Primary Wave Music Strikes $2 Billion Deal With Brookfield to Invest in Music Copyrights

Jem Aswad
·4 min read

Primary Wave Music, a top player in the music-catalog and publishing boom, has joined forces with Brookfield Asset Management in a $2 billion deal to invest in music copyrights, the companies confirmed. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Brookfield, which is new the space, will take a significant minority interest in Primary Wave, and commit $1.7 billion to fund a permanent capital vehicle focused on acquiring music rights from top acts. Primary Wave Music is primarily a music publisher but has become a leader in the catalog-acquisition business with its ability to market those catalogs biographical films, Broadway shows, song interpolations and brand deals. Its assets include interests in the catalogs of Whitney Houston, James Brown, half of the Prince estate, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and more.

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The deal also brings on Creative Artists Agency as a strategic partner and minority investor in Primary Wave, tapping the talent agency’s film, television, theatrical and branding teams to help market and find uses for the acquired copyrights.

According to the report, unlike Primary Wave’s existing funds, which have a typical 10- to 12-year lifespan, the new vehicle is structured to hold catalogs as long as it wants to have them and never has to sell.

“It means there isn’t any good acquisition that we couldn’t do in the music business,” Primary Wave CEO Larry Mestel says. “We’re not limited by size or opportunity.”

Along with the Brookfield deal, Primary Wave has acquired all of legendary Ramones singer Joey Ramone’s music-publishing assets for around $10 million, according to the report. The deal is the first one of such scale for a punk-rock act and suggests a new field of opportunity for such deals.

The focus of the deal was to hold music assets in perpetuity, said Angelo Rufino, a managing partner at Brookfield.

“Increasing demand for content from streaming services and social media make iconic music IP a scarce and irreplaceable asset,” he said. “One of the cheapest forms of entertainment is going to keep finding ways to weave itself into our everyday consciousness and that just means more revenue.”

Primary Wave has become a major player in the catalog-acquisition and marketing business by being selective and working with what it considers proven catalogs. “The majors dabble in the acquisition business, and obviously they’re fantastic companies, but they all have millions of copyrights,” Mestel told Variety last year. “We’re one of the largest music companies in the world right now and we only have [50,000] copyrights — who’s gonna have an easier time prioritizing and marketing?”

Unlike other major companies in the space, it largely avoids recent catalogs and invests in older, more seasoned artists — its interests also include catalogs of Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Bing Crosby, Olivia Newton-John and Alice Cooper — and and works them aggressively but tactfully, being cognizant of not wearing out the brand.

“We’re always working in conjunction with the artist or their estate — we’re creating a marketing plan that they sign off on, and then we go and get,” Mestel told Variety, reeling off a dizzying array of recent and forthcoming gets, including biopics and Broadway shows for Whitney Houston, a destination show in a specially built Las Vegas theater for Bob Marley, even a partnership with the Red Cross during the pandemic for Burt Bacharach’s song “What the World Needs Now (Is Love”), along with contests, TikTok campaigns and more. Bolstering the artist’s reputation and brand is as important as commerce: “We did ‘Devo Day’ in their hometown in Ohio — a whole campaign to get the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he says, although that effort has not borne fruit yet. “We’ve got 15 digital strategy people who do playlist pitching, website construction, ecommerce development, social media enhancement, we’ve got seven branding people. Our competitors, aside from the majors, are not built to do what we do.”

Primary Wave has executed $300 million this year and has another $600 million in pending transactions before the end of 2022, according to the report.

The companies have their sights on international markets like Mexico, India and Brazil, Rufino says.

“This is largely today a more Western-focused business,” he told the Journal. “There are some of these artists with hundreds of millions of followers but are local to their country. There are many ways to grow this.”

Eventually, Brookfield could also purchase the assets from any of Primary Wave’s existing three funds. Already, the new vehicle has bought over $700 million of music rights from Primary Wave’s first and second funds

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