H2 2026 Music Finance Index

01Introduction

We are pleased to present the second edition of the Duetti and Billboard Music Finance Index.

Our first Index, which we published 6 months ago, was reviewed by thousands of stakeholders who work directly with artists including managers, lawyers, and other members of their teams. Our goal is to increase transparency in a historically opaque market and to share insights and perspectives we hope will empower music creators to make the best financial and catalog management decisions for themselves. Our Index continues to draw on a curated panel of industry experts and insiders, tracking how opinions of catalog multiples vary across key deal dimensions, including rights type, catalog age, genre, and geography.

With the second edition of the Music Finance Index, we have built on findings from the first study, tracking how the expectations from that edition matched reality, examining how perceptions of multiples and deal volume have evolved so far this year, and introducing new questions on how deals get done or what causes them to fall through.

As we enter the second half of 2026, the picture that emerges from our panel is one of a largely stable investment market compared to last year. Perceptions of multiples and deal activity have largely held, and market participants are cautiously optimistic about the rest of the year. We are also detecting a compression of expectations at the top of the valuation curve and a slight cooling in certain genres.

Lior Tibon, CEO & Co-Founder, Duetti

02Key terms

Superstar: The top 1,500 artists globally, ranked across all genres — a genre-agnostic measure of mainstream scale. In corridos, 73 artists currently sit in this tier (up from 13 in 2021).

Mainstream: The next tier below superstar in Chartmetric's framework, roughly the 1,500–10,000 range globally. Established audiences, not yet global-chart scale.

Mid-Level: Chartmetric's mid-level career stage — roughly artists ranked 600–1,000 of ~8,000 active corridos artists. Where most real independent business happens, and where indie and non-indie artists are most directly comparable.

Undiscovered / Developing: The earliest career stages: artists still building initial audiences. Together these account for 76–83% of the corridos artist pool.

Indie: Artists without label affiliation, per Chartmetric's database. 92.7% of all corridos artists fall into this category. Classification is estimated and may not reflect all contractual arrangements.

03Valuations Rise Steadily with Age, With Growth In Young Publishing

As we observed six months ago, catalog age remains the clearest and most consistent driver of perceived valuation. This makes intuitive sense: younger catalogs are earlier in their typical revenue “decay curve," and a new catalog generating $1M in net revenue today may generate half that in a few years. Multiples therefore cannot be compared on an “apples to apples” basis - it may make financial sense to sell a younger catalog for a “lower” multiple early and lock in the monetary value, versus waiting a few more years with all the uncertainty associated with how performance could change. Additionally, proceeds from an early sale could be invested elsewhere, and it may end up as a much better financial decision versus waiting out for a higher headline multiple - but potentially a lower monetary value - later on.

We have introduced a new category for our second edition which did not exist previously - of catalogs aged 6-24 months. Duetti views this category as the “new frontier", and last month we were the first company to secure financing and launch the option for independent artists to sell masters (or parts thereof) as young as 6 months old. This is a particularly difficult category to establish price expectations in - track performance tends to be highly volatile, and the entire concept of a “multiple” (which is calculated based on annual revenue) for very young tracks is questionable. With that being said, we thought that it would be informative to see expectations for that band.

In terms of actual results, our panel perceives masters in the 6-24 months old band to start from a base of 3.8x, rising to as high as 5.1x. From there, the curve rises steadily: from a base of 5.9x (2–5 years) to 8.1x (5–10 years) to 10.2x (10+ years). Publishing multiples follow a parallel trend path, albeit more expensive, starting from a base of 4.7x (6 months – 2 years), 6.9x (2–5 years), 9.5x (5–10 years), and 12.1x (10+ years). The Publishing “premium” over Masters is consistent across every age band, and it widens as catalogs mature. At the youngest end, the gap between average Publishing and Masters bases is +0.9x. By the 5–10 year band it has grown to +1.4x, and in the 10+ year cohort it reaches +1.9x.

Across all age bands, lawyers perceive meaningfully higher multiples than managers, particularly at the upper end of the curve. For example, for 10+ year Masters, lawyers in our panel average 12.9x compared to 10.9x for managers. The gap is wider still on Publishing: lawyers see 16.6x against 13.4x for managers. This likely reflects the fact that lawyers spend more time and are more focused on larger premium catalog deals.

Our mid-year Index includes an expanded panel, so slight variations in results are to be expected. With that context, we note a number of more significant developments when comparing reported multiples between H2 2025 and H1 2026:

(i) Younger Publishing: The average multiple expectations for publishing catalogs in the 2–5 year range increased by almost 20% vs our January Index. This could indicate growing buyer confidence in their ability to predict and manage publishing catalogs, which are generally considered to be more difficult to track and administer compared to masters.

(ii) Narrowing of valuation ranges: The range of multiples reported by our panel has compressed significantly since our January Index. The largest compression is found in older catalog (10+ years) - making it the only age band that showed declines in average multiple expectations. There are fewer outliers in both directions with a rising floor and declining ceiling, both of which lead to a midpoint that has remained stable. This is consistent with our panel's view that multiples haven't changed much since H2 2025.