Decential shares an interesting outtake from the latest Water & Music academy on global music rights: "To be fully licensed a startup would have to speak to about 150 entities and spend between $500,000 to $750,000 in legal fees. And being licensed then means you have to pass about 85 percent of your revenue straight to the rightsholders – one of the reasons Spotify has such slim margins. So unless you’re a massive platform with a savvy team, there’s not much you can do to disrupt entrenched power dynamics". “Music innovation only stays innovative until they start to touch rights and licensing, Is it any wonder that the last great innovation was Spotify?” - Dan Fowler, director of Open Source Projects at HIFI Labs and author of newsletter Liminal Spaces, said. The solution the academy has offered? Web3.

"With the influx of cash that’s led to a music catalog buying spree over the past few years, where does all of this money come from?" - The Bag looks at the other side of the headline. Musicians have become much richer in the past five years since Hipgnosis kicked off this catalog boom. The biggest financiers:

Blackrock, who invested hundreds of millions of dollars via Influence Media Partners,

Litmus Music launched with $500 Million in funding from Carlyle Global Credit

Hipgnosis Song Management raised $1 Billion from Blackstone