from pharmaceuticals and related inventions; it’s run by Golnar’s brother Behzad Khosrowshahi.
The catalogue acquisition space has since exploded, with massive deals routinely grabbing headlines. Major asset managers such as BlackRock and KKR have been snapping up copyright royalty streams in recent years, while in a single month in 2021, Hipgnosis Songs Fund bought the rights to some or all of the catalogues of superproducer Jimmy Iovine, Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham.
Margaret McGuffin, chief executive officer of Music Publishers Canada, said that among publishing companies, “the most successful ones are going to be the ones like Reservoir who can understand the creative and understand potential – creating new lives for old songs while also finding opportunities for new creators.”
Still, Reservoir’s highest-profile expansion may be its push into the label business, thanks to the aforementioned rescue operation it performed with De La Soul’s six Tommy Boy albums.known as Posdnuos, Dave and Maseo – learned that a dispute between Tommy Boy and their long-time major-label partner Warner
nearly 20 years old, and possibly in the hands of the group’s ostracized former label, Tommy Boy. Everything fromwas shelved for years. As negotiations dragged on, De La Soul were never offered a cut of streaming revenue they felt was fair, Posdnuos said. “There were times where there were samples that I remembered but I didn’t remember the name of to find the original record,” Posdnuos said. He spent hours digging through his garage to find the albums he’d sampled from. Even once he found them, he often had to call the original musicians – or the people overseeing their estates, such as Otis Redding’s – to ask for permission to release art he’d made three decades earlier.