Catalogue acquisitions have become a familiar part of the music business.
A regional catalogue changes hands. A stake is acquired. A distribution agreement locks in years of future releases. The deals are announced, the numbers are discussed and ownership changes.
What receives far less attention is what happens after the acquisition is complete.
Rights need to be verified. Metadata needs cleaning. Songs need to be distributed, marketed, licensed and surfaced to new audiences. For the people responsible for managing these catalogues, that work often determines whether an acquisition succeeds.
Where Value Gets Created
Sujal Parekh, Chief Business Officer at Zee Music Company, believes the industry often underestimates what happens after a catalogue is acquired. “True value creation begins after the deal is signed, not before,” he says. “Securing rights is merely the first step.”
The work that follows is often operational rather than strategic. Metadata standardisation, rights validation, monetisation planning and ongoing catalogue management all influence whether an acquisition performs as expected.
“While a catalogue may appear valuable based on historical performance metrics or the presence of well-known tracks, significant value can remain unrealised if the underlying data is not accurate, rights are not comprehensively mapped, and the repertoire is not actively managed.”
Using a large-scale acquisition such as Toxic as an example, Parekh says the philosophy remains the same even when the complexity increases. “When a large-scale acquisition such as Toxic comes in, the scale certainly elevates both the intensity and complexity of internal execution, while the underlying philosophy remains consistent.”
Larger acquisitions require coordination across legal, finance, distribution, content operations and commercial teams.
“The risk exposure is also significantly higher because even small gaps in rights documentation or metadata can have major downstream impact at scale.”
What Makes A Catalogue?
Mandar Thakur, CEO of Times Music, is cautious about how the industry uses the word catalogue.
“No catalogue gets built in just some years,” he says. “It takes decades for something to be respectfully called a catalogue in a non dictionary way.”
At a time when recent streaming success is increasingly being packaged as catalogue value, Thakur draws a distinction between music that is currently performing and music that has demonstrated lasting cultural relevance.
“What we acquire necessarily needs to be of legendary value and iconic in nature, and not just trendy and very recent, so that we are able to work the catalogue to grow it further.”
For Thakur, acquisitions are as much about what can be built around a catalogue as what already exists within it.
“Such catalogue acquisitions require a significant amount of operational depth to understand real value and what you can grow operationally to get a return on your investment.”
Data helps inform those decisions, but only up to a point. “This simply helps our gut make more informed decisions. What it is not expected to do is predict hits. That is God’s exclusive domain.”
The long-term view remains central. “Times Music only buys music that it believes will be worth something beyond 10 years. That is the intent. We refuse more than we acquire.”
“Old is always gold. What makes one song or catalogue worth more than the other is its timeless nature and its resonance with audience memories.”
The Questions Before The Deal
While acquisition discussions often focus on valuation, revenue projections and deal structures, Parekh believes the industry spends too little time discussing what happens once a catalogue changes hands.
“One conversation I still think the industry doesn’t have enough before acquisitions is around post-acquisition operational readiness.”
Questions around integration, metadata, rights alignment and long-term monetisation often become critical after a deal closes.
How quickly can a catalogue be integrated? Is the metadata ecosystem clean enough to scale globally? Are rights chains aligned across publishing, masters, neighbouring rights and international territories? What resources will be required to monetise the catalogue over the next three to five years?
For Parekh, those questions increasingly determine the outcome of a deal.
“Music catalogues are no longer just financial assets, they are living IP ecosystems. Their value increasingly depends on how effectively they are managed, surfaced, and culturally sustained over time.”
The Infrastructure Layer
Uzma Aman Khan, Vice President of Content Marketing & Business Development at Phonographic Digital Limited (PDL), sees a different part of the process.
PDL works with more than 1,400 labels and over 45,000 sub-label rights holders, giving Khan visibility into how acquired catalogues are prepared, managed and monetised once they enter the wider rights ecosystem.
“Catalog acquisitions rarely arrive in a fully distribution-ready state,” she says.
While the music itself is usually delivered promptly, the supporting information often requires work. “There are often gaps or inconsistencies in metadata, ownership information, territorial rights, artist mappings, asset quality, and platform-specific requirements.”
As a result, many acquired catalogues require validation, rights verification and operational clean-up before they can be properly activated. “The extent of this work varies by catalog, but it is common for acquired catalogs to need operational review and normalization rather than being immediately ready for release.”
Priority artists and high-performing tracks are typically worked first through marketing, playlist pitching, audience development and metadata optimisation. “Given the scale of many acquisitions, it is not always immediately viable to actively market every asset.”
Metadata remains one of the most persistent challenges, according to PDL CEO Prashant Dogra.
“Metadata issues are far more common than most people realize and can have a direct impact on revenue.”
Missing ISRCs, incorrect ownership information, inaccurate artist mappings and incomplete contributor data can all affect discoverability and royalty collection.
“The biggest problem lies in the genre, sub-genre, description level, which can cause a big boost in the song’s discoverability.”
“Even small metadata inaccuracies can result in meaningful revenue leakage over time, making metadata management one of the most important and often underestimated parts of catalog value creation.”
For Dogra, the difference between successful and underperforming catalogues is rarely the music alone.
“In most cases, the difference is rarely just the music itself.”
“Great music matters, but the ability to manage, market, and monetize it effectively is often what separates a good catalog from a great one.”
The Sync Reality
For Girish Bobby Talwar, founder of Rebellion Management, catalogue value is often tested when a song is being licensed. To understand why catalogue acquisitions have become more attractive, Talwar points to changes in the economics of recorded music.
“New releases used to be predictable income engines. That model has largely broken down.” Streaming spikes, singles culture and changing listener behaviour have made new music harder to forecast. Catalogue offers a more predictable proposition.
“The streams are steady. The royalty income is consistent. The behaviour of a song that has been loved for twenty years is far more predictable than anything released last month.”
That predictability has attracted investors as well as music companies. “When KKR and Hipgnosis and private equity are involved, you know the conversation has moved well beyond A&R instinct into institutional investment logic.”
But ownership does not automatically make a catalogue usable. “More often than the industry would like to admit, it lands unusable.”
He describes a common scenario. A campaign identifies the right song. The creative team wants it. The brief is approved. Then the clearance process begins.
“The master is with the acquirer but publishing is still with the original composer’s estate.”
“Three weeks later your brand has moved on and your edit is running with library music, not because the song wasn’t right, but because the infrastructure around it wasn’t ready.”
Why Discovery Remains Reactive
Talwar believes much of India’s sync market still operates reactively. “This is what I mean by reactive. Someone on the creative team remembers a song from their childhood. A reference track gets mentioned in a brief. Someone calls a label. The deal gets complicated fast.”
Projects often end up using commissioned or stock music instead. “Internationally, music gets involved at a creative level very early,” he says. “In India, for most projects, music arrives late.”
That affects the music that gets selected. “The market selects for fame because fame is the easiest shortcut when music is an afterthought.”
To address this, Rebellion works with creative teams before briefs are finalised. “We do listening sessions not to pitch specific tracks for a specific brief, but to plant recall.”
The transaction may transfer ownership. What happens next determines whether the catalogue simply changes hands, or continues to grow.
