Recoup Podcast

"The lower multiple you pay, the more room you have to be wrong," says Tom Sarig, founder of AntiFragile Equity Partners, which buys catalogs from artists earning $100,000 to $1 million a year. He aims for 5x to 10x, runs a valuation in-house with his CFO, and must get a third-party valuation before he can draw on his credit line.

Tom managed Lou Reed, and he is precise about where that money came from: Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day earned about $1.5 million a year, "100% sync." From his label years he tells how Cannons' "Fire For You" went into Netflix's Never Have I Ever for "like $3,000 a side" and, in his telling, went from about half a million streams to 50 or 60 million.

Then the plan for Hot Vibes, the European dance catalog his firm bought: about 180 songs earning close to $400,000 a year, 19 ideas to grow it (SoundExchange registration, Musicbed micro sync, a sync rep, paid social), a hoped-for 10 to 15% a year, and AI remixes that could take it to 500 songs by the end of next year, as long as the melody and lyrics are "not composed by a computer."

We also cover why he buys the whole album where, as he sees it, Duetti buys the one biggest track, how he screens for bot streams (four or five years of history, nothing declining more than about 5%), and whether Duetti's index of 3.8x to 10.2x matches what he pays: "That's about right."

Tom Sarig: antifragilemusic.com/equitypartners · LinkedIn

Chapters
0:00 Cold open + intro
0:24 Your purchase price is everything
5:07 Two songs, a million and a half a year
11:19 Finance people vs music people
14:47 Total serendipity
19:42 180 songs, 19 ideas
22:37 The AI stack
25:31 Bots, fraud and real growth
26:52 What multiples look like now
27:17 Quickfire
28:21 Outro

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

"Nobody actually wants a marketing plan," says Ali Lieberman, VP of Product at Symphonic Distribution. "They want the release to do well." That idea shaped the Release Campaign Builder, which Symphonic launched in February: a marketing plan built from a release's own data. Ali walks through one on screen, a demo release with a $500 budget and one goal, a playlist placement. One of Symphonic's senior A&R leaders called the output "annoyingly good."

Before Symphonic, Ali ran the US ISRC agency at the RIAA and improved business processes at SoundExchange. Her rule for AI comes from that work: it is "mostly an amplifier." Clean data and processes get faster; messy ones get you "amplifying mess." She explains which work Symphonic has handed to AI, how the team defines and tests those workflows, and what stays with people.

We also cover distributors as gatekeepers after UMG sued DistroKid and IFPI launched its Streaming Integrity Initiative, why the problem is "music pretending to be something that it isn't," why the default for AI training "should be no," and whether a model can price an advance: "I do not trust AI 100% to give the final number."

Ali Lieberman: symphonic.com · LinkedIn

Chapters
0:00 Cold open + intro
0:16 From ISRCs to AI
3:40 Your super assistant
8:36 A release plan written by AI
13:35 Distributors as gatekeepers
17:42 Opt in, not scraped
22:00 Can a model price an advance?
26:06 Quickfire

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

"Our target multiple is a 20X," says Sean Peace, who founded SongVest in 2007. A catalog owner buys at 8x, then sells 10% or 15% of a song to fans at 20x. Fans pay it because a SongShare is "the coolest piece of memorabilia you'll ever buy": a piece of a song they love that actually pays a royalty.

We test that on one real offering. In SongVest's 2026 offering circular, a share of "Rain On Me" earned $12,637 over the last twelve months. The seller gets $252,750, about 20 times that, and fans pay up to $318,465, about 25 times. Sean explains who those buyers are, how payouts reach them, and why the first song he put on the marketplace, "Hit The Quan", was one he owned himself.

We also cover fewer, bigger buyers after Sony and Recognition and BMG and Concord, what drives a multiple a year later, why a ton of money doesn't make you good at valuing catalogs, why song shares don't trade like stocks yet, and what AI licensing will actually pay song owners.

Sean Peace: songvest.com · LinkedIn

Chapters
0:00 Cold open + intro
0:26 Why SongVest is still here
5:32 Fewer, bigger buyers
9:03 The multiple, a year later
13:53 Who pays 25x for Rain On Me
16:23 Payouts and getting out
21:39 Will it ever trade like equities
23:41 AI money and fake streams
28:38 Quickfire

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

Jesse Kirshbaum signed the Clipse at 23. More than twenty years later, "Grindin'" is a Lavazza coffee. "Songs don't get old, but context is consistently changing," he says. That is his Living Catalog: brand partnerships that give older songs new meaning, and new income, long after the release date.

Jesse runs Nue Agency and writes the Beats + Bytes newsletter. He explains how a brand picks a song (data shows where the heat is, taste shows where it is going), why music licensing needs to be frictionless rather than permissionless, and what a label sitting on 5,000 songs should pitch first: not a playlist, a concept.

We cover Dolly Parton's Cup of Ambition coffee, DJ Khaled and Nesquik's "Another Bun", the 2025 NFL Draft walkout songs, Kid A Mnesia, and which archive deserves that treatment next.

Subscribe to Beats + Bytes: beatsxbytes.com/subscribe

Jesse Kirshbaum: nueagency.com · LinkedIn

Chapters
0:00 Cold open + intro
0:26 Grindin', twenty years later
1:49 From agent to agentic
6:57 What brands want from a catalog
9:37 Taste, data and the needle
13:10 Can a brand deal make an old song worth more?
16:45 Clearing music at scale
20:57 Don't send a playlist, send a concept
22:53 Quickfire

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

Vickie Nauman expects the first AI music licenses, signed on market share, to start paying on actual usage when they come up for renewal in one to two years. The founder and CEO of CrossBorderWorks has spent 26 years licensing new music technology, and she lays out what rights holders need before that switch: an attribution system for AI output, artist opt-in, and a transparency clause in every AI license.

We cover Spotify's AI artist badges, whether a Drake hit and a Kansas City singer-songwriter carry the same value in a training set, Merlin's role for independent catalogs, GEMA's court win against Suno, why AI-generated music should flow through the same DDEX pipes as everything else, and why 3.5 billion gamers make games a catalog income line. Vickie also explains why the industry lost four years trying to stop digital from 1999 to 2004, and why rights holders are at the table this time.

Vickie Nauman: crossborderworks.com · LinkedIn

Chapters
0:00 Cold open + intro
0:19 Human, machine, or a million shades of gray
6:49 Twenty-five years of new tech meeting old rights
11:53 The majors signed first. What about everyone else?
15:55 When the AI deals come due
20:45 Proving a song is human
25:09 Games as catalog income
29:28 Quickfire

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

Recorded in Miami during Art Basel 2024. Xcelencia runs his career the way a good company runs a product line: the album treated as software, distribution engineered through quests rather than playlist luck, and a direct commercial relationship with the collectors who fund the work. We go through the numbers behind his $100K year, the tooling he built versus bought, token-bound accounts as fan infrastructure, and what he would keep if he started again. Required listening for anyone who owns a catalog and wants to see the leading edge of independent operation in practice.

Connect with Xcelencia: El Niño Estrella, X, Spotify

Recoup designs and builds the systems behind conversations like this one: catalog data, royalty operations, and AI agents for labels, publishers, funds and management companies. recoupable.dev

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