Musonomics

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Who Wins After the Catalog Gold Rush? Aug 19, 2026

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For the past decade, success in music rights investing has largely been measured by one thing: how many great catalogs you could acquire before everyone else did. But every gold rush eventually matures. Capital floods in. Competition intensifies. The biggest players start buying each other instead of buying songs. The question is no longer who owns the most music. It's who can build the best business around it. In this special crossover episode of Musonomics and Music Moneyball, Larry Miller is joined by Tom Mullen, CEO and Co-Founder of Standard Innovation, to explore what the next chapter of the music investment industry might look like. Together, they trace how streaming transformed music into an institutional asset class, why mergers and acquisitions are accelerating across the sector, and what history can teach us about competing in markets increasingly dominated by giants. Looking beyond music, they turn to A24's rise in the film industry as an unlikely blueprint for how smaller, more focused companies can outperform far larger competitors by embracing specialization instead of scale. Along the way, they examine why platform businesses are replacing simple catalog acquisition, where investors should be looking for untapped opportunities, and why the biggest competitive advantage may no longer be having the most capital, but knowing exactly where not to compete.

5 Billion Reasons to Train AI on the Music Traditions of the Global South Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

Artificial intelligence is doing to music what the printing press did to books and what the mp3 did to the album. But as the tools multiply and the investment pours in, a harder question is starting to surface. Who exactly are these systems built for? On this episode, Larry talks with Drew Thurlow, former senior executive at Sony Music, Pandora, and Warner Music, and author of Machine Music, the most clear-eyed account yet of what is actually happening at the intersection of AI and the music industry. Then Rithvik Kundu, music technology researcher and co-founder of the NYU Gen Audio AI group, and Jad Al Masri, violinist, composer, and founder of Motif, join the conversation fresh off winning the Berklee College of Music AI Hackathon. Their work asks a question the major AI music platforms have largely ignored: what about the five billion people whose musical traditions, modal systems, and microtonal instruments don't fit neatly into the Western tonal framework these models were built on?

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