Grammy-winning producer Young Guru recently shared an interesting backstory about the day Jay-Z recorded his verse for the 2018 track "Talk Up" from Drake's Scorpion album. The memory was revitalized on August 6, when Guru saw a video from Drake's recently released 100 gigabytes of content. The clip, posted by journalist Elliott Wilson on Instagram, shows Drake telling his team they needed to wait on Jay-Z to send in his verse for the track.
According to Young Guru, the verse was recorded while they were in Europe for Jay-Z and Beyoncé's "On The Run II Tour." In an Instagram Story, Guru recounted how Hov wrote the verse after performing a full two-hour show. Despite being booked to DJ an after-party later that night, Guru set up a makeshift studio at the venue and recorded the verse. In a real-time scenario, he tethered his phone to send the session over to Drake's producer, Noah "40" Shebib, before he could make it in time to his DJ set.
Young Guru explained the work and the effort that went into that level of quality, thinking about the energy that the artists put in to make classic tracks like "Talk Up."
Investing In Jay-Z Songs
If you're a huge fan of Jay-Z or just want to get started with music royalty investing, now you can do so on Royalty Exchange. On Royalty Exchange you can sign up as an investor and search through thousands of music catalog listings that include producer and songwriter royalties to some of the biggest songs of the past few decades.
Take this Jay-Z asset listing for instance. The buyer paid $190.5k back in October, 2018 to acquire lifetime rights of future earnings from the songwriter's cut of royalties from huge songs such as the legendary smash hit "Empire State of Mind" featuring Alicia Keys. While they've held the catalog for just under 6 years, they've already collected $232.1k in earnings. That's a total yield of 121.9% already in just under 6 years! The coolest thing about investing in a song like this is that it's super evergreen meaning listener consumption will continue for decades to come. The investor makes money from streaming, radio play, and public performance, so if Jay-Z or Alicia Keys performs the song during a concert or you even hear it when you're shopping at Target, this buyer gets paid!
The great thing about investing in music catalogs is that their performance is independent of financial markets as people are always consuming music. One amazing thing about this catalog in particular is that it's still growing as the song's popularity continues to skyrocket. The earnings for the investor who purchased the catalog reached $68.1k in the past twelve months, an increase of 15.9% more than the catalog's 3 year average earnings! You can see just how insane the growth in earnings from streaming and listener consumption from that source has increased since 2020. The earnings from this asset listing were $15.6k in 2020 and have since increased by 335% in annual earnings for the buyer.
We’ve prepared this guide on Royalty Investing Made Easy to help you out if you want to get started investing in music royalty catalogs.
At Royalty Exchange, you can choose from thousands of the most popular songs to invest in. There are a ton of legendary rap catalogs from artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, even 90's hits like "I Got 5 On It". We offer hundreds of catalogs that are up for auction today, so sign up as an investor to get started.
Discover why so many investors today are actively searching for the next best music catalog investment deals.
