Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein spent more than a decade as co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He's also the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, which the New…
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Once if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert halls, cafes and nightclubs to claim back royalties. Seemed fair… except ASCAP started a war when it demanded radio stations turn over 10% of their revenues.
ASCAP’s monopoly on music rights was broken, but they’d made songs into valuable financial assets. This set the scene for an epic copyright beef between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, and for David Bowie to turn his pop hits into a complex special purpose vehicle… a securitization pool!
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The Hosts
Robert Smith
Robert Smith, co-host of the Business History podcast, is a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and contributing host of NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the…
