Duetti Acquires Young Songs, Hires Indie Artists for Remixes

While catalog music has traditionally referred to songs released anywhere from three years to decades ago, music investment company Duetti said on Tuesday (June 9) it is acquiring songs released as recently as six months ago, and it is launching a new in-house remixing program with indie artists to work those new songs.

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Duetti says it is hiring independent artists to remix, cover and create new derivative works from the more than 30,000 tracks in its catalog. Artists will earn a share in the future royalties of the new songs, and Duetti will cover distribution and marketing costs.

As competition for investing in masters and publishing royalties has increased in the years since streaming introduced stable cash flows and reams of consumption data to music, Duetti’s strategy since 2022 has been to buy songs released as recently as two years ago. While major music companies and catalog acquisition funds have considered these to be riskier assets, Duetti CEO Lior Tibon says they’ve invested in the data and forecasting tech to confidently underwrite investments and project future cash flow for much newer songs.

“It’s just another step in the innovation in what we’re trying to bring to the market,” Tibon tells Billboard . “What we do best is predict future performance and value music, simplify business processes that are notoriously difficult to automate and make easy, and find new audiences and improve revenue potential [through] marketing. [What] we are developing will allow us to offer more options and products.”

The initial two-year parameter was somewhat “arbitrary,” Tibon says, and the company’s investments in data engineering, forecasting and “proprietary AI-driven predictive models [enable it] to materially lower the master acquisition age threshold from two years to six months following the initial commercial release.”

The company has already worked with more than 200 artists, including RxPapi, Jesse Barrera, and Ingrid Contreras, to acquire stakes in tracks that were released less than two years ago. Financing for acquisitions of these songs will come specifically from an existing $75-million credit facility Duetti has with Viola Credit. (In January, Duetti said it raised $200 million through equity investment and debt financing, bringing the total amount it has raised to $635 million.)

“We underwrite data and track record, and we’ve had a long relationship with Duetti that… has never been a creative one; it has been grounded in alignment on underwriting and risk management,” Viola Credit partner Michael Chen. “The beauty of what Lior has built is a technology platform that gets to the bottom of [consumption data] to provide meaning in the data.”

The remixing program adds a key pillar to Duetti’s marketing strategy, Tibon says. To date, Duetti has released 200 remixes and derivative works from over 100 artists across genres, including rap, baile funk, and house music, across North America, Europe, and Latin America. The company says collaborators include Satin Jackets, Kowloon, MC Leleto and rising hip-hop performer zai1k.

The collaboration with zai1k started with Duetti reaching out and pitching him songs from its catalog they hoped he would remix. After zai1k selected “Dangerous” by David Hugo, Duetti connected the two, booked a studio for them to track new vocals and tweak production of the original record. Later, Duetti helped finance a music video for the track, paid zai1k a fee for co-creating the song, which he and David own stakes in, and the company began promoting the song across its owned playlists, through influencer campaigns and other means.

“By using AI insights and analytics, we’re able to identify the right remixing artist and pair them with a globally rich catalog built for reinterpretation – all while ensuring collaborations are fully authorized and artist-approved,” Elliot Baumohl , Duetti’s head of music growth, said in a statement. “We’re creating the fastest, simplest remix process in the industry.”

The company says it plans to expand the remixing program to songs in its catalog from genres like phonk, dancehall, and reggaeton, which it hopes will deepen its footprint in key markets outside the US, including Germany, France and Latin America.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/duetti-is-acquiring-six-month-old-songs-and-remixing-them/)._