The old joke about the definition of “alternative investment” is that it is an alternative to investing. Shareholders in Hipgnosis Songs Fund, after yet another bum note from the boardroom, may fail to see the funny side.
The owner and acquirer of music rights arrived on the London stock market at 100p a share in 2018 on a mission to prove that the back catalogues of the likes of Blondie and Neil Young could be turned into reliable streams of royalty income that would adorn the mainstream portfolios of dividend-seeking investors.
