How music catalogues are valued: multiples, NPS and decay curves

When a songwriter's catalogue sells for a headline number, that number almost never comes from a guess about how good the songs are. It comes from one line of arithmetic: last year's income times a multiple. Everything interesting happens in choosing the income and choosing the multiple. This guide walks through both, so you can read a deal headline, or an offer for your own catalogue, with some confidence.

If you are weighing cash against future royalties rather than a sale, start with our guide to royalty advances and catalogue financing, which uses the same decay logic.

Step one: the income figure

For publishing rights, the base figure is usually net publisher's share (NPS). Long Angle's music royalties guide defines it as royalty revenue collected by a music publisher from a composition, and calls it "a foundational metric for valuing publishing assets, with market multiples applied directly to this figure." For recordings, the equivalent is the trailing twelve months of net income to the rights owner, which the same guide calls LTM earnings.

Two practical points follow. First, NPS is net, after royalties paid to songwriters and any co-publishers, so it is smaller than the gross the song generates. Second, it is backward-looking: a buyer pays for a year that has already happened and then argues about whether next year will look like it.

Step two: the multiple

Price divided by that income is the multiple. A catalogue earning $1 million a year that sells for $15 million traded at 15x.

What are buyers paying? Citrin Cooperman's 2025 valuation review, published in April 2026, counted 566 catalogues worth nearly $13 billion combined in 2025, up from 557 worth $10.7 billion in 2024. In its figures, older masters and masters-plus-publishing catalogues traded at more than 17x, publishing catalogues at around 15x, and younger masters averaged 13.7x. It also says older-music multiples have held steady for three years.

Those are the valuations of a professional market of sizeable deals. Smaller catalogues look different. Royalty Exchange's marketplace data puts average closing multiples at about 4x for catalogues aged 0 to 3 years, 5x to 7x for 3 to 10 years, and 8x and often higher for those over 10 years. Long Angle gives similar tiers: 3x to 5x for newer catalogues, 5x to 10x for those about 3 to 10 years old, and 10x to 18x for evergreen catalogues with a flat or rising trend.

Step three: decay, the reason age matters

Age dominates every one of those tables for one reason: decay. A new song tends to earn most in its first years and then fall away, so a buyer paying 15x for a two-year-old hit would be paying for income that may not be there in five years. A song that has already survived a decade has shown its income has flattened out, so each year of it is worth more.

That is why the inputs buyers ask for are not just last year's NPS but the trend: the percentage change in earnings, usually over the last three years. Royalty Exchange treats a three-year decay rate worse than -5% as a warning sign. (Long Angle's page states this threshold in two contradictory ways, so treat -5% as a rule of thumb rather than a standard.)

A worked sense-check

Here is our own simplified illustration, not a figure from any source. Take a catalogue earning $10,000 NPS a year.

• If income is flat forever, at a 15x multiple you are paying for 15 years of today's income.
• If it falls 10% a year, the next 15 years add up to roughly $79,000, about 8 years' worth of today's income. Pay 15x for that and you lose money unless something revives it.
• If it falls 3% a year, those 15 years total about $122,000, roughly 12 years of today's income.

The multiple is a compressed forecast. A high multiple is the market saying "this income will barely decline, and we will wait a long time to be paid back." A low one says the decay is steep or uncertain.

What we think

Three things are worth taking from this, whether you are a writer thinking of selling or just reading the headlines.

1. A multiple without a decay rate is meaningless. "Sold for 18x" tells you little until you know whether the income was flat or still sliding off a recent peak. Ask for three years of statements, not one.
2. The big-deal multiples are not your multiple. The 15x to 17x averages describe large, established catalogues. Royalty Exchange's own marketplace shows new catalogues closing near 4x. If you own a few recent releases, plan around the lower tiers.
3. Selling early usually means selling at the bottom of the curve. Because buyers price in the steepest part of decay, a young catalogue is sold at its cheapest multiple. In our view, unless you need the cash or think the income is about to collapse, holding until the income settles often captures more value than any negotiation will.

Citrin Cooperman, Royalty Exchange and Long Angle all sit on the buying or advising side of this market, so their figures are best read as directional, not as a price list.