Readers of MUSICx are likely familiar with Penny Fractions, David Turner’s indispensable newsletter, which took a critical approach to analyzing goings on across the music industry. If you’re not familiar, you should fix that immediately by spending some time in the Penny Fractions archive, which collects David’s writing from 2017 to 2023. To my mind, there is no better history of recent years in the music industry.
One of my favourite parts of Penny Fractions was a recurring short feature called ‘A Note of Financialization’, where David would round up recent music industry news related to investment, financialization, and consolidation, and then situate those stories within a brief bit of critical analysis. Penny Fractions began during the first major wave of music catalog financialization, and these notes became an especially useful way to track a fast-moving world of investment deals, acquisitions, and capital flows.1 Just as importantly, they helped readers spot patterns across transactions that might otherwise have appeared discrete or disconnected. This is why it was such a loss to the ecosystem of critical music writing when David sunsetted Penny Fractions in late 2023.
Since then, financialization and consolidation within music have only accelerated, particularly around catalog investment, rights acquisition, distribution infrastructure, and private capital. As I’ve argued in the past:
In music, what gets invested in shapes what becomes real including what tech gets built, which types of institutions and organizations take form, which rules are used to determine compensation structures, and which artists get developed, which all boils down to what values get encoded into the ever-evolving industry institutions.
Given the speed at which institutional capital is now pouring into music and the harmful outcomes this can produce, it feels like the right time to revive the financialization round-up as a form.
So, with deep appreciation to David for the inspiration, and to Maarten for his gracious support, this is the first of what will be a bi-monthly-ish round-up on MUSICx tracking key financial(ized) transactions in the music industry. The idea is to follow the seemingly endless stream of major investment and related developments in music, while identifying larger patterns they reveal and approaching those patterns with a critical eye. As a nod to David’s original title, we’re going to call the series ‘Notes on Financialization.’
For this inaugural edition, we’re reaching all the way back to March because, boy howdy, the last two months have been absolutely bonkers for major financial transactions in music. Shall we dig in?
Kobalt’s hot-potato era
Let’s start on the publishing side with Kobalt Music Group, considered the largest independent music publisher in the world, just behind the majors in scale.
In late March, Primary Wave Music—itself a catalog-acquisition and IP monetization company—announced it will acquire Kobalt from Francisco Partners, with Brookfield Asset Management2 along as a strategic partner, at something “north of $1.5 billion.” Variety labeled the result a $7 billion indie music powerhouse.
Kobalt was founded in 2000 as an explicit alternative to the opacity of traditional music publishing, with a focus on transparency, better data, and a fairer deal for songwriters. Over the years it grew through acquisition and expansion of its publishing catalog, alongside some injections of private capital from places like Google Ventures.
2021 kicked off the ‘hot-potato’ financialization era for the business when Sony Music acquired Kobalt’s AWAL recorded-music division and its neighbouring rights arm for $430 million, disaggregating the company’s most liquid assets. In September 2022, Francisco Partners acquired 90% of the remaining business for approximately $750 million. Now, three and a half years later, Francisco Partners is selling Kobalt to Primary Wave and Brookfield for roughly double what it paid, netting private equity a tidy 2x return on an…independent music company. Notably, this value may now flow out of the sector—what economists would term ‘leakage’—as Francisco Partners redeploys its returns wherever it sees fit.
Zooming out, this ‘hot potato’ arc shows just how far Kobalt has moved from its original project of building an independent, tech-forward alternative to the major publishing system. Primary Wave may be independent from the majors in the narrow ownership sense. But ‘independent’ as a negation, meaning ‘not major’ is not the same as independence in the richer historical sense associated with independent music, which includes a commitment to artist development, cultural risk, community, and more progressive, humanist values.
Primary Wave isn’t meaningfully separate from the wider machinery of big capital and hasn’t been for some time. For example, Brookfield’s role in the firm is not limited to its partnership in the latest deal. In 2022, the asset-management giant—which is known for its contributions to the financialization of housing among other crummy behaviour—bought a significant minority stake in Primary Wave and committed $1.7 billion to a new fund for acquiring music rights. Primary Wave framed this deal as giving it the ability to pursue acquisitions without being “limited by size or opportunity.” Its core business today is decidedly not building alternative infrastructure for music publishing. Rather, it is a well-capitalized tech-enabled music IP company focused on acquiring, managing, and extracting value from music rights at the institutional scale. What remains of Kobalt, in this framing, seems less an independent challenge to the system than a royalty pipe to be further optimized.
Adding further evidence to this narrative, just six days after the Kobalt deal was announced, Primary Wave confirmed the close of its fourth music catalog fund at $2.225 billion, which it described as “the largest dedicated closed-end music royalties fund raised to date in the industry.” The liquidity providers tagged in the announcement read like a checklist of institutional capital and includes insurance companies and endowments. Roughly $700 million of this fourth fund has already been deployed across more than 65 single-artist catalogs, including rights associated with The Notorious B.I.G., The Village People, The Cars, and more. This is hardly a roster of emerging or independent artists looking to open up previously inaccessible opportunities.
The fourth major arrives
In a similar vein, on the recorded music side, we learned last week that BMG, the music division of multinational conglomerate Bertelsmann, will merge with Concord, a nominally independent music company built through years of acquisition and institutional investment. Variety described the deal as “creating the world’s fourth major music company,” while Bloomberg called the merged entity a “$14 Billion Music Giant”. Taken together, those descriptions tell you much of what you need to know about its likely consequences.
Under the deal, Bertelsmann will own roughly 67% of the combined company, with Great Mountain Partners, Concord’s private equity backer, retaining 33% after walking away with a whopping $1.16 billion in cash. Again, we’re talking about ‘independent’ music companies here, which, in this case means a multinational conglomerate, and a $1.16 billion cash-out for a private equity firm.
Upward consolidation of independent music companies has been an ongoing worry for champions of independent music in recent times. But what is especially important to note here is the way this consolidation often proceeds not all at once, but step-wise, through a series of transactions that each appear smaller, more contained, and therefore harder to contest and less likely to generate sustained critical scrutiny or pushback.
We can see this in the dominoes that fell before the BMG-Concord merger was announced.
In March, Concord acquired Ninja Tune, the 35-year-old UK-based independent label with deep cultural history and standing. At the time, the deal was largely framed by the trade press and parts of the independent music community as one independent company buying another. Concern at the time was relatively muted. In a similar vein, the day before the BMG-Concord merger announcement, Concord acquired independent publisher Mothership and its 5,000-song catalog, a deal that barely generated a news cycle at all.
This step-wise approach to consolidation, where each acquisition appears to be a deal between comparably scaled companies, demonstrates one pathway through which large-scale concentration advances with minimal scrutiny or accountability.
The endpoint of both transactions is now the same. Ninja Tune and Mothership are assets inside a Bertelsmann-controlled music company. I’ve yet to spot any response from independent trade associations or individual labels, so we can’t know for certain, but my hunch is that if BMG had simply announced a direct acquisition of Ninja Tune, the reaction from the independent music community would have been much sharper.
Who owns the pipes?
If catalog acquisition was the first obvious phase of music financialization, distribution consolidation is the related infrastructural phase. The strategic prize is not only owning copyrights, but controlling the systems through which copyrights move including delivery pipes, royalty accounting, rights management, analytics, YouTube monetization, label services, and the back-end tools that independent labels and artists increasingly rely on to reach the market.
musicben mapped this trend recently, showing how the major labels aren’t only competing with independent music companies, but buying deeper into the infrastructure those companies depend on.3 As Ben notes, distribution isn’t simply a neutral technical service sitting between artists and platforms.4 In the streaming economy, distribution is where data, market access, payments, and bargaining power converge. The companies that control distribution infrastructure can see more, bundle more, prioritize more, and shape the terms on which independent music reaches listeners.
At the distribution layer, multiple acquisitions across the last six weeks further reinforce this basic ‘control the pipes’ logic. In early April, Warner Music Group announced it will acquire Revelator, a B2B music platform that provides white-label distribution infrastructure for independent labels, including rights management, royalty accounting, and real-time analytics. Warner also recently invested in TuStreams, a Latin distribution platform. The timing is telling, with Warner trying to close the gap with Universal’s growing distribution capabilities. In February 2025, UMG’s Virgin Music Group completed its acquisition of Downtown Music, bringing FUGA’s white-label distribution infrastructure under its control in the process. All this also comes alongside rumours of the potential sale of DistroKid, with Goldman Sachs and The Raine Group representing DK in deal discussions.
The same pattern is visible beyond the majors. In the last two months Symphonic acquired Distro Nation to deepen its YouTube monetization capabilities, while Secretly Distribution acquired analytics firms Entertainment Intelligence and Babel Ops, building a data stack into its distribution offering. Similarly, Zebralution, an independent music distributor that GEMA sold to the private equity firm Insight Holdings just two months back in January, has now been folded into Bookwire, a cloud platform best known for book distribution.
Even amid all this consolidation, there still seems to be plenty of juice left in the investment tank for distribution infrastructure. Independent distributor Too Lost recently announced a nine-figure raise from private equity firm TA Associates and music investment company GoldState Music. This complicates the picture, but doesn’t undermine the general structural pattern. Taken together, these developments suggest there is still a fundable case for independent distribution, while also showing that competing at this layer of the value chain increasingly requires the scale and type of outside capital that can sometimes sit uneasily with the values often associated with and claimed by independents.
What is ‘good’ consolidation?
This question deserves a fuller treatment at some point, but for now it’s worth noting that the pace of consolidation across music should force us to complicate any easy distinction between “good” and “bad” consolidation.
There is a real argument, made well by Darren Hemmings in Network Notes and echoed by Darius Van Arman, that consolidation isn’t inherently bad. Owners sometimes need exits, though this doesn’t always have to mean selling to larger companies. It can also include exits to community, like selling to workers and/or artists5, or values-aligned trust structures, like the one Beggars Group recently set up to steward its future. Scale can also help independent companies compete, and, of course, a deal that doesn’t make Universal, Sony, or Warner larger may be preferable to one that does.
But this can’t be the whole test. What’s important is not only whether consolidation increases the market share of the Big Three, but also what kind of power is being consolidated, who gains from it, and what forms of artist, worker, community, or ecosystem input are lost or gained along the way. This is where ownership, governance, and the ultimate destination of capital become central. The question, then, is whether the capital, efficiencies, and leverage created through consolidation are reinvested back into the ecosystem through artist development, staff capacity, better services, and long-term institutional resilience, or whether they leak out of the system through shareholder returns, debt service, management fees, and private exits.
A company like Secretly, for example, can, based on its mission statement and track record, plausibly be understood as providing something closer to quasi-public infrastructure for the independent sector, including distribution, services, expertise, and scale, that many independent artists and labels need but could not easily build on their own. In that context, some of Secretly’s acquisitions and investments, including Entertainment Intelligence, Babel Ops, and its earlier investment in Cargo Independent Distribution, may be read as strengthening shared infrastructure rather than extracting from it.
When huge, private-equity-backed companies absorb more of the independent sector, the result is not only a different configuration of music companies, but a concentration of power and even more capital in the hands of the already wealthy. Consolidation combines more than catalogs and staff. It consolidates investment power producing combined entities with more capital to deploy, more rights to leverage, more data to analyze, more infrastructure to control, and more collateral against which to borrow (see the rundown of ABS transactions below for more on this). I know I am prone to repeating myself, but this is important to state often: Investment power matters and shapes the future structures of the music industry and their orientation towards artists and workers!
Even when consolidation produces real operational benefits, it can still narrow the space for artist agency, democratic input, cultural risk, and genuinely independent institutional imagination.
The debt machine behind catalog acquisition
The accumulation of capital to purchase catalog assets, and the purchase of those assets, continues apace. Across March and April, music-related finance companies raised $767 million through asset-backed securities (ABS).
Briefly, an ABS allows an owner of musical rights to borrow against the future income of that pool of assets. In music, that means expected royalty streams from songs and recordings are bundled, rated, and sold to investors as debt instruments. The logic of recursive capital accumulation baked into this process is pretty easy to spot. The catalog generates cash, the cash services the debt, and the upfront capital can be used to refinance earlier acquisitions or purchase…even more return-generating catalog rights.
First up on the ABS front, in late March, Seeker Music Group, a large institutional capital backed music company closed a $267 million inaugural ABS. The underlying collateral included more than 19,000 copyrights and master recordings including works by Beyoncé, Drake, Joan Jett, One Direction, and Run the Jewels.
Then there’s Chord Music Partners, which is backed by Universal Music Group and Searchlight Capital. In late April, Chord filed plans for a $500 million ABS through a newly created vehicle called Canon Music Issuer Trust, backed by an $830 million catalog. As per Music Business Worldwide’s reporting, the top three sub-catalogs behind this deal account for just over half that value: $uicideboy$ at 23.3%, Morgan Wallen at 15.8%, and Ryan Tedder’s OneRepublic at 12.6%. The anticipated repayment date is May 2031. The final maturity date is fifty years from now in May 2076. Royalty streams from songs by a hip-hop duo and a country superstar are now primary collateral for half-century institutional debt instruments, partially backed by one of the three major labels. *gulp*
Bits and bobs
To keep the format manageable, not every transaction in these columns will get the full analytical treatment. Some will simply be rounded up and appear near the end of each column in grouped lists, where they can be read together as evidence of the different financial logics playing out across music.
i.
Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square launched a $64 billion bid for Universal Music Group on April 7. Plenty has already been written about the potential deal, so I won’t add much here other than to note that Ackman’s bid may have pushed Universal to make the move to sell half of its ownership stake in Spotify, which will net the company around $1.4 billion (some of which will be passed on to artists). For my money, the most interesting column written about the bid comes from Maarten on this very site, who used it as an entry point to think about how music might attract capital investment beyond straightforward IP plays.
ii.
On the catalog acquisition front, March and April produced a steady stream of purchases:
HarbourView Equity Partners (Apollo-backed) acquired select assets from the Quincy Jones estate including Jones’ interests in the three Michael Jackson albums he produced (Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad), “Soul Bossa Nova,” George Benson’s “Give Me the Night,” and Jones’ participation in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Domain Capital Group closed its $768 million Domain Entertainment Fund II with Sony Music Publishing and Paramount among its partners; Domain and SMP Nashville had co-acquired Miranda Lambert’s complete catalog in January.
Primary Wave picked up the Eartha Kitt estate’s catalog and name-and-likeness rights, and the Harry Chapin estate’s catalog and NIL rights, both drawn from Primary Wave’s newly closed $2.2 billion fund discussed above.
Swedish catalog specialist Pophouse, in a “strategic transaction with BMG,” acquired a majority stake in Tina Turner’s music interests.
Bella Figura Music acquired Paul Epworth’s publishing catalog (Adele, Florence + The Machine).
BMG acquired A Flock of Seagulls’ publishing and recording rights.
CTM Outlander picked up Matt Simons’ masters.
MusicBird acquired the catalog of Supertramp bassist Dougie Thomson.
Seeker, just days after closing its $267 million ABS, deployed some of that capital into the Nu Shooz catalog. The ABS-as-acquisition-fuel loop, complete!
New entrants into the catalog purchasing game were also announced as Japanese entertainment company Avex Music Group launched a $100 million publishing acquisition fund and made its first purchase, the catalog of Infamous, who is the co-writer of Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control“.
iii.
Elsewhere:
UMG launched its first-ever share buyback program just eight days before Ackman’s bid landed, committing up to €500 million by October 2026. This is a big ol’ pile of surplus capital going to UMG shareholders rather than, say, being reinvested in artist development. That’s shareholder capitalism for ya.
UMG took a stake in What the Duck, Thailand’s most prominent indie label.
Warner refinanced its existing credit facilities through a new $1.645 billion JPMorgan credit agreement.
HYBE injected $100 million into its US subsidiary.
Primary Wave invested in Vietnam’s POPS Music.
Reservoir Media became the subject of dueling takeover bids from activist investor Irenic Capital and a counter-bid backed by Wesbild Holdings, the ~44% shareholder run by CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi’s father. Meanwhile, Reservoir’s MENA subsidiary PopArabia acquired Viral Wave for distribution infrastructure.
Crate digging the Penny Fractions archive
It feels only right to end these columns by hopping into the DeLorean and checking out what David was writing about in Penny Fractions around this time in years past.
Today we’re headed six years back to May 2022, when PF published a newsletter titled ‘MySpace Died, Why Didn’t Anyone Care?’. In it, David reports on how MySpace lost its entire back catalog of music—50 million tracks!—in a failed server migration. Using this as a jumping off point, he argues that this loss of a unique and important archive of cultural heritage shouldn’t be surprising. Corporate-backed digital music platforms were never meant to fulfill the function of cultural stewards. Rather, they were built to capture attention, generate advertising revenue, scale quickly, and satisfy investors. Once that growth story ends, the cultural archives those platforms happen to accumulate become little more than abandoned infrastructure.
David contrasts this with the messy, but genuinely archival function played by torrents and file-sharing networks. Those systems made alternate versions, obscure releases, regional editions, underground recordings, and otherwise commercially marginal music easier to find. Their continuing destruction, he argues, helps narrow musical memory to what corporations and rights-holders choose to keep available.
Despite the somewhat depressing nature of the analysis, David ends with a brief moment of positivity, where he gestures toward a more utopian idea of music itself, as an art form where literal physical waves(!!) connect us to shared meaning and experience:
“If there ever were an art form that should exist without bending to the whims of market pressures, it’d be nice to imagine that to be a medium of air vibrations.”
Amen to that.
LINKS
✊ Music Front - Editorial (Music Front, vol. 1, no. 3, p. 2)
“The artists take no nonsense from the exploiters and the exploiters know this. The exploiters do not like to have their tactics noised about and the artists will do it. They know whom they cannot fool. They know this only through the actions of the workers whom they try to beat out of their rights.”
✘ Looking back to Music Front—a New Deal–era magazine by and for music workers—I’m struck by how clearly its artist-authors (1) conceived of themselves as workers engaging in class struggle alongside other workers; and (2) understood that one of the basic tasks for artists and music workers is to expose the tactics of capital. These Notes on Financialization columns are, in a small way, an attempt to carry that work and spirit forward.
🦁 Mind the Gaps: A History Told Through Borrowed Lines (Tia Julien / New Feeling)
“Listeners respond to music that resonates with an emotion or experience communicated in a piece of music. Being vulnerable is a human skill; taking accountability for one’s own work and ideas, and choosing to let others perceive it even though it may be imperfect. When questioning what a human musician can do that a robot can’t, the most satisfactory answer I can come up with is to be brave.”
✘ Using lyrical collage and personal observation, Tia Julien offers a beautiful, short political and artistic manifesto that functions as a perfect response to the cultural ruptures produced by tech-accelerated capitalism. Be brave!
💌 mad enough to stay (Graham Latham / anything/everything)
“After more than twenty years of arguing about it, I don’t have much time for artists or musicians who claim their work “isn’t political.” I remain very much invested, however, in conversations about how such work always is. The ways we conceive of how cultural production interfaces with or mediates political exchange is crucial to our understanding of what “politics” even is – an understanding which, I would argue, remains desperately underdeveloped. Of course, professing “good politics” doth not necessarily good art make, lord knows, but I always get most excited about work that’s animated by a commitment to making visible the social context and political economy of its production. It’s the way it’s done that makes it interesting.”
✘ You absolutely must go and read Graham’s full profile and interview with Beirut trio Postcards (who rule!). He starts it off with this banger of a paragraph, with which I could not agree more.
MUSIC
This past weekend, ridin’ my bike to the first outdoor farmers’ market of the season. Arthur cranked in headphones. Nothing better!
A little patch of grass
And the sidewalk pass by swiftly
The hedge and the greenhouse sing a subtle songRidin’ my bike, I’m doin’ what I like!
In 2022, David Turner, Kaitlyn Davies, and Henderson Cole also published Understanding Two Decades of Music Catalog Purchases through France’s Centre national de la musique. It offers a short, highly readable history of music catalog acquisitions since the turn of the millennium and is very much worth your time.
Building on Ben’s mapping of recent major-label investments, I add a further layer of analysis by placing each acquisition and investment within the broader recorded music value chain. The result shows just how deeply major labels are vertically integrating across the recorded music industry and extending their reach and control within the sector.
Though perhaps it could be, if we treated music infrastructure more like a public utility! I’m planning to write about this in more detail soon over on my personal newsletter, Building Blocks (subscribe for free!), but in the meantime, two excellent starting points that touch on music infrastructure as utility are Ramsay Eyre’s The Platformization of Music, which explores how tools from the law of networks, platforms, and utilities could be adapted and applied to music, and Eric Drott’s Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, which is a tour de force on the political economy of digital music.
Shoutout to Canada for recently moving to make its employee ownership trust (EOT) tax exemption permanent, giving business owners a clearer path to sell their companies to employees rather than defaulting to outside buyers.
This is great. I really appreciated the analysis, especially because the political economy of music is still too often treated as background context rather than as something with a prefiguring grip on what music gets made and how music gets made.
In my own research, I have been working on what I call the gridification of music as part of a broader understanding of grammatization, a term I take from Bernard Stiegler. By grammatization, I mean the process by which a continuous, relational activity is broken into discrete units so it can be stored, measured, processed, circulated, optimized, and controlled.
In the recording studio, gridification is the grammatization of musical time. Music that was once recorded as the coordination of people playing together in a room is broken into editable units and corrected against a machine-defined grid.
I am reading this through Susanne K. Langer’s theory of presentational symbolism. For Langer, music is not mere entertainment, it has an epistemological function. Music presents the objectification of felt or lived time. It shows us how feeling unfolds, how people coordinate across difference, and how relations become intelligible as form. This is the key role of music and where the idea of music as a universal language comes from.
That matters because a presentational symbol is apprehended as a whole. Its meaning does not come from isolated units. It comes from the interrelation of its parts.
Grammatization denies epistemic validity to relational wholes. It flattens relation into discrete, swappable units. Gridification does this to musical time. Financialization does this to the whole musical ecosystem: songs, catalogs, rights, royalties, metadata, distribution pipes, listening behavior.