Competition Doubles Asking Price For a Modern Classic

Matt White is a singer songwriter known for writing catchy, moving pop and rock songs.

One of his more famous songs is the modern classic “Love.”

Besides racking up over 2 million views on YouTube from fans, the song is popular with brands and moviemakers alike. It’s appeared in such movies as “She’s the Man,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Wedding Crashers,” “Hotel for Dogs,” and others. Brand placements include ads for Nissan Leaf, Panasonic, Microsoft Bing, Aveeno, Cadillac, and Sandals resort.

Collectively, the song has consistently earned around $170,000 a year since 2012.

So when Matt first considered selling his royalties to the song to raise money, a representative from one of the larger hedge fund firms offered him $500,000 on the spot.

Now $500,000 sounds like a lot of money for just one song, and is certainly a tempting offer for a working singer-songwriter. But Matt wanted to “play the field” so to speak, and voiced a desire to test out the auction market.

The fund manager immediately upped his bid to $900,000.

See, private backroom deals are designed to offer what seems like a big figure to the seller, but offer no insight into what the free market can actually support. The goal of bidders in these scenarios is to keep you from shopping other offers. They want to offer you just enough to get you to take the deal without offering too much.

But competition is a funny thing. Ultimately, Matt chose the auction route, listing it at $600,000 on Royalty Exchange. And as we’ve seen time and time again, bidding drove the price up to a final closing price of $900,000.

He used the money to build a state-of-the-art home recording studio, which he now uses to record even more music that allows him to keep even more of his future returns.

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