What is a catalog actually worth?

Ask an artist what their catalog is worth and you get one of two answers. A shrug, or a number someone said at a dinner once. Neither is real. And it's not the artist's fault: the only people who routinely put a number on a catalog are the people trying to buy it, and they are not incentivized to show their math.

Here's the math they're doing. A catalog trades as a multiple of its earnings, usually the last twelve months of royalties, adjusted for how old the songs are and how fast they're decaying. A song still climbing is worth more per dollar of income than a song ten years past its peak, because the buyer is pricing the future, not the past. Genre matters. Rights type matters, since publishing and masters trade differently. Concentration matters: five songs doing ninety percent of the income is riskier than fifty songs doing two percent each.

None of that is exotic. It's arithmetic on data the artist already has. The problem is where the data lives: royalty statements from three distributors in three formats, a publishing admin report that looks nothing like any of them, splits scattered across emails and old contracts. Nobody sits down with four years of PDFs and a spreadsheet. So the number never gets computed, and the artist walks into every conversation about their own catalog as the least informed person in the room.

“The artist walks into every conversation about their own catalog as the least informed person in the room.”

This is a reading problem, and reading is what Maude does. She ingests every statement, normalizes every line item across distributors, maps the splits, and builds the earnings history that a valuation actually rests on. Trailing twelve months, decay curve per title, income concentration, the shape of the whole catalog over time. Then she applies the same multiple logic a buyer would, stated plainly, with the assumptions visible.

To be clear about what that is and isn't: it's not a bank-grade appraisal, and we don't pretend otherwise. A formal valuation for a sale involves lawyers, audited statements, and negotiation. What Maude gives you is the evidence-based number, grounded in your own income data, that tells you what range you're in before anyone else puts their number on the table.

And the number changes behavior. Artists who know what their catalog earns and what it's plausibly worth make different decisions about advances, about recoupment, about whether that buyout offer is generous or insulting. The difference between knowing and guessing, in a catalog conversation, is routinely six figures.

You built the asset. You should be the first person to know what it's worth, not the last.