Business News Labels & Publishers

Another investment fund moving into music rights acquisitions

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 14 January 2022

You know what the world needs right now? Another investment fund buying up music rights, that’s what! I mean, think of all the famous veteran artists and songwriters still to do a mega-bucks deal around their old music. Like, erm… Well, the Five Star catalogue is still definitely up for grabs, and no one’s done a deal with Las Ketchup yet. Oh and the rights to ‘Agadoo’! I think they’re still available.

So good news everybody – according to the Financial Times, US asset manager Pimco has decided to join the music rights land-grab party, setting aside an unconfirmed sum of money to buy itself some copyrights and/or royalty rights from the great and the good of the music-making world.

It joins investment funds like KKR, Blackstone and Apollo Global Management at that party, of course, alongside music rights specific investment vehicles such as Hipgnosis and Round Hill. Plus the pesky majors. In fact, so crowded is this party becoming, it’s starting to look like a ‘work event’ at 10 Downing Street during lockdown.

But Pimco isn’t getting into the music rights buy-up business alone. According to the FT’s sources, it is following KKR’s lead in partnering with BMG on this particular music venture. Although both KKR and BMG have undertaken some significant rights acquisitions alone in recent times, they also announced a partnership to pursue such deals last year, subsequently joining up to buy into the catalogues of John Legend and ZZ Top.

Neither Pimco nor BMG have as yet commented. They’re probably waiting for Sue Gray to confirm if they did in fact agree to party together.