📰 This Week…

An updated look at my SongVest investment results. One of the most popular articles on Asset Scholar has been my one-year performance. It’s been a whole nother year now, so let’s see how things look 2 years in.

I’m back from traveling, but I’m still recovering from getting sick. I’m hoping to resume the regular news roundup starting from next week.

📽️ Where We Left Things In Year One

• I had seen about a 7-14.5% annualized return. The results vary based on the SongShares in question.

• My overall return was about 5%.

• The majority of my investments were more recent and none of them had paid out for a full year at the time.

🛒 My SongShares Portfolio

For the most part, not much has changed here since the year one update. I’ve added “Swish Swish.” That increased my SongShares holdings by about 8%.

That also means 92% of my portfolio has been payout for at least one full year.

💰 Results Overview

There are a few different ways we can look at things. Let’s start with an overall summary of total returns so far:

Across almost all assets, I’ve gotten about 11-21% of my initial investment back. That translates to receiving about 18% of my total investment amount back so far.

Considering that I’ve only been invested for 2 years, I think that’s a pretty healthy return.

📊 Performance Trends

We can also take a look at performance in a different way as well:

It’s a bit harder to read, but this is the quarterly payments for each asset over time. There are a few things here that I have my eyes on:

Inconsistency in the last two payments. There was generally a bump in the May ‘24 payments and an across-the-board decline in the Aug ‘24 ones.

• May’s payments were late since SongVest was in the process of switching to a new payment provider.

• I think that delay may have resulted in some of August’s payout being included with May’s. If you account for that, things look a bit smoother.

We’re seeing some declines. There are several assets that have a consistent down-trend in their earnings.

• The Chippass Master Catalog has been on a steady decline the entire time I’ve owned it.

  • The asset has about 140 different masters from 2014.

  • However, the biggest earner (9%) was released in 2021. The second biggest (4%) was released in 2019.

  • The top two songs are young enough that we would expect to see them decline as they age.

  • But, it’s a very diversified catalog outside of the top two songs. That unfortunately makes it harder to measure how old the entire catalog is.

  • So, I’m not really sure if this level of decline is just from “normal aging.”

• Eric Cain has also been gradually declining.

  • All the songs in the catalog (2019-2022) are relatively new, so this is mostly expected.

  • At the time of offering, the trailing 12-month yield for the catalog was about 27.25%.

  • With a bunch of new songs, that performance wasn’t going to persist. But I had still hoped to capture more of the early high-performance.

  • By the time the first SongShare payouts came, earnings were about ½ of that.

  • Additionally, Eric Cain is a small artist - just 5.3K Spotify followers. That hopefully leaves room for future growth if he’s able to generate additional traction in his music career.

🎵 Annualized Results & Conclusions

In the past year, I’ve had an annualized 13.62% return. That’s quite healthy. It’s also an increase from the 12% annualized return I got in the first year.

What makes that more impressive is that my portfolio contains some assets that I expected to return in the 7-10% range. It also includes impartial results from Swish Swish, which drag down the overall numbers. Without those, this year’s return would have been 14.5% annualized.

Overall, I continue to be quite happy with the results I’ve gotten.

That having been said, a few words of caution:

1. The delays caused by the asset transaction and SEC qualification means it’s easy to miss out on significant earlier payments for younger/newer songs. I think that makes these investments riskier.

2. The selection of SongShare offerings so far this year are more middle of the road. They’re a mix between pure investments and neat fan collectibles for recognizable songs or artist/fan promotions. Of what I’ve seen this year, I wouldn’t expect most of them to perform at this level.

On a brighter note:

• These results show that music royalties can be good-performing investments. That’s true even with the fees that come on top of the SongShare offerings.

• Lastly, while performance isn’t completely predictable, it isn’t random either. You can see a certain level of consistency and predictability from the results so far.

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