{"id":582287,"date":"2026-04-13T20:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T20:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/582287\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T20:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T20:39:09","slug":"justin-biebers-coachella-set-had-nothing-to-do-with-catalog-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/582287\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Bieber\u2019s Coachella Set Had Nothing to Do With Catalog\u00a0Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFan and media speculation that\u00a0Justin Bieber<\/a>\u00a0played mostly newer songs during his\u00a0headlining set at Coachella<\/a>\u00a0on Saturday (April 11) due to the $203 million sale of his catalog are misguided, music industry insiders say.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Justin<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2023, the pop superstar\u00a0sold 100% of his publishing rights<\/a>\u00a0and his artist royalties from his master recordings and neighboring rights to some 290 songs released before Dec. 31, 2021 \u2014 from \u201cBaby\u201d to \u201cLove Yourself\u201d \u2014 to\u00a0Hipgnosis<\/a>\u00a0Songs Capital, now called Recognition Music Rights. During his Coachella performance over the weekend, Bieber briefly performed some of those songs. However, he spent most of the first 50 minutes of his set performing songs from his 2025 albums\u00a0SWAG\u00a0and\u00a0SWAG II\u00a0on a stage featuring just the artist and a laptop. The Daily Mail<\/a> on Monday (April 13) ran a story that said the \u201creal reason Justin Bieber couldn\u2019t play his old music in full\u00a0\u2026 could be\u201d that he sold his back catalog.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s nonsense,\u201d a source familiar with the terms of Bieber\u2019s\u00a0catalog deal<\/a>\u00a0tells\u00a0Billboard. \u201cThere are no restrictions on what he can or can\u2019t do in live performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBieber performed around a dozen of the songs that were included in the 2023 transaction at Coachella, and Brooklyn rock band Geese performed their own cover of\u00a0Bieber\u2019s \u201cBaby\u201d at the festival<\/a>\u00a0hours before Bieber\u2019s performance, the source pointed out. The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to discuss undisclosed details of the transaction.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnder U.S. copyright law, playing a song in concert requires only a \u201cpublic performance\u201d license, and venues themselves typically secure blanket licenses from groups like ASCAP and BMI automatically covering the performance of nearly all popular songs. Just like Geese could cover Bieber\u2019s song in concert, he himself could play them without seeking permission from Recognition.<\/p>\n

\n\tRepresentatives for Bieber did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tPop stars are frequently the targets of online chatter and speculation, especially when it comes to their financial lives \u2014 and particularly in light of the recent slew of music catalog sales by major artists, which have increased in regularity in recent years. In 2023, for example, internet rumors circulated that Taylor Swift passed up playing the Super Bowl Halftime Show due to a conflict with the owners of her catalog.<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift\u2019s masters were famously sold to Scooter Braun, Bieber\u2019s former manager, whose Ithaca Holdings purchased Swift\u2019s old record label Big Machine. Swift later re-recorded several of those first six albums as highly successful Taylor\u2019s Version editions in an attempt to redirect fans playing her music to her songs, rather than those to which she did not own the rights.<\/p>\n

\n\tPeople speculated\u00a0<\/a>that Swift repeatedly declined to play the Super Bowl because the spotlight would cause streams of her songs to spike \u2014 Bad Bunny\u00a0streams spiked 85%\u00a0<\/a>following his performance in February \u2014 and thus enrich Braun; that narrative was whipped into a frenzy once Swift purchased back her original masters last spring, with fans feverishly speculating that now that she owned her early albums, she would grace the world\u2019s biggest stage. She didn\u2019t, and it\u2019s worth noting that Swift always controlled her song catalog, which is the piece of Bieber\u2019s works that he sold in the Hipgnosis deal. <\/p>\n

\n\tNonetheless, selling one\u2019s music rights \u2014 to recorded masters or of a song catalog or royalty streams \u2014 does not preclude an artist from performing any song, including their own, in a live setting.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the lead up to his Coachella performance \u2014\u00a0Bieber\u2019s biggest solo show in years \u2014 he played two intimate shows at the West Hollywood venues The Roxy and the Troubadour, which he devoted entirely to songs from\u00a0SWAG\u00a0and\u00a0SWAG II.<\/p>\n

\n\tBillboard\u00a0reported that the 12 older songs that Bieber performed \u2014 or sang snippets to \u2014 as he played their YouTube music videos during his set took up around 25 minutes of the show, suggesting that the artist may have gone through them quickly because the tracks \u201cotherwise felt out of place in the set \u2014 even to those who don\u2019t want to admit it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAdditional reporting by Dan Rys and Bill Donoahue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fan and media speculation that\u00a0Justin Bieber\u00a0played mostly newer songs during his\u00a0headlining set at Coachella\u00a0on Saturday (April 11) due…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[59945,27714,88,497,255158,216,498],"class_list":{"0":"post-582287","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-catalog","9":"tag-coachella","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-genre-pop","12":"tag-hipgnosis","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-music-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}