Music bull market or music bubble? Veteran manager MERCK MERCURIADIS' publishing investment company, HIPGNOSIS SONGS FUND LTD, having already raised $262 million to acquire copyrights, went public on the LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE Wednesday in what is reportedly the exchange's biggest IPO of the year. And then and only then, if I'm reading the news reports correctly, it announced the acquisition of its first set of songs—75 percent of THE-DREAM's catalog. Remember when you used to believe there was no longer any money to be made in this music thing? Hipgnosis' IPO comes three months after SPOTIFY's blockbuster entrance into the public market, with SONOS and TENCENT MUSIC waiting in the wings. VIVENDI has been publicly flirting with the idea of spinning off UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP. Is the music biz ready to party like it's 1999 again? Is the optimism warranted? Will profits follow? MusicSET: "The Year of the Music IPO?"... BOOTS RILEY's surreal dystopian comedy SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is not in any literal way a "music movie," but it's a logical extension of the music and ideas of his hip-hop group the COUP, which tend to get called "radical," which is another way of saying "kind of makes a lot of sense." And it literally does have music, lots of it by the Coup to go along with a score by TUNE-YARDS' MERRILL GARBUS. And there's one wonderfully inappropriate freestyle by the film's protagonist, played by LAKEITH STANFIELD, delivered at the most nightmarish SILICON VALLEY bro party you'll ever witness, unless they're all like that, I don't know. Music movie of the year, then... A thorough investigation into the synth sounds of TOTO's "AFRICA"... In completely unrelated news, KENNY LOGGINS loves GRETA VAN FLEET almost as much as he loves MICHAEL MCDONALD, with whom he's taking over the HOLLYWOOD BOWL this weekend... Spotify diversity data, presented here without comment... BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN plays an encore... RIP trombonist BILL WATROUS and (no link yet) Boston rock producer MIKE DENNEEN.