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I'm Dan Runcy. Welcome to Trap Ital where today we're talking about investing in music. Specifically the opportunities that capture the biggest headlines have been the biggest companies, the biggest artists and the major catalog sales that are often for billions of dollars or for the artists who are household names. But there's arguably an opportunity that has been overlooked by many but is starting to become more and more mature as music as an asset class develops. And that's that independent layer both with the companies that are attracting the artists who are leading independent record labels or the artists that have been independent themselves or the artists that may be leaning and building in the music industry in non traditional ways and that also looks at the catalogs for those artists as well. That may not be the Queen Michael Jackson level but, but the returns may be just as valuable if they're aggregated in a smart way. And that opportunity right there, that's what we're going to get into in this conversation because believe me, there are a growing number of investors, LPs and others in this sector that believe that the deals that capture the biggest headlines are getting too expensive.
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The sellers want too much money for
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them and the market for music as an asset class, it's just grown too much that there's less opportunity to generate a return for the LPs, which is the fiduciary responsibility for any investor. So that opportunity we're talking about, there is high risk there because it's less proven, but if it pays off, there could be tremendous reward. And that's been a big focus for today's guest who is Mike Morris. He is a managing partner at Flexpoint Ford which has made investments in companies like Create Music Group, Gold State, Duetti Network and more. And you're going to hear about how Mike went about those decisions, some of the trade offs and how he sees the opportunity moving forward. This was a fun conversation with Mike
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and I hope you enjoyed it as
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much as we did. Here's my conversation with Mike Morris. Our third annual Trapital Summit is right around the corner. We will be live in Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 15th.
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This will be a day for relationship
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building, insightful conversations and more. On stage you'll hear from some of the top executives like Steve Boom from Amazon, Larry Mystel from Primary Wave, Aaron Teague from Disney and more to name. Soon we'll also have a room full of executives from places like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Shot Tower Capital, bank of California, Splice Symphonics, Seasac Music Match, Reed Smith and many, many more. If you want to buy a ticket, you can grab a link in the show notes. This is a limited capacity room, so make sure that you get a ticket. You want to be there again.
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You don't want to be the person that sees the highlights and say, oh,
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I got to get there next year. This is literally for you. Get the ticket now. There's a link in your show notes. See you in a few weeks at our third annual trapital Summit. This episode of TRA is presented by Symphonic, which recently launched next, their new initiative focused on catalog acquisitions, royalty advances and indie artist financing. As the needs of independent artists and labels evolve, so does Symphonic. With Next, they're creating new pathways to capital and strategic partnerships, giving their clients the flexibility to grow, invest and scale on their terms. According to Symphonic CEO Jose Brea, NEXT is designed to be flexible across a wide range of opportunities, typically supporting transactions from catalogs generating around $25,000 in the last 12 months of earnings, up to larger multimillion dollar acquisitions depending on the opportunity to learn more, tap the link in the show notes.
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All right, we are here with Flexpoint Ford's Mike Morris.
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Welcome to trapital.
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Glad to be here, Dan. Thanks for having me.
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Of course. Appreciate you coming here in San Francisco. And anytime that you and I have talked or I've looked at your strategy, I feel like your strategy's a bit more unique in that you're specifically looking at independent sector and you're looking at the opportunities that aren't just the biggest artists in the world, the most iconic. Is that how you look at it on your end?
C
Yeah, no, I think that's broadly right. I think it starts with the usual things that you and your guests have talked about in the past around just the secular growth in music. But then what's talked about quite a bit less is that within the independent sector, that has been taking quite a bit of share from the majors over the last 10 plus years. If you go back in time 10 years ago, the independent sector was kind of 25 to 30% of overall. You know, the overall, at least on the recorded music music business, fast forward to today, that's closer to, you know, the mid-40s from a market share standpoint. So when you take both the secular growth of the industry over overall and the secular growth of this part of the market, it's a pretty interesting place to be. The second thing is that, you know, as opposed to where obviously you kind of have the big three and then we can argue about whether Concorde and BMG coming together qualify as a major or not. But there's a tremendous amount of fragmentation in that independent part of the market. And this is where a lot of the interesting technologies, especially on kind of the services and infrastructure side, have popped up over the last few years. And so all of those things have kind of made it a pretty interesting place to be and have informed a lot of the investing that we've done that you just mentioned.
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A lot of people have viewed the
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independent sector, as you mentioned, yes, it's not what the majors are after necessarily, but because they see it as being more fragmented, people often can think, okay, do you invest more in the pipes or the distribution where you can capture everything, as opposed to trying to pick the winners that are most likely to capture the most successful entities, whether those the artists or the companies producing those artists? Do you have a laying there based on what end of that spectrum you may lie in or where you see those opportunities?
C
You make a good point about kind of how the industry and this independent part of the industry have formed. If the question is around, is it more interesting to invest around these independent artist catalogs or the infrastructure and the pipes, as you've called it? Look, we found good opportunities in both lanes, but I think as you look forward, and this is really where a lot of our portfolio companies are going, you really need to bring both together. I think today, just being capital and just going and buying independent artist catalogs at random, that's not a winning strategy. It probably wasn't 10 years ago, and it's certainly not today. So today I think it's a combination of bringing the infrastructure, financial savvy to that and discipline to that is where really the opportunity is. It can take the form of being on the identification side. So using all forms of data to identify the catalogs that are doing the best, or it can be using better pipes to get better distribution, get better, get uplift on your distribution market, the music better. There's just a tremendous amount of opportunity right now to kind of better administer and monetize some of these independent artist catalogs than there has been in the past.
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So if we're thinking about that and taking a step back with it, the one place I'm curious and how you look at it is the risk. Because like anything, high risk, high reward, how do you underwrite those opportunities? Make sure that, yes, you know, the upside is there, but if the underlying thing, even if you're not directly investing directly in one particular artist, it's still very hit or miss on what that can look like, which is less proven than some of the biggest things we have.
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Well, I have two thoughts for you. One is that it's less hit or miss than most people would think. Just because you're not Bob Dylan or Billie Eilish or Justin Bieber doesn't mean that you don't have a fan base that, that's very dedicated to you, that is very loyal to you, that'll listen to not only your legacy catalog but also everything new that you put out. So just because your followership may be less than Billy or Justin doesn't mean that you don't have 10,000, 100,000, a million very dedicated listeners and followers on Spotify or the other platforms. So I think there is a little bit of a misconception that just because you're a smaller artist that it's riskier. The second layer is that what we're doing, and this is important, we would not, even with the best data in the world and the most confidence in the world, we're not going and making isolated bets around a single artist or a couple artists or even five or ten artists. We're building in different ways between our portfolio companies, diversified pools of these, of these royalty assets, as well as services, contracts and services relationships with these artists. And when you put all of those together into a diversified pool and assuming that you're doing your job on the front end to make sure you're getting access to the right contracts and the right assets and the right repertoire, it ends up being this diversified pool of fairly visible predictable cash flows. But it comes down to getting that level of diversification, not taking large single bullet shot type exposures on individual artists and getting the diversification to provide those predictable cash flows.
A
Right, and that makes sense at the more mature level. Right? Because as you mentioned, not everyone is Justin Bieber or Bob Dylan, but you're also investing in companies that are investing earlier stages as well, right? Catalogs that are three, four, you, maybe even one year old.
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And there, there is a bit more risk.
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But I also think you're pricing and underwriting that type of risk.
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Well, you just, you just, you just hit it. And you know, I don't mind saying because I think it's public, but one of our portfolio companies, Duetti, has recently announced that they're now buying tracks in catalogs as young as six months, which would have seemed, you know, entirely crazy even to me, not all that, that long ago, but for, you know, Duetti specifically just to hit on them for, for, for a minute, they've been, they are a digitally native catalog acquirer and, and and services business that has always been focused, you know, init two years plus plus old and now with the body of data in the kind of technological tools that they've been able to build over the course of their reasonably short existence, we now feel that there's enough confidence that we can go out and very selectively buy those tracks down to six months. But you hit on it. The price is key. Clearly you cannot pay the same price for a six month old track from a very emerging artist irrespective of how much momentum they might have behind them that you can for a 10 or 20 or 30 year old track that has proven performance over the course of years or decades. So but by getting the underwriting good enough, it won't be as tight as it will be for a 10 or 20 year old track. But in combining that with the right pricing that's a, that's an attractive place to be. From what we've seen so far.
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They recently put out their own report, they showed for the multiples for some of those younger catalogs and you're looking at 3, 4, 4, 5x and again, that's very different from the music that is much more mature. So again that's what we're talking about. When you're talking about okay, how do you price the asset accordingly? Because obviously if that works out well, that's a tremendous payoff. Right, but that's exactly right. But there's also a lot more risk that comes with that.
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And that also makes me think of
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another investment that you all have that's public, which is Create Music Group. If the rest of the music industries have been more focused on the traditional DSP game, they're looking at YouTube or TikTok and creators themselves, hence the name or even things like record labels for cats.
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For dogs.
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For dogs, not cats for dogs. Yes, the through line there is.
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Okay, what is the type of opportunity that may be less obvious on paper
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but could have that next upside down the road?
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Yeah, the next opportunity that could have more be less obvious on paper and have more upside down the road. I think you hitting on Create is an interesting example of kind of where they've taken their business. It might be little known at this point, but Create started out as a pure play YouTube rights management business. That's how they were built. That's really just around going and collecting on UGC user generated content that was on YouTube doing the conflict clearances and getting money from YouTube into the correct IP owners owner's pockets. So they grew up digitally native and over time have taken the business further to get into distribution, to get into record label ownership, but also because of that kind of experience information story around being native to YouTube in UGC, this isn't well known, but they also have a very significant digital content studio called Flighthouse Media that has, you know, over 300 million subscribers to own channels, has over a billion unique views a month that they're able to leverage to better get their, the artists that they represent in their repertoire and music out, out into the world. So those more digitally native businesses like Create that came up outside of the traditional record label system and outside of being reliant purely on the DSPs early on are something that we're very, very bullish about.
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Are there any additional risks that a company like that faces that may be different from the more traditional music groups?
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Yeah, look, I mean when it comes down to it, the risks would really be they don't have that classic repertoire of the Eagles and the big name, the legacy catalog acts.
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What's the risk of that though if it's purely financial? Right. Like, is there risk in not having just a marquee name even if you have others that can still generate?
C
Well, we, I mean it's, I think this is that, that would be more the view of the, some of the traditional like label and publishing people that if you don't have this kind of corpus of, of legacy iconic repertoire, then you just have a riskier catalog. But for Create today, they have exposure and generate revenue through literally millions of tracks spanning the independent music ecosystem and spanning all kinds of genres, geographies and most importantly, they're exposed to the highest growth areas of the music ecosystem today. So when you put all of that in the blender, is there really more risk to a platform like Create versus a major label? I'd argue not. And you're exposed to, you know, capturing more of that, that upside associated with the fastest growing parts of the industry.
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Do you look at platform dependency as a primarily important risk factor, whether it is YouTube or TikTok or others?
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Yeah, of course we look at, look at it. If you're a content owner or a content service provider, whether you're in music or film or audiobooks or anywhere else, you are dependent on the DSPs that you're distributing through for, for the most part. And in music, obviously that's your Spotify's and your Apples in your Amazons, youtubes. And so we do spend a lot of time and this is what a lot of our kind of like internal discussions are around how we best form these symbiotic relationships between the DSPs and the I and the IP holders. One really can't exist without the other, but there's a constant tension. It's important to maintain the relationships with those DSPs in a way that's going to end up making sense for the for our individual platforms. But there is a playbook to doing it. But it involves a lot of hard work, relationship building, etc.
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Let's take a break for our chart metric stat of the week Ella Langley's country hit Shoes in Texas has been one of the most popular songs of 2026 on the Billboard charts. Fifteen weeks as the number one song of the Hot 100 Countdown.
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That's more than Mariah Carey's We Belong Together.
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That's more than Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love youe.
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Does that mean that this song is
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actually bigger than those songs?
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We're not gonna get into that today.
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But what we will get into is Ella Langley herself and how her stardom has grown, specifically on Spotify. She currently sits at just under 32 million monthly Spotify listeners. She crossed the 30 million threshold in May of 2026. She crossed the 20 million threshold in January of 2026. She crossed the 10 million threshold in June 2025. And just as recent as 2024, she had under 3 million Spotify monthly listeners. Again, this is an artist who had been active for years, but you never know when that moment might be that an artist may pop. Best of luck to her. Let's see how well this song continues to do for the rest of the summer.
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Let's get back to the episode. So looking at the portfolio, are there any areas that you feel are exciting areas to you that you haven't been able to make or that you're still looking to find the right opportunity?
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Yeah, I'd say that the one area that's most like within that kind of combination of having the right capital, having the right service offering that's most interesting to me right now. But no one is quite cracked the code on yet is around marketing within music. Historically, marketing has been a little bit of this like nebulous thing where going back 10, 20 years, it's you sign to our label, we're going to market your album the right way, we're going to get you on the right tours, on the right radio stations. There was a lot of smoke and mirrors as to how as to how that all worked and if it ever worked. I think that going forward, finding measurable ways to put money marketing dollars behind the right artists, the right, the right tracks, the right songwriters is, is like a problem that people have been trying to figure out for a while. But again, no one has quite cracked the code on and we're monitoring kind of that, that service offering to see if something emerges because if someone gets it right and gets, gets it to a very measurable place where you can kind of know with some degree of certainty we put $1, $10, a million dollars behind a track or an artist, what is that going to result in in terms of a return on capital? Like that's going to be a pretty compelling place to be if someone can crack the code.
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Of course, historically people would just, you know, throw money at different things and whatever types of promotion based on who they thought was popular or just through intuition. But now I feel like so many artists and the folks they represent, they're relying on meta, they're relying on all these other platforms where the metrics are pretty quantifiable. How that lends itself to long term value creation beyond just you're able to acquire this user or this viewer for X amount. But you're saying that, okay, if we apply that more directly to music and maybe be a bit more holistic, how can you have a more complete picture on what that looks like for the customer or what that looks like for owning that relationship and marketing?
C
Yeah, that's right. But the measurability piece of it is it's very difficult because if you get, let's say you create a viral moment on TikTok, which is by the way, very difficult, next to impossible to create virality. There needs to be substance. I would argue the vast majority of labels now are out trying to manufacture it by paying creators to feature their songs in a dance TikTok video. But it doesn't mean it's going to translate into something. But getting that to a place where you can measure it with some degree of certainty is where things need to go before someone or some company breaks through.
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I assume similarly, would that lean a bit more towards someone that has the distribution of the pipes of the marketing to be able to have some type of technology that serves everyone as opposed to maybe an agency that is more so picking and choosing?
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Yeah, I think that it needs to be less bait when you say picking and choosing, I think it needs to be less based on kind of like taste and intuition and more based on data numbers. So as to who it is, is it someone who already has distribution? Is it someone more on the agency side? It's hard to say in the barrier for all of these groups, they have their own way of doing business. They're making money one way or a couple of ways today. This may be a new model for how you make money in the, in the music business. And so I wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's someone who is a totally new entrant and who doesn't necessarily have distribution pipes or agency relationships or an agency offerings today anyway. There needs to be real, you know, real data, real technological infrastructure and then you know, an operator who hopefully has some and entrepreneur and management teams that hopefully have some of that taste and ability to see where culture is going, but can marry it with the data, with the financial acumen and with a scalable infrastructure to build something enduring and of consequences. Those are the types of businesses that we want to get behind.
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And on a similar perspective, are there
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any trends right now that are more popular among investors or even among the asset class that you're less excited about?
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Yeah, I'll give you a controversial, it might be a little bit of a controversial take to some, to some people, but I don't want to say it's a trend. It's just been kind of the norm. And you have a lot of very vocal folks, especially in the catalog aggregation space today that'll just say like buying anything other than the blue chip artists and frankly a lot of what I would consider just like old white guy music. So owning the Eagles and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, there are a lot of people out there that would say that's the only stuff to own. That is all that will endure when you buy anything even remotely new that's not going to endure. My controversial take is that this is a little bit informed by, as we were talking about before the show. As a father of three with a 10 year old, a 7 year old and 5 year old, I don't think my kids are ever going to listen at all to the Eagles or to Bruce Springsteen or to Bob Dylan. And demographics have a way of catching up. I listen to some of that music because that's what I grew up listening to because my parents listened to it. So it's like a part of my listening. But I just don't think it's going to be the case for this next generation coming up. So I wouldn't be surprised if before you and I get too much gray hair, I already have more, more than you, you start to see declines in those catalogs that were supposed to be very much perpetual and forever catalogs.
A
I agree with you on that, because I've had similar thoughts. And of course, streaming is more tied to the master side, but you can see it in the streaming data. I think it was a couple years ago where Drake had more streams on Spotify than any artist before 1980 or some type of stat there.
C
Similar.
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Right. So that data is there, but there's clearly still people making these bets. So I guess for you, I know it's easy to say, okay, like, what are they doing? And just looking at that, but is there a rationale that you see that you're like, okay, even though that isn't my strategy, I understand why people are doing that.
C
Well, look, I'd say that I have a lot of respect for the primary waves and pop houses of the world and what. In what they're doing. I think that, you know, in my view, what they're doing in terms of finding other ways to, you know, essentially monetize these catalogs, including really the name, image and likeness, by doing Broadway plays, by doing bio biopics and the rest. That's the only justification that I can find for going in and paying, you know, 20, 25, 30 times for one of these catalogs. But you better be really damn sure that you know what you're. That you know what you're doing. And you're going to both drive more consumption and. And drive these ancillary streams before. Before you can do it. Because going just acquiring it passively, if you're just sitting on it, I think the demographics are going to work against you in the cash flow. Yields on it at those type of multiples aren't very attractive.
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Yeah.
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Which does kind of speak to the
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operating model of this industry from its beginning.
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Right.
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You're signing all these artists because you're hoping that one of them becomes the legendary Springsteen Dillon Home Run, when there was thousands of of others. I guess the equivalent of that is a lot of these firms investing in all of these artists at 25, 30x multiples, hoping that one of them does become the next stab of Voyage Experience, the next Bohemian Rhapsody, the next Michael Biopic.
C
I think what you said is mostly right, other than that on our part of the market, in this independent middle class, whatever you want to call it, certainly we hope that one or more of them becomes the next major artist. It doesn't have to happen in order for us to do very well and for our platform companies to do very well, it just needs to work out well enough on average across, you know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of artists and, you know, tens of Thousands or millions of tracks.
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And the other thing I think that
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stuck out to me about your strategy
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of Flex Point Forward is that you're
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not making 15, $20 million investments hoping that the company can then be sold for a couple hundred million dollars. You yourself are making the 9 figure investments which then implies 10 plus figure exit potentially from those types of investments which in this industry there's probably been fewer and farther between in terms of companies that end up getting sold as opposed to so much of the M and A activity frankly happening even below what may fit within most of the deals from the investments that you've all made.
C
Yeah, I think you got that without talking about our strategy too closely. You got most, most of most of most of that. Right. There have been plenty of nine and ten figure exits in the, in the music industry even in the, in the, in the last year or two without speculating over what Distrokid was. Look, it's, it is a relatively niche business. There aren't going to be hundreds of billion dollar plus companies within the music industry. So we're very, very selective about where, where we invest. But you're right, we're not investing at the kind of like trad stage and we're also not investing at the kind of mega cap stage. You're not going to see us take Universal Music private anytime soon. But we're trying to get behind really those handful of best in class players that can, that can go from being eight or nine figure businesses to nine or ten figure businesses. We feel confident, especially given some of what we talked about before in terms of fragmentation and the growth in the independent sector, that there are going to be opportunities like that for years to come.
A
And with those public companies, whether it's the labels or even Spotify itself, we've seen how the public markets have discounted them. There are a number of reasons why, but one of them is AI and just the markets being a bit uncertain on how AI is going to impact those companies. But you know, the AI also impacts the companies that you all invest in too. So how do you look at both from the future companies that you may be looking at, but also your own portfolio AI itself and just ensuring that okay, this is a company that is more defensible versus being less defensible.
C
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it starts with the question of whether we're all going to be listening, we're all going to drop all of the music that we've been listening to our entire lives and discover to the extent that you still at 41 years old, like me, still discover new music. Whether that's all going to be artificially generated three, five, ten years from now, I feel quite certain that the answer to that is no. On the other side of that is what is AI going to do to the operations of these businesses and how they're run every day, how they sort new data that comes in, how they optimize their own internal processes for running a business day to day? The best businesses are going to embrace it, they're going to optimize, and they're going to end up growing a lot faster because of it. And those that don't are going to have a tougher time going forward.
A
And knowing you, and even through this conversation, you are very focused on what you're investing in and what you're not investing in. And even though you have that discipline, do you ever feel a bit of that pressure or a bit of that focus, whether it's internally at the firm or outside, to be like, okay, well, should we do something more with iconic catalogs? Should we do something more with this buzzy thing that other investors in music are looking at?
C
There is some degree that varies widely from firm to firm of that oscillates from time to time depending on what's going on in the world. I think at Flex Point Forward, we're pretty lucky, both in terms of the types of investors that we have, as well as just our culture and mentality, that we are certainly never pressured to chase fads. If anything, we probably are more mindful of and reluctant to go after things that have the appearance of being fads or having some layer of FOMO sprinkled around them within the industry. So whether it's investing in businesses that are have some kind of AI orientation, whether it's chasing big catalogs for the sake of being able to say, name your major artist, we don't feel a lot of pressure to do that. We're very focused on the nuts and bolts, cash flows, unit economics, and again, the quality of the management teams and the entrepreneurs that we back. That's what we're all about.
B
And then of course, I'm sure that
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part of your underwriting process, when you're looking at these companies is looking at, okay, what do the exit opportunities look like? And do you have a feel for the company specifically, whether or not you think that, okay, the exit opportunity for this would be more likely to be a financial acquirer or a more strategic move?
C
We worry or we think less about who specifically the buyer is and more about, again, kind of Building these enduring businesses that are, that are able to compound growth over time. Because it's my experience, having done this for a while, that trying to over orient yourself to a specific exit and trying to force exits is kind of a losing strategy. The best companies are bought and they're not sold. The exits end up taking care of themselves when you build a really good business. So fortunately within music specifically, there is a very robust buyer universe around this independent sector from, you know, the majors and universal having bought downtown, not all that, not all that long ago to now very large strategics like BMG and Concord, to more and more private equity firms coming into the space. Which is a little bit to my chagrin because I don't like competition, but it's good to have more buyers for assets. And then maybe more interestingly as a prediction, you're having new forms of credit capital come into the industry, especially from a catalog standpoint now with insurance companies actively doing it indirectly, but doing it through managers going and buying up these long duration catalogs that they're putting on their insurance balance sheets because they want very long duration, uncorrelated yield in their portfolio. You can even now see with Sony and GIC sovereign wealth entering the, entering the space. It's a pretty robust set of buyers out there. Who the most likely are depends on the, on the business and in the asset. But again, I go back to if you build a, A, a growing business that compounds value that, that, that has predictable cash flows, the exit is going to take care of itself.
A
So as you're looking through, you're looking at 2027. Are there any trends that you think will be growing conversations there? Maybe this marketing one you mentioned may be one of them as you think about these opportunities. But are there any things that aren't big conversations now, but you think what will be?
C
Look, I think the marketing thing is a big topic that everyone is focused on or at least the more forward thinking kind of companies in the music ecosystem are focused on. I think what you're going to see, you know, as we move forward in 2027 and really beyond are more novel forms of, of financing catalogs and partnerships with, with, with artists. I'm not sure if you've covered, you know, what happened with the Weekends catalog, but those types of transactions, especially around the iconic or soon to be iconic artists, I think you're going to see a lot more of that in terms of X. Artists took control of their catalog, entered into a commercial partnership and financing partnership with forms of institutional capital. They're not simple transactions to pull off, but I think I'd be surprised if you didn't see one or two more by the end of 2027.
A
Well, we'll definitely have to follow that. But Mike, this is fun. Appreciate you coming on and sharing a bunch of insights and predictions on where we think things are going. So thank you again for joining us on the podcast.
C
Thanks for having me, Dan.
B
And that is a wrap. Thank you again to Mike Morris, thank you to Trevor and the team at Empire for letting us record at your studios. Thank you to G, Eric and Rwana on our team for everything you do to help make trapital possible. And most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy trapital and get a lot out of it, whether it's this episode on investing or any of the conversations that we have, send them a link to the show. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. And if you've already done that and
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if you have a few minutes, leave a comment, leave a review.
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Tap that follow button. Tap that subscribe button. Make sure you get the next episode.
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Make sure that you are letting people know that you like the podcast so
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that the algorithm can do its thing
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and that trapital can reach the right people.
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Thanks again. Talk to you next time.
Guest: Mike Morris, Managing Partner at Flexpoint Ford
Release Date: July 31, 2026
In this episode, Dan Runcie sits down with Mike Morris, Managing Partner at Flexpoint Ford, to discuss the evolving landscape of music investment—specifically, why investors are increasingly looking beyond acquisitions of iconic, major-artist catalogs and focusing instead on opportunities in the independent sector. They break down why the independent ecosystem has grown, what makes it attractive (and complex), and how new models and technologies are changing how returns are generated from music assets. The conversation covers risk, portfolio strategy, platform dependence, the impact of AI, and where untapped opportunities may lie.
On indie catalog risk:
“There is a little bit of a misconception that just because you’re a smaller artist that it’s riskier.” (Mike Morris) [07:43]
On marketing as an unsolved challenge:
“Finding measurable ways to put marketing dollars behind the right artists…is like a problem people have been trying to figure out for a while, but again, no one has quite cracked the code…” (Mike Morris) [17:01]
On demographics and ‘blue chip’ catalogs:
“My kids are never going to listen at all to the Eagles or to Bruce Springsteen or to Bob Dylan.” (Mike Morris) [21:00]
“Demographics have a way of catching up.” (Mike Morris) [21:00]
On future of exits:
“The best companies are bought and they’re not sold. The exits end up taking care of themselves when you build a really good business.” (Mike Morris) [29:13]
Mike Morris provides a data-driven, market-savvy perspective on why the independent sector is where the “next wave” of music investment opportunities lies. Emphasizing technological infrastructure, diversified asset pools, and skepticism regarding legacy catalog returns, he pinpoints both what’s working and which industry problems (like measurable, effective marketing) remain unsolved. As music continues to evolve as an asset class, Flexpoint Ford’s model is to look beyond the obvious, focus on fundamentals, and build for long-term value.