Protecting Your Financial Assets in the Music Business

In the financing world you have two categories that matter: liabilities and assets. The difference is fairly simple. A liability takes money from your pocket, and an asset puts money into your pocket. If you're a producer or musician, your biggest asset is your music and you need to protect it.

Money by itself is not an asset it's a tool. Your goal shouldn't be to hoard money because money has no real value. It's backed by absolutely nothing but debt. The value of money goes down every year as inflation rises. The Ponzi Scheme banking system we live in guarantees that.

Money is only a tool that you can use to help you develop revenue streams and build assets. It seems like circular logic if money doesn't matter, to spend money on acquiring assets to create more avenues to generate money. Here's a good way to think of it.

If money didn't matter, what is your goal with music?

If you had enough revenue streams where money didn't matter. Do you have the same goal?

The point of creating assets is to keep you free to pursue your real goals without draining your time. The moment you focus on money as your goal, you become a slave. Why? Because you are spending your time and energy collecting paper backed by debt.

Remember your music is your biggest asset because you can transform music into revenue streams. You as a creator can take an idea from your mind and use it to print money for yourself, if you're good at creating assets from it.

This is where you need to really be careful though. Investors and business people know all about assets and liabilities and they will speculate the value of your asset, and try to cash in on it for themselves. If you are not careful you can be put into a situation where you can lose your ownership and your asset now becomes theirs.

Never ever put yourself in that position where you're losing ownership without a reversion clause. What a reversion clause means is that after so many years you regain ownership of the music and can do with it what you want. Signing away music rights in perpetuity without a reversion clause is a terrible deal for artists.

To protect your music, you need to keep ownership. It's hard to do in the world of the 360 deal but the more you can control the rights to your tracks the better. Especially when it comes to music publishing and licensing.

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