Primary Wave Music Founder Larry Mestel on the Booming Song-Catalog Market, and How He Plans to Spend $2 Billion
variety.comJem Aswad Senior Music Editor Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan selling their catalogs for $600 million, Genesis and Phil Collins for $300 million, Stevie Nicks for $100 million — over the past few years dozens of artists have sold the rights to their music catalogs for eight or nine figures.
There are all kinds of reasons why this is happening: Artists are getting older and are basically estate planning, the pandemic proved that copyrights can be a great investment, and the booming market is bringing more and more buyers and sellers to the table.
But what do you do with that catalog once you’ve bought it? The old approach was to basically to sit and wait for the songs to make money — through radio, sales, use in films or TV shows or advertising campaigns, Broadway shows and lots of other ways.
But a more recent approach is to work aggressively to pitch those catalogs to drive up their value — and that’s an approach that Primary Wave Music, led by founder and CEO Larry Mestel, has supersized since it was founded in 2006.
Read more on variety.com
