that they were intrigued but didn’t want to be his guinea pigs. Hipgnosis went
public on 11 July 2018. Mercuriadis walked into the IPO ceremony at the
London Stock Exchange with Terius “The-Dream” Nash , the writer-producer
behind Rihanna’s Umbrella and Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put A Ring O n It) –
his fi rst A-list acquisition. “I didn’t want to walk into that ceremony empty-
handed ,” he says. “I wanted to say, ‘Let’s get started.’”
Hipgnosis, which employs 65 people in London and LA, has now raised
more than £1.5bn, and spent it fast. In December and January alone,
the fund announced deals with Neil Young , Shakira , Fleetwood Mac’s
Lindsey Buckingham , the Kaiser Chiefs, and producers Jimmy Iovine and
Jack Antonoff. Hipgnosis has a stake in around 3,000 No 1 hits and fi ve
of the songs in Billboard’s Top 10 of the last decade, including Ronson’s
Uptown Funk and Ed Sheeran’s Shape O f You. Around 50 of the investors
who told Mercuriadis they would wait and see have since come on board.
“Everything I’ve ever told my investors has either come true or been
exceeded,” he says.
“When Merck’s talking to artists and investors, they have to believe
in a system that they’ve never encountered,” says Chic’s Nile Rodgers ,
a longtime friend who sits on Hipgnosis’s advisory board, The Family
(Music) Limited. “They have to believe that he’s sincere, smart and has good
instincts. The success of a business is basically because of the person running
the business.”
Companies have been quietly acquiring song catalogues for years, but
never on this scale. Thanks to Hipgnosis, demand is running red hot, with
growing competition from rival funds and major publishers who have been
spooked into chasing prize properties. Last December, Universal acquired
all of Bob Dylan’s songs in what was said to be one of the biggest ever
deals of its kind. For Mercuriadis, who had been negotiating with Dylan’s
representatives for two years, it was a rare disappointment. “We were ready
to make a deal and then [Universal] made an off er that we couldn’t possibly
compete with,” he says. “You’d have to be a company of that size to absorb
the price they paid.” It was, he says, much higher than the £225m reported
at the time. “I would love the Bob Dylan catalogue but it wasn’t the right
deal for us.”
Universal’s big swing for Dylan – using money that could have
been spent on developing new artists – is a sign of Mercuriadis’s
Richter-scale impact on the music business. “The whole
business is running scared,” says Ted Gioia , a music historian
with a business background. “In the current environment,
owning the rights to old, proven songs is viewed as the last safe
investment in music.”
Mercuriadis has even bigger plans. He wants
to rewrite the music industry’s decades-oldeconomic equation , which means that a recording earns around fi ve
times more than a composition. This ambition combines self-interest
(Hipgnosis would get more money) with a sense of justice (so would all
songwriters across the board). It makes him a headache for the big three
record labels ( Sony Music Entertainment , Universal Music Group, Warner
Music Group ) and their publishing arms ( Sony Music Publishing, Universal
Music Group Publishing and Warner Chappell Music ). I ask him if he has
made enemies.
“None of this is personal,” he says. “The people who work at Universal,
Warner and Sony are great people who love music. It’s not them that I have
a problem with; it’s the paradigms that have existed for 75 years.” He laughs.
“Behind my back, I’m sure they’ve got a picture of me on a dartboard. And
there’s a lot of forehead to throw darts at.”When Hipgnosis bought a 50% share of Neil Young’s catalogue, it acquired
half of the fi rst album that Mercuriadis ever loved: 1972’s Harvest. Like
Young, Mercuriadis is a product of small-town Canada. In his case, the towns
were very small indeed.
He was born on 2 October 1963. His father was a former professional
footballer in Greece who moved to Scheff erville , an isolated mining town in
northern Quebec, to work in the iron-ore industry and start a family. When
Mercuriadis was fi ve, his family moved to the similarly tiny Middleton,
Nova Scotia, where they opened a diner. Mercuriadis would help out
behind the till, chatting to high school students as they pumped coins into
the jukebox. “Songs became your friends because there are only so many
things that you can experience in these very little towns,” he says. “My
fi rst experience of empathy was listening to Elvis sing In T he Ghetto on the
jukebox.” As he began collecting albums, he became entranced by the far-out
album sleeves of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. The designers were called
Hipgnosis , meaning “hip knowledge”. (Much later, Mercuriadis managed
co-founder Storm Thorgerson , asked him for permission to use the name,
and commissioned him to design the fund’s logo.)
As a teenager, Mercuriadis did what small-town kids tend to do – drink
too much, take drugs, get into trouble – until his best friend died in a car
crash. “That had a big eff ect on me. That was the beginning of me going,
‘OK, I’ve got to get out of here.’” Devouring rock biographies and
music magazines, Mercuriadis knew he lacked the musical talent to
be the next Neil Young, but thought he could emulate his legendary
manager, Elliot Roberts. “I can’t play that instrument, I can’t sing
that song, I can’t write that song,” he says. “Responsibility
is the only quality that I bring to the party.
I never let anyone down.”
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GETTY IMAGES; REUTERS; MICHAEL OCHS/GETTY IMAGES; LYNN GOLDSMITH/GETTY IMAGES After his family re →
Merck Mercuriadis’s
Hipgnosis owns the
rights to songs by,
from far left, Terius
‘The-Dream’ Nash; Nile
Rodgers, Fleetwood Mac,
Annie Lennox, Debbie
Harry and Ed Sheeran