Greed is good!! Or not.

We’ve all looked on in horror as executives at BMI are structuring a way to extract the value that generations of songwriters have bestowed on the broadcasters’ PRO. Because BMI had operated as a nonprofit corporation since 1939, extracting that value in the form of a sale of BMI was a bit of a problem because nonprofits have pretty extensive restrictions on who they can sell to (most prominently, other non profits and not the for profits who have the money) not to mention the responsibility of board members and no stock ownership by board members, liquidation preferences, etc. Some songwriter advocacy groups sent a letter asking a number of questions to BMI’s head honcho Mike O’Neil. You can read the letter and O’Neil’s non-answer on Music Business Worldwide. After reading the nonanswer see if you have the same reaction a lot of people have had–yep, it’s bullshit.

Enter the team that BMI and their broadcaster board plays for: The White Shoes of Wall Street with their notorious manager Goldman “Shifty” Sachs. As we know, the most dangerous geography in the world is the conflict zone between Shifty Sachs and fees not yet doing the english shift into Shifty’s pockets. So unsurprisingly, BMI did some kind of rollout (aka the Delaware two step) that presto changeo turned BMI into a for profit company ready for serving up on Shifty’s fees menu. And extracting songwriter value for BMI executives with tips all round for Shifty and his White Shoes.

And they’re getting away with it by the look of things. Are you surprised?

One reason they are getting away with it is that the rumored competitive offer from a songwriter buyer group hasn’t materialized yet. But the main reason they are getting away with it is because somehow a firm that has no connection to the music business (North Mountain Capital) seems to be interested in forking over a rumored $1.7 billion price tag for BMI. And that’s a lot of streams.

Because North Mountain have no detectable connection to the music business (aside from a valuation firm which to our knowledge hasn’t humped a trap case in quite a while) they are not really focused on a songwriter revolt against a business whose core asset is rented songs. We say “rented” because any BMI songwriter or publisher agreement can be unilaterally terminated by the songwriter or publisher. Even though that termination can be delayed a while, we wonder if Shifty has really taken that into account.

Of course, North Mountain itself may have some investors who are familiar with the music business. We can’t help noticing that the MLC invests hundreds of millions of other peoples black box money and they may very well have put some of your millions into North Capital as they have with mutual funds in which they are a “controlling person.” Since MLC refuses–under oath–to disclose their investments for the ludicrous reason that they might move markets…sheesh…and since the Copyright Office doesn’t compel the MLC to disclose those investments, we have no idea what they are up to. (There may be a simple explanation for this lack of spine given the Copyright Office’s past revolving door activities.) But we cannot rule out that the black box might be used to fund, albeit indirectly, an acquisition that the songwriters don’t want. In fact, there’s nothing to say that MLC has not already either directly invested in a takeover fund or made loans of black box money to publishers or their buddies who want to buy catalogs.

Unless something’s changed this morning, the BMI sale still isn’t done yet, but we have every confidence in Shifty and the White Shoes.

Because as Gordon Gekko taught us, greed is good.