Private Equity’s Next Target Is Indie Music

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ome of the biggest music deals in recent years have involved songwriting catalogs, from Bob Dylan in 2020 to Justin Bieber in 2025 to Pete Townshend this spring, many fetching nine-figure buyouts. Most of these have come from private-equity firms looking for reliable investments.

But independent labels and artists are fast becoming the focus for a number of recently minted investment firms — companies, and catalogs, of seemingly every size. And one label owner, Aaron Schultz of the boutique soul-funk imprint Bastard Jazz Recordings, says the moves are “threatening for the entire indie-music ecosystem.”

In a widely disseminated post on Facebook on July 2, Schultz wrote disparagingly about this wave. It read in part:

“This week alone, I’ve had something like 6-8 catalog acquisition / PE folks banging down my door to try and purchase masters from artists we’ve worked with over the years. The offers themselves don’t matter (they do suck though), but what struck me more than the numbers was just how relentless it’s become. It feels like they’ve largely swallowed up the biggest fish already, and now they’re working their way down the ladder to medium and small independent labels. It’s a feeding frenzy and it feels gross.”

This wave of investment in music catalogs of all sizes hasn’t been limited to private equity, either, though that appears to be the primary actor. “It’s about institutional capital more broadly — from private equity to large pension funds,” says Patrick Clifton, executive director of the international indie-music organization ORCA, in London. “Big institutional money is flowing into the industry, and the independents are under focus, because a lot of them have catalogs and rights that are potentially valuable.”

From the companies’ 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. 

“For the last couple of years, people [have] put lines in the water to see if we’re interested in selling the catalog,” Schultz tells Rolling Stone over the phone. “But [in recent] months, it’s really been taking off.”

One reason for this recent flurry of activity is that institutional-capital-backed firms had traditionally required “five years, ideally 10 years” of financial information to accrue before investing, says Lior Tibon, the CEO and co-founder of Duetti, one of the largest such companies. (In January, Duetti announced it had raised $200 million toward further catalog acquisitions.) “We started with a two-year minimum,” he says, adding that this summer, Duetti “took the threshold all the way down to six months” for master recordings.

Some of Duetti’s 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, “Loverboy (Who Got You Smiling Like That),” was recently relaunched after the artist made a royalty-split deal with Duetti. “Five years later, in ’26, and we’re seeing [it] come back as a viral phenomenon on TikTok over the last few weeks,” 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.

“We’re not a financial fund,” says Tibon of Duetti. “A 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’t have an expiry date. We’re building long-term investments, and we see ourselves as any other music company.”

And these companies are growing: Tibon says that Duetti has just crossed the 100-employee threshold.

Mara Kuge, a music publisher in Los Angeles, has seen this kind of surge of publishing buyouts occur twice before — in the early Nineties, during the alt-rock gold rush, and in the early 2010s, when “large corporations like BMG were buying out all the smaller companies,” she says. “But at least in those situations, they were music companies buying other music companies.”

But 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 — and runs counter to how financiers such as private equity tend to do business.

“Their philosophy is ‘We can make this more efficient. We can consolidate,’” says Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. “And 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’s 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.”

One operator offered Schultz a flat $1 million for the entire Bastard Jazz catalog; another proffered $50,000 for one song “that was worth infinitely more than that,” he says (he declined to name the artist or song).

Such 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’s entire publishing catalog than it’s worth.

That 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 “spray-and-pray emails”; at one point, he was getting them “every 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 — they would just be spamming.” 

One such entity, says Schultz, “must have emailed me 14 times before I finally wrote back and was just like, ‘We’re not interested.’”

Such relentlessness is to be expected, says Greenwell. “Based on how it works in every other industry, the goal is to carpet-bomb as many artists, labels, producers, etc. — to get as many as you possibly can on board,” she says.

Here’s a case study: Rolling Stone was forwarded three emails from investment firms that were sent to the singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. As of this writing, his biggest song on Spotify, “Time,” has been streamed more than 33 million times, followed by “You Needed Love, I Needed You” at more than 25 million. When he tours in October, he’ll be playing intimate rooms like Chicago’s Old Town of Folk Music and NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge.

One of the inquiring emails to De Augustine, from 2024, offers $10,000 for the master rights to his song “Old Hope” — which opens his 2014 debut album, Spirals of Silence — as a standalone item, along with offering to push the track’s visibility through the company’s own marketing arm. (“Old Hope” currently has 1.8 million Spotify streams. Spirals of Silence was self-released — the rest of De Augustine’s catalog is on the medium-size indie label Asthmatic Kitty.) 

A 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’s-who-we-work-with to let’s-get-on-the-phone to a URL link that allows artists to evaluate their own catalog’s worth. The logic seems to be: Who isn’t obsessed with their own net?  

(“Of course, it’s not our intention to spam anyone,” says Tibon to charges that companies like his send out spam. “If anyone feels it’s spam, they’re welcome to let us know and block us.”)

There’s a Wall Street-like market-bubble feel to much of this activity. Schultz refers to these companies “bundling catalogs and selling them, literally, like stocks.”

“They’re trying to bundle as much as possible,” Bennett says. “They don’t really give a shit about the quality of it. It’s more of a quantity game.”

Recently, an artist on Schultz’s label had gotten a private-equity offer on their biggest song — “Probably 5 million spins,” Schultz says — and was looking for “an equivalent offer on the song” from Schultz during contract renegotiations.

“We ended up working it out,” he says. But the artist’s temptation to “give master rights away on this one track” and thus “breaking up the album” sounded an alarm. “I actually don’t know how that would work,” Schultz says. “It seems like it would be a mess with our distributors. I haven’t thought that far about it, because we’re just not trying to do anything like this.”

“The 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,” says Greenwell. “Stripping 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.”

Sometimes these deals work out in the artists’ or labels’ favor. “If an artist needs $40,000 to buy some lights to go on tour, this is sometimes a good option for them,” says Bennett. “It’s harder and harder these days for artists to find sources of income that are there in lump sum.”

“Independent record labels are founded by entrepreneurs,” notes Clifton. “And acquisition is a natural byproduct of entrepreneurship.” 

Kristina Benson of the music-licensing company Sweet on Top says, “I work with someone who acquires lots of labels, and they really are good stewards of the labels that they acquire. They really do breathe new life into these catalogs. They invest in them.” 

But that’s not always the case. The danger of private equity in its previous incarnations is that it would blindly strip its assets for parts and leave them rebundled for future reacquisitions, willy-nilly. The questions Benson considers in such deals: “Are they just sitting on it like a house they flip? Do they do anything with it? Are they just waiting for these assets to appreciate?”

Clifton, like others, expresses concern about what this land grab bodes for the future. “We’re not regenerating,” he says. “We’re not seeing new independent record labels emerge and become successful as fast as we’re seeing them be acquired. For a thriving music ecosystem, you need companies of every size, and you need that to be in balance. You need new companies emerging as old companies are being bought out.”

Schultz’s widely shared Facebook post has prompted a lot of conversations, he says — including with some of the people offering these deals. “Folks that work in this private-equity sphere are actually agreeing with me about what’s going on here,” he says. “Some middle-tier folks have some kind of a conscience about the work that they’re doing. They’re even getting the ick.”