasn’t always been true. Without vision, even the right offer can look like the wrong one.

Preparation is where the value is decided
The catalog market will keep moving, and the headline deals will keep setting expectations that most catalogs won’t match. None of that changes what determines a good outcome for a rights owner. Clean ownership records, complete statements, and a clear vision for the sale do more to shape a deal than any comparable sale.

The most expensive mistake a rights owner can make is treating the offer as the starting line. By then, the work that decides the result should already be done. Rights owners who do that work first walk into the conversation knowing what they have, what they want, and what they will and won’t give up. That puts them in a position to make the right decision and the biggest impact for their business and for their legacy.

Written by: Michelle Garramone, Head of Strategic Partnerships for Symphonic NEXT. In this role, she works with artists, labels, catalog owners, music businesses and private equity funds on acquisitions, royalty advances, and long-term catalog strategy.

A thoughtful approach to catalog deals
Symphonic NEXT helps independent artists, managers, labels, and rights owners evaluate what comes next, whether that means a royalty advance, a partial or full catalog sale, or improving a catalog’s performance before pursuing a transaction.

Unlike platforms built primarily to buy assets, Symphonic approaches these conversations as an independent music operating partner, with distribution, technology, and catalog expertise under one roof.

If you have a catalog and are thinking about liquidity, growth capital, or your long-term strategy, explore your options with Symphonic NEXT — Learn more about Symphonic NEXT

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