The trick for investors is finding a way to get a piece of the action. Most rights are acquired by companies, funds or billionaires like French telecom mogul Xavier Niel, who owns the song “My Way.” Yet there are outfits that focus solely on music rights like Hipgnosis Songs Fund Ltd, which shelled out 500 million pounds last year for the rights to songs from Blondie, Soundgarden, the Pretenders and other artists. Hipgnosis is listed on the London Stock Exchange and its shares have returned 17% in the past 12 months. Investors looking for a more direct approach might consider Royalty Exchange, a Denver-based firm that runs a marketplace where artists sell royalties to fund their work.
Why now: The streaming revolution is making new and old music more valuable.
Risks: It’s not easy to invest directly in catalogs of legends like Dylan, and the ebb and flow of the music business is unpredictable.
How much you’ll need: Buy stock in listed song rights funds or search royalty exchanges for promising newcomers. Hipgnosis shares were trading at 1.20 pounds on Friday.
Restored Wilderness: The Ultimate Alternative Investment
While conservation has long been popular among the wealthy, preserving a landscape is no longer good enough as climate change threatens biodiversity. Now a new breed of environmentalist investor wants to restore land to its original wilderness state in an approach called “rewilding.” In Scotland, for instance, Anders Povlsen, a Danish retailing billionaire, has purchased 230,000 acres to bring back flora and fauna that thrived in the highlands long ago. His time horizon: 200 years.
You don’t have to be ultra-rich. In the English region of East Anglia, three farmers joined forces in 2020 to rewild tens of thousands of acres in a 50-year effort to bring back beavers, bison and the Eurasian lynx. These projects are painstaking: First, you have to purchase agricultural properties, open space or depleted forests, and often that means negotiating with multiple owners and local governments which may dislike the idea of letting the land go wild. Next, investors must hire botanists, naturalists and other scientists to research and design a rewilding program.
Then there’s the satisfaction of turning back the clock on a swath of the natural world. Such an endeavor may take decades, making rewilding a family legacy. “There is a good business case,” says Emily Norton, the head of rural projects at Savills, the U.K. real estate firm. “It’s just not clear what the exit strategy is.”
Why now: Climate change has made biodiversity a vital issue, and investors can reap carbon and tax benefits, and ecotourism business from rewilded properties.
Risks: Assembling and purchasing lands for rewilding can be a complicated and costly process, and it may take decades to see results.
How much you’ll need: The costs depend on the property’s location and size, of course, but investors should start with a budget of about 2.5 million pounds, says Thomas Heathcote, the head of Knight Frank’s Agri-Consultancy practice.
Insect Farms: Food of the Future?
The thought of eating insects may turn off some people, but they are becoming more interesting as a viable and necessary nutritional source as overpopulation and climate change squeeze global food production. Insects can be farmed on far less land and for way less money than livestock, which could alleviate the deforestation of Brazil and Africa for grazing land. They don’t emit clouds of global-warming methane like cattle do. Plus, insects are an economical way to produce fertilizer as well as feed for fish farmed in aquaculture projects, which are on the rise around the world.