The path for Hipgnosis is clear. Keep buying, keep proving industry power, and keep investing. Though much of their staff is already located in the states, in the next 18 months or so Merck aims to focus his companies ambitions towards the American market. Mercuriadis began in the UK because the culture is bent towards music discovery, with BBC Radio 1 focusing entirely on new music. Here, discovery is done almost exclusively through streaming, in a very passive way. Mercuriadis wanted to capture the more fervorous, rapturous consumption of music across the pond before marketing his company in the United States. “Our agenda is to put the artist, the producer, and the songwriter at the forefront of everyone's cortex,” Merck says. “We want to use the leverage of our financial wherewithal and our great songs to change where the songwriter and the artist sit in the economic equation. That’s a very important part of what we're doing.”