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Chad Doerge is the deputy CEO and president of Round Hill Music, which manages a $1.1bn portfolio of music rights. He joined the firm from Aiera, an AI-powered fintech platform and previously held senior roles at Evercore ISI, ISI Group and Deutsche Bank.
Round Hill Music, founded in 2010, is a private equity platform specializing in music catalog investment and management. It currently manages over 150 time-tested catalogs, which includes songs performed by George Harrison, Elvis Presley, Morgan Wallen, the Goo Goo Dolls, Black Sabbath, The Killers and Madonna.
1. Round Hill was acquiring music catalogs long before “music as an asset class” became a Wall Street buzzword. What was the company seeing that the rest of the market missed for more than a decade?
We should start by giving credit where credit is due — our founder Josh Gruss is the one who saw the great potential for music royalties to be an investable asset, well before anyone else was thinking this way.
His fundamental insight was that music royalties behave like a bond with upside optionality — they generate recurring, predictable cash flows that are largely uncorrelated with equity markets, while the underlying asset can actually appreciate as a song finds new cultural moments.
What the broader market missed was the durability of that income. A well-written song doesn't depreciate. It doesn't become obsolete. It gets licensed in a film, re-recorded by a new artist, or streamed by someone who wasn't even born when it was written.
Round Hill recognized early on that the traditional music industry's undervaluation of publishing rights created a genuine arbitrage opportunity — one that required both musical intuition and financial discipline to exploit. The "asset class" framing that Wall Street later adopted was really just the language catching up to what the fundamentals had always shown.
2. You have a unique background that spans AI product and institutional finance — how do you intend to apply that skillset at Round Hill?
My path to Round Hill is a little unconventional, but that's actually the point. I spent the earlier part of my career in institutional cross-asset sales — at Deutsche Bank, ISI Group, and Evercore ISI — which gave me a deep foundation in how large asset managers and allocators think, build conviction, and make capital deployment decisions. The institutions I was selling to are precisely the LP base Round Hill is increasingly engaging with, and they'll remain critical relationships for the firm.
Recently, I was part of the founding team at Aiera, an AI fintech firm building products for the asset management industry. We grew from four people to over seventy, and the core problem we were solving — how do you let institutional investors harness AI to navigate large amounts of unstructured, qualitative data, while protecting the underlying IP of the firms who created it — has a direct parallel to what the music industry is wrestling with right now. Research firms terrified of losing control of their IP to AI derivative works — we cracked that problem on the finance side, and the music world is now grappling with it too.
More broadly, I have a huge passion and a direct family connection to music. While I don't come to this role with a long track record of music rights dealmaking, I'd actually argue that's part of what makes this opportunity so compelling. I get to lean on a team that has been investing in music IP longer than anyone else in the industry, while bringing my complementary, external skills to the table.
Round Hill helped invent and build the music investment space from the ground up. The depth of expertise sitting around that table, in terms of how music rights are valued, structured, acquired, and managed over the long term, is genuinely unmatched. These are people who were navigating music IP transactions before most of the industry had even recognized it as an asset class.
So my job isn't to walk in and reinvent the investment playbook; that playbook already exists and it's excellent. My job is to take everything I've built over my career in institutional finance — the relationships, the deal structures, the understanding of how large allocators think and make decisions — and apply it in service of what this team already does so well. It's a complementary fit, not an overlapping one.
3. Round Hill has amassed a deeply impressive collection of music spanning different decades and genres! How do you go about spotting artistes with multi-generational star power?
The honest answer is that the songs are always the starting point. Truly great songs far outlive the careers of the artists who created them. Our number one acquisition criterion is simple: will this still be listened to in 50 years? Ninety percent of what crosses our desk doesn't pass that test.
The ones that do tend to share two qualities. The first is proven longevity — if a song has sustained commercial relevance for four decades, that's compelling evidence in itself. The second is cultural embeddedness — some songs become so woven into shared memory that they persist regardless of format shifts or generational change. They’re the songs you’ve heard at weddings consistently for decades, despite all the upheavals in the music industry that have taken place in the interim.
Our acquisition of the Goo Goo Dolls catalog is a perfect example of this. ‘Iris’ is currently our highest-earning song, and in the last couple of years it has enjoyed an extraordinary viral renaissance. It started with the song being featured in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ and then it took off on TikTok, driving a streaming surge that made it the most-streamed song from the 1990s across all US audio streams last year, reaching generations who weren't even born when the song was first released. When the NASA Artemis II crew wanted a soundtrack for their launch celebration video, they chose ‘Iris’. It’s remarkable to see a song from 1998 still finding new audiences, and once again being part of the fabric of people’s everyday lives.
4. How will recent generative AI developments (such as the prevalence of deepfakes, etc.) impact the value of your music assets, and how is Round Hill managing that risk?
Generative AI is a dual-sided risk. On the one hand, AI voice cloning and deepfakes create real threats around artist likeness, unauthorized sound-alikes, and content that could dilute the exclusivity or reputation associated with a catalog. On the other hand, the same technology is dramatically expanding the addressable market for licensed music — every AI-generated video, game, or interactive experience is a potential new licensing touchpoint.
Our posture is to stay deeply engaged with the legislative and platform-level conversations happening right now, because the rules of the road are being written in real time.
On the risk management side, that means monitoring for unauthorized uses more actively, supporting legislation that extends rights protections to AI-generated content, and making sure our agreements contemplate AI use cases explicitly.
But we're also watching the opportunities closely. AI companies are actively seeking to license high-quality catalogs for model training, because the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input. For a firm like Round Hill, with a deep catalog of culturally durable songs, that is an emerging revenue stream that didn't exist five years ago.
And when it comes to stream share and music consumption, we believe that the quality of our repertoire means it will be the last to be impacted by AI. No one wants to hear a fake KISS song. People will always be drawn to these classic songs because they are unique and inimitable.
5. Final question on AI, I promise! The use of AI is still quite controversial in the music industry — think about the fan reaction to The Beatles’ final single Now and Then in 2023, plus the growing discourse around ‘AI slop’. Do you think AI has a place in an industry that’s uniquely and imperfectly human?
I think the fan reaction to "Now and Then" was actually instructive in a nuanced way — most people, once they heard it, felt it was more human, not less, because the technology was used in service of completing something deeply personal rather than manufacturing something from nothing. The distinction that matters is intentionality. AI as a tool in the hands of a human artist, to realize a creative vision, is a continuation of a very long tradition — electric guitars were once controversial, Pro Tools was once controversial.
AI as a replacement for human creative agency, producing content at scale with no artistic intent behind it, is something different. That's what ‘AI slop’ really refers to, and I think the industry's instinct to reject it is correct. From a rights perspective, we're firmly in the camp that human authorship and the cultural capital that comes with it are not substitutable. That's actually a reason to be optimistic about the value of the kind of catalogs Round Hill holds — there's a scarcity premium on authentic human creativity that will only increase as the synthetic alternative proliferates.
The other application of AI is on the operational side of our business, where we are using it to maximize the active management of our portfolio. AI is a crucial tool for rights owners, not just for the data management and forecasting, but also for the very important job of rights registration and tracking — identifying where a catalog is being used and whether it's being correctly compensated — which is crucial to ensuring that great art receives the money it's due.
6. Asset-backed financing seems to be the most popular way of monetizing music IP and catalogs right now — what other financing pathways are you hoping to explore for these assets?
Round Hill has been investing in music for over a decade and a half now, and the firm has always given significant thought to which financing structures best serve the assets we're investing in.
Asset-backed financing is a natural fit for catalog as collateral: the cash flows are predictable, the duration is long, and the legal framework around ownership is well-established. But it's far from the only financing pathway available.
Closed-end funds have long been the norm in the industry, as they give known exit timelines and clear return profiles; but as a structure they sit at odds with the long-termism of music rights’ value.
Music copyright durations often run to more than 70 years — that's a fundamental mismatch with a typical five-to-10-year fund timeline, and it means that some of the most valuable moments in a catalog's life can fall outside the window where you still own it — like our ownership of ‘Iris’. If we had been forced sellers of that song within a five-year period, we would have missed out on the income and capital value growth it’s now enjoying in our sixth year of ownership. It's something we think about a lot, and in our view perpetual strategies are better suited to these properties.
7. Round Hill’s last music royalty fundraise closed in October 2020 — any plans for another fundraising round soon?
I'm not in a position to make specific forward-looking statements about fundraising timelines, but what I can say is that the strategic rationale for a new vehicle remains compelling.
The catalog acquisition market has evolved — prices have corrected from the frothy peaks of 2021-2022, which means the entry point for a new fund is more attractive than it's been in several years. Streaming continues to grow globally, AI licensing represents a meaningful new revenue vector, and there's still significant fragmentation in the catalog ownership space, which means deal flow for a disciplined acquirer is strong.
8. Will you consider acquiring music assets from other areas of the globe (like K-Pop, for example) in the future?
Global diversification is a natural evolution for any serious music IP portfolio. K-Pop is a fascinating case study — it has demonstrated genuine multi-market fandom and real streaming staying power, but the underlying IP structures and rights frameworks in Korea are different enough from the Anglo-American publishing system that you'd need specialist expertise to evaluate and manage those assets appropriately.
The broader principle is that as streaming penetration grows in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, local repertoire becomes more economically significant, and the catalogs with exposure to those markets will benefit.
We'd want to be thoughtful about which markets we enter and ensure we have the infrastructure to actually manage rights across different collection society frameworks. But the directional answer is yes — music is increasingly a global asset class, and our portfolio should reflect that over time.
9. We hear that your uncle is keyboard player Craig Doerge of The Section — how did that shape your view of music growing up, and did you ever think that one day you’d be (sort of) working in the industry as well?
Craig came up in the business with some of the most enduring songwriters of the 20th century — James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and many more. Growing up around that gave me an early understanding that great music is a craft, and that the commercial durability of a great song is inseparable from the artistic integrity that went into its making. These aren't decorative cultural objects, they're precisely built things that took real time, real intention, and real skill to get right.
I didn't set out to work in the music industry. My career went through institutional finance and financial technology, a long way from Laurel Canyon. But when I look at what Round Hill does — identifying songs with genuine longevity, building the infrastructure to understand and maximize their value, making the case to serious investors about music’s value — it connects to something I understood intuitively from a young age. I just have a more formal toolkit to work with now.
