Megabucks music-catalogue acquisitions aren’t quite a thing of the past. Sony Music has just bought half of Michael Jackson’s publishing and recording catalogues, with Billboard reporting that the company will pay at least $600m – and possibly up to $750m.
The report also claimed that the deal includes some other songs from the late star’s Mijac publishing catalogue: songs written and/or performed by the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Curtis Mayfield and Percy Sledge among others.
Previous iterations of Sony Music had a long partnership with Jackson when he was alive, each owning half of publisher Sony/ATV. Jackson died in 2009, and Sony would later (in 2016) pay $750m to buy his half of the company.
According to Variety, Primary Wave continues to hold a 10% stake in Jackson’s publishing assets, but none of the companies concerned have commented on the record about the details of the deal.
If the reported details are correct, though, it’s the biggest such acquisition yet in terms of the overall catalogues’ value, fuelled by the continuing streaming popularity of Jackson’s music – he has more than 38 million monthly listeners on Spotify for example.
