About This Role
This pure deal and investment role involves evaluating and underwriting music deals, including catalog and frontline advances and acquisitions. The role suits an analyst who can build and pressure-test deal models, run royalty diligence, and prepare materials for the C-suite and investment committee. You will track the performance of closed deals against underwriting, and are expected to understand the true worth of a deal.
Responsibilities
- Build DCF valuation models for catalog acquisitions, label deals, and artist advances, including decay curve construction, streaming forecast builds, and terminal value assumptions
- Model deal structures across their full mechanics: advance sizing, recoupment waterfalls, royalty splits, escalators, term and reversion, minimum guarantees, and earn-outs
- Run IRR, MOIC, and payback analysis across multiple structure scenarios; produce sensitivity and downside cases that show what actually breaks the deal
- Perform royalty statement diligence: normalize statements across distributors and DSPs, tie reported income to underlying streaming data, and identify undisclosed leakage, misattribution, or unrecouped positions
- Verify ownership and rights: master vs. publishing splits, Schedule A and asset-level review, ISRC/UPC-level ownership confirmation, territory carve-outs, existing encumbrances, and producer or featured-artist obligations
- Analyze streaming and consumption data (Luminate, Spotify for Artists, Chartmetric, raw DSP reporting) to separate durable catalog income from promotional spikes, playlist dependence, and one-off virality
- Flag the diligence issues that change price, not just the ones that fill a checklist
- Draft investment committee memos: thesis, valuation, structure, key risks, and recommendation
- Build the deal-specific analysis that supports negotiation, and sit in on negotiation to update the model in real time as terms move
- Maintain portfolio monitoring: actual vs. underwritten performance, recoupment tracking, and post-close variance analysis to identify any issues in collections or forecasts on every closed deal
- Support pipeline tracking and analytics infrastructure
- Help improve and build an efficient analysis framework
Requirements
- 2-5 years of proven analysis experience including underwriting and investment appraisal gained through a career in music finance, music investment, distribution, label finance, royalty administration, or investment banking / private credit with meaningful music or media exposure
- Demonstrated fluency in music industry economics: understanding how streaming revenue is generated, reported, and paid, and knowing the difference between master and publishing income, gross and net receipts, distributor rates and label rates
- Advanced Excel modeling skills: ability to build a multi-scenario deal model from scratch
