\n
\t\t\tS \n\tBut independent labels and artists are fast becoming the focus for a number of recently minted investment firms \u2014 companies, and catalogs, of seemingly every size. And one label owner, Aaron Schultz of the boutique soul-funk imprint Bastard Jazz Recordings<\/a>, says the moves are \u201cthreatening for the entire indie-music ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a widely disseminated post on Facebook on July 2<\/a>, Schultz wrote disparagingly about this wave. It read in part:<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThis week alone, I\u2019ve had something like 6-8 catalog acquisition \/ PE folks banging down my door to try and purchase masters from artists we\u2019ve worked with over the years. The offers themselves don\u2019t matter (they do suck though), but what struck me more than the numbers was just how relentless it\u2019s become. It feels like they\u2019ve largely swallowed up the biggest fish already, and now they\u2019re working their way down the ladder to medium and small independent labels. It\u2019s a feeding frenzy and it feels gross.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThis wave of investment in music catalogs of all sizes hasn\u2019t been limited to private equity<\/a>, either, though that appears to be the primary actor. \u201cIt\u2019s about institutional capital more broadly \u2014 from private equity to large pension funds,\u201d says Patrick Clifton, executive director of the international indie-music organization ORCA, in London. \u201cBig institutional money is flowing into the industry<\/a>, and the independents are under focus, because a lot of them have catalogs and rights that are potentially valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFrom the companies\u2019 standpoint, even a modestly successful song catalog can be a no-brainer investment. Minor hits tend to keep earning money, either from streaming or from placements in film, series, or advertising. Hence, more of these offers are being made all the time. And the size of the companies hardly matters: Bastard Jazz, for example, employs three people.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cFor the last couple of years, people [have] put lines in the water to see if we\u2019re interested in selling the catalog,\u201d Schultz tells Rolling Stone over the phone. \u201cBut [in recent] months, it\u2019s really been taking off.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOne reason for this recent flurry of activity is that institutional-capital-backed firms had traditionally required \u201cfive years, ideally 10 years\u201d of financial information to accrue before investing, says Lior Tibon, the CEO and co-founder of Duetti<\/a>, one of the largest such companies. (In January, Duetti announced<\/a> it had raised $200 million toward further catalog acquisitions.) \u201cWe started with a two-year minimum,\u201d he says, adding that this summer, Duetti \u201ctook the threshold all the way down to six months\u201d for master recordings.<\/p>\n \n\tSome of Duetti\u2019s higher-profile recent deals have been with the Mexican-based Roland Garcia (who averages more than 100,000 monthly Spotify listeners) and A-Wall, whose 2021 viral sensation, \u201cLoverboy (Who Got You Smiling Like That),\u201d was recently relaunched after the artist made a royalty-split deal with Duetti. \u201cFive years later, in \u201926, and we\u2019re seeing [it] come back as a viral phenomenon on TikTok over the last few weeks,\u201d says Tibon. The track recently floated around the Top 10 of the TikTok U.S. chart, with A-Wall at 4.2 million monthly Spotify listeners.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe\u2019re not a financial fund,\u201d says Tibon of Duetti. \u201cA fund has to return capital. Usually, it operates for a five-year or seven-year or even a 10-year time horizon. But once that clock ends, they need to sell and recycle the capital. We don\u2019t have an expiry date. We\u2019re building long-term investments, and we see ourselves as any other music company.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tAnd these companies are growing: Tibon says that Duetti has just crossed the 100-employee threshold.<\/p>\n \n\tMara Kuge, a music publisher<\/a> in Los Angeles, has seen this kind of surge of publishing buyouts occur twice before \u2014 in the early Nineties, during the alt-rock gold rush, and in the early 2010s, when \u201clarge corporations like BMG were buying out all the smaller companies,\u201d she says. \u201cBut at least in those situations, they were music companies buying other music companies.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBut while many of these new companies employ longtime music bizzers in A&R roles, they have a much different vibe. The ideological component of the indie world is important to its audience \u2014 and runs counter to how financiers such as private equity tend to do business.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cTheir philosophy is \u2018We can make this more efficient. We can consolidate,\u2019\u201d says Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. \u201cAnd in a world like indie music, efficiency is not the point. Scale is not the point. [They] are making things that people love and feel a real connection to. It\u2019s just very hard to square that ethos with the private-equity ethos of consolidation at all costs, growth at all costs, and quick exits whenever possible.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOne operator offered Schultz a flat $1 million for the entire Bastard Jazz catalog; another proffered $50,000 for one song \u201cthat was worth infinitely more than that,\u201d he says (he declined to name the artist or song).<\/p>\n \n\tSuch lowballing, several people told Rolling Stone both on and off the record, is standard in these kinds of offers. An employee of a longstanding West Coast label recently received spam from a private-equity firm offering them far less for the label\u2019s entire publishing catalog than it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n \n\tThat employee, please note, did not even own the label. But that, too, is commonplace. Harrison Bennett, who manages EDM stars Zeds Dead, refers to these as \u201cspray-and-pray emails\u201d; at one point, he was getting them \u201cevery week. It was nonstop. I would get it, my day-to-day [assistant] would get it, the agents would get it, the U.K. agent would get it, PR \u2014 they would just be spamming.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOne such entity, says Schultz, \u201cmust have emailed me 14 times before I finally wrote back and was just like, \u2018We\u2019re not interested.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSuch relentlessness is to be expected, says Greenwell. \u201cBased on how it works in every other industry, the goal is to carpet-bomb as many artists, labels, producers, etc. \u2014 to get as many as you possibly can on board,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \n\tHere\u2019s a case study: Rolling Stone was forwarded three emails from investment firms that were sent to the singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine<\/a>. As of this writing, his biggest song on Spotify, \u201cTime,\u201d has been streamed more than 33 million times, followed by \u201cYou Needed Love, I Needed You\u201d at more than 25 million. When he tours in October<\/a>, he\u2019ll be playing intimate rooms like Chicago\u2019s Old Town of Folk Music and NYC\u2019s Le Poisson Rouge.<\/p>\n \n\tOne of the inquiring emails to De Augustine, from 2024, offers $10,000 for the master rights to his song \u201cOld Hope\u201d \u2014 which opens his 2014 debut album, Spirals of Silence \u2014 as a standalone item, along with offering to push the track\u2019s visibility through the company\u2019s own marketing arm. (\u201cOld Hope\u201d currently has 1.8 million Spotify streams. Spirals of Silence was self-released \u2014 the rest of De Augustine\u2019s catalog is on the medium-size indie label Asthmatic Kitty.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA second email, from 2026, is a follow-up to a 2024 missive offering flexible deals. But the third is the whopper: a four-message pileup dated May 16, June 24, July 2, and July 9 of this year. The messages go from just asking to here\u2019s-who-we-work-with to let\u2019s-get-on-the-phone to a URL link that allows artists to evaluate their own catalog\u2019s worth. The logic seems to be: Who isn\u2019t obsessed with their own net?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t(\u201cOf course, it\u2019s not our intention to spam anyone,\u201d says Tibon to charges that companies like his send out spam. \u201cIf anyone feels it\u2019s spam, they\u2019re welcome to let us know and block us.\u201d)<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s a Wall Street-like market-bubble feel to much of this activity. Schultz refers to these companies \u201cbundling catalogs and selling them, literally, like stocks.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThey\u2019re trying to bundle as much as possible,\u201d Bennett says. \u201cThey don\u2019t really give a shit about the quality of it. It\u2019s more of a quantity game.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRecently, an artist on Schultz\u2019s label had gotten a private-equity offer on their biggest song \u2014 \u201cProbably 5 million spins,\u201d Schultz says \u2014 and was looking for \u201can equivalent offer on the song\u201d from Schultz during contract renegotiations.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe ended up working it out,\u201d he says. But the artist\u2019s temptation to \u201cgive master rights away on this one track\u201d and thus \u201cbreaking up the album\u201d sounded an alarm. \u201cI actually don\u2019t know how that would work,\u201d Schultz says. \u201cIt seems like it would be a mess with our distributors. I haven\u2019t thought that far about it, because we\u2019re just not trying to do anything like this.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe idea that this is all part of one album and is supposed to be presented together rather than in a vacuum: That is just not how private equity works,\u201d says Greenwell. \u201cStripping for parts is really the goal. Everything is a widget, and all widgets can be disentangled from each other and put back in new combinations.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSometimes these deals work out in the artists\u2019 or labels\u2019 favor. \u201cIf an artist needs $40,000 to buy some lights to go on tour, this is sometimes a good option for them,\u201d says Bennett. \u201cIt\u2019s harder and harder these days for artists to find sources of income that are there in lump sum.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIndependent record labels are founded by entrepreneurs,\u201d notes Clifton. \u201cAnd acquisition is a natural byproduct of entrepreneurship.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\tome of the biggest music deals in recent years have involved songwriting catalogs, from Bob Dylan in 2020 to Justin Bieber in 2025<\/a> to Pete Townshend<\/a> this spring, many fetching nine-figure buyouts. Most of these have come from private-equity firms looking for reliable investments.<\/p>\n