Expert Profile
Investment Professional | Strategic Advisor | Ex-Hipgnosis & Evercore
Music IP investing, M&A, credit, early-stage technology, sync licensing
Music rights should be underwritten less like entertainment speculation and more like long-duration intellectual-property cash flow with operational leakage, catalog decay, and manager capability as the decisive variables.
Music IP proof
Influence Media Partners and Hipgnosis/Recognition Music Group
Banking foundation
Evercore M&A and Houlihan Lokey Media & Entertainment
Credit lens
Ares Nordic Direct Lending
Current role
Board member, MAIA Universe; VC investor and strategic advisor
What the author believes their edge is, stated plainly and judged by usefulness rather than title.
Turns fragmented rights terminology into decision frameworks an allocator can compare against private credit, infrastructure, and real assets.
Focuses on the parts of music investing that break models: metadata quality, payment lags, reversion risk, and collection efficiency.
Ranks diligence questions by investment impact rather than producing exhaustive but undirected checklists.
Trust signals from editorial review, public work, and anonymized allocator feedback.
Shiv's edge is forcing music-rights enthusiasm through an allocator lens: what can be benchmarked, what can fail, and what should be sized modestly.
The useful part was not more music trivia; it was a clearer map of which risks belong to the asset, the manager, or the structure.
Named results where available; otherwise representative workstreams are labeled without overstating confidentiality-bound claims.
Music rights primer
Music IP investor lens
Brought direct song-catalog and royalty-stream investing experience from Influence Media Partners and Hipgnosis/Recognition Music Group into the primer's underwriting architecture.
Benchmark design
M&A and credit discipline
Frames music rights through transaction, financing, and downside-protection questions shaped by Evercore M&A, Houlihan Lokey media and entertainment banking, and Ares direct lending experience.
Risk prioritization
Sync and technology angle
As a MAIA Universe board member, stays close to instant music licensing infrastructure across film, series, advertising, social content, and gaming.
Representative examples of how this author thinks with investors. These are anonymized to protect confidentiality.
Mandate
Assess whether music royalties could complement private credit and infrastructure income.
Work
Compared yield, liquidity, volatility, correlation, and operational complexity across implementation routes.
Outcome
Defined a conservative entry path through diversified funds and IP-backed credit before direct catalog exposure.
Mandate
Pressure-test a potential catalog opportunity for concentration and collection risk.
Work
Built a diligence view around top-song concentration, DSP dependence, decay curves, and royalty reporting gaps.
Outcome
Separated attractive cash-flow characteristics from manager-dependent remediation work.