Residuals
Where culture keeps paying.
FromGannett.Partners
Field Map · No. 001
By Chris Gannett, Founder & CEO of Gannett.Partners

The map

24.
Ways in

Four moves — underwrite, own, operate, compound — across six segments where culture is trading as an asset class. Each square is a place to take a position. Start with the grid. What sits underneath it comes after.

Where the value moves

Functions ↓ × Segments →

Swipe the map sideways →

Function ↓Segment →
Education
x·01
Media
x·02
Sports
x·03
IP
x·04
Creator
x·05
Technology
x·06
y·01Underwrite
01·01Price the enrollment engine, not the founder's fame.
01·02Value the library by what it still earns, not what it cost.
01·03Price the scarcity — franchises and rights, not the fanfare.
01·04Diligence the rights stack before the story.
01·05Underwrite the audience's durability, not last month's reach.
01·06Separate the moat from the demo.
y·02Own
02·01Take the credential, where the pricing power sits.
02·02Buy the catalog, not the release.
02·03Take the equity where scarcity lives: teams, rights, venues.
02·04Hold the rights and the formats, not just the title.
02·05Own the relationship and the data, not the post.
02·06Own the rails the value runs on.
y·03Operate
03·01Build the enrollment engine behind the expertise.
03·02Convert fading reach into owned, recurring relationships.
03·03Turn game-day fans into owned, year-round relationships.
03·04Make one asset earn across formats and decades.
03·05Put an operating spine behind the personal brand.
03·06Fold AI into the work without hollowing the craft.
y·04Compound
04·01Cohorts and community that renew, not churn.
04·02Rights and catalogs as a yield-bearing class.
04·03Rights cycles and franchise scarcity that reprice for decades.
04·04License and finance the same asset, again and again.
04·05A business that outlasts the algorithm.
04·06Infrastructure that compounds every position above.

Twenty-four positions, and almost no allocator holds an operator’s read on any of them. What follows is the ground underneath the grid — how large the pools are, and who is moving to own them.

Five sectors, multiplied
01 Education $7T Global learning spend, the biggest pool here. Its digital, creator-led edge is the part in motion.
02 Media & Entertainment $3.5T The incumbent pool. Large, profitable, and quietly being unbundled.
03 Sports $0.5T core Up to ~$3T broadly defined — franchises, rights, and NIL, the scarcest assets repricing fastest.
04 Intellectual Property The ownership layer Rights, catalogs, formats, and brands. Now an asset class you can finance.
05 Creator Economy $250B → $1T The fastest-growing distribution layer. Attention, now with a balance sheet.
× Technology & AI The multipliers The force you already back. Its least-crowded, highest-leverage application is everything above.

Don't add these up. Watch them collide. The value in play is whatever these are worth once ownership, audience, learning, and technology quit their separate lanes. Which makes the number worth watching the one on the other side of the table.

Who's moving to own it
c·01 Family Offices $5.5T → $9T ~8,000+ offices, AUM by 2030 — Citi, 2025. Patient, control-seeking, and the reader this is written for.
c·02 Direct Investing 70% Now buying directly, in domains where they hold an operating edge — Citi, 2025.
c·03 Adjacent Capital Growth · PE · Venture Reading alongside, and broadening the base.

The assets are one half of the map. The capital learning to buy them is the other. Brands in culture is exactly the domain patient capital buys — durable, ownable, cash-generating. Residuals reads that intersection for the people holding the checkbook.

Own the audience. Own the IP. Let technology compound both.

— Chris

Residuals

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Sources · Capital: approximately 8,000+ family offices managing around $5.5 trillion, projected toward roughly $9 trillion by 2030, with about 70% now investing directly (Citi Global Family Office Report, 2025); office count roughly tripled between 2019 and 2023. Segment sizing across education, entertainment and media, sports, and the creator economy is directional and drawn from published industry estimates. The point of this map is the vector, not the decimal.