Section 03
Rooms, leases and who ends up owning the catalogue
Studios have leases and catalogues have owners. This section follows the infrastructure: the rooms, the independents, the majors, and the arithmetic streaming imposed on the tracklist.
Everything in labels
Where the back catalogue lives, and who owns it.
- Why the map of French music follows the studio leaseLABELSA studio is a fixed cost with a lease, which is why scenes cluster around the rooms that exist rather than the places people imagine.
- Because Music and Ed Banger both exported coherenceLABELSBecause Music and Ed Banger built rosters that travelled, and the second one gave French electronic music a house style for a decade.
- Universal bought Barclay and inherited decades of chansonLABELSOwnership of a catalogue outlives the label that made it, and most French catalogue has changed hands at least once.
- Streaming repriced the track and French albums grew longerLABELSPer-stream payment rewards more tracks and shorter ones, and French albums have changed shape accordingly.
03
Every piece in every section is listed on the archive. The four sections are geography, now, labels, awards.