At the beginning of February, Britney Spears sold her catalog to Primary Wave for approximately 200 million dollars (about 173 million euros). The operation is part of a broader trend. In recent years, Bob Dylan sold his publishing rights to Universal Music Publishing for $300 million (€259 million); Neil Young gave 50% of his catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund; and Shakira did the same with that same British background. Hipgnosis, founded in 2018 by Merck Mercuriadis, financed its purchases by raising money from investors through the stock market. The thesis was that large music catalogs function as relatively stable assets: they generate recurring income on digital platforms, radio or synchronization and do not depend directly on fluctuations in the financial market, which makes them attractive instruments for diversifying investment. Hipgnosis ceased trading in 2024 after being acquired by Blackstone, which integrated its catalog into a new private structure. Today it operates under the umbrella of Recognition Music Group, focused on the global management and monetization of music rights. In reality, copyrights have always been transferable and managed by music publishers. What has changed is its conceptualization. They are no longer acquired solely as part of a creative or editorial strategy, but as financial instruments capable of generating projectable long-term cash flows. What happens in the Spanish case? Kiko Veneno (Figueres, 76 years old) assumes, in statements to EL PAÍS, that this economic dimension has always been present: «From the beginning, copyrights are financial assets. In the 60s and 70s they were in the hands of thousands of authors who received benefits from the music industry. Today they are in the hands of three companies and platforms from which very few musicians earn substantial benefits.» Loquillo (65 years old, Barcelona) maintains the same idea: “The sensible thing is to understand that your repertoire is a financial asset from the moment you protect it with registration and copyright, something that has been within our reach since the times of Dickens and Turgenev, and thanks to them.”
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The question is whether this model can be replicated in Spain. There have been attempts, although with limited results. The most visible case was that of Clippers, which acquired the catalog of composer David Santiesteban following a logic of concentration of rights and monetization of future flows. Even more ambitious was The Musix, the Spanish attempt to fragment rights into tradable shares inspired by the American company JKBX (today Jukebox), which allows individuals to buy “shares” of songs and receive a percentage of their future income. Arturo Parga (32 years old, Madrid), a lawyer specialized in intellectual property and part of the project, explains that the idea arose when observing the large Anglo-Saxon operations: “We saw that all these catalog sales were happening, but that they were happening in the world Anglo, and we thought: what if people could participate in the royalties of their favorite artists?” The proposal consisted of retail investors acquiring small percentages of songs and “receiving proportional royalties.” According to Parga, the attraction was twofold: «On the one hand it was financial, although I think that was going to be residual; on the other hand it was more about supporting your artist.»Neil Young performing with Crazy Horse at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in May 2024. Jeff Kravitz (FilmMagic) However, the Spanish legal context introduces structural obstacles to replicating that model. The first is the existence of non-transferable moral rights. Parga explains: «In Spain it is not so easy for these catalog sales to occur. Continental law protects the author a lot because it considers him a weak party.» Ainara LeGardon (49 years old, Bilbao), musician and intellectual property disseminator, emphasizes that the legal starting point is different: «In our territory the Intellectual Property Law recognizes a double aspect of rights, the economic and the moral.» And he adds the key nuance: «These moral rights are, by law, inalienable and inalienable. They cannot be transferred.» In practice, this means that the author always maintains certain powers over his work. As Parga exemplifies, the creator could oppose certain uses: «He can say: ‘I don’t want my song to appear in the Coca-Cola advertisement’. And then there is no your aunt. In the United States those rights do not exist.» Even within the economic aspect there are limits. LeGardon recalls that “our law recognizes some rights of a remunerative nature that are non-transferable and mandatory collective management”, which implies that certain farms must necessarily be managed through entities such as SGAE. Consequently, even if an author cedes exploitation rights, «it is not completely disconnected from the fate of his works on the market.» For Manuel Felipe Mirabal (37 years old, Caracas), lawyer at the music consultancy Sympathy For The Lawyer, another important obstacle is the information available to value these assets. “In order to have a catalog made available on the market you need information, you need data,” he explains. Although the collective management system works as an international network, the quality of the data varies between territories: «There are entities, such as the SGAE, that do not function nearly like those of the United States or Germany, which have very reliable data and very reliable collection. The appraisal of a catalog like this is more risky.» Without accurate records that allow projecting future income, risk increases and the value of the catalog suffers.
Kiko Veneno posing in Seville in April 2025. PACO PUENTESA All of this adds up to taxation. Parga remembers that many conversations with artists stopped when calculating the tax impact of a million-dollar sale: “It was quite difficult for an individual to receive a large amount of money without being hit by personal income tax.” In this context, sometimes the creation of a “shell company” is proposed to which the author contributes his rights so that it is the company (and not the individual) who receives the income and pays corporate tax. But that strategy is not without risks either. “The Treasury pursues the shell company quite a bit, and that makes the sale unattractive in our country,” warns the lawyer. For the artists themselves, however, the cultural significance of these operations is relative. Loquillo admits that selling a catalog can offer “a different possibility of financing in a profession that does not have many other ways to capitalize,” although he warns of the risk of doing so without precautions: “You may miss out on the possibility of revaluation of your catalog in the future.” From a creative point of view, he adds, the issue has less weight than is often suggested: “Artistically and culturally, the sale of catalogs does not have much meaning, because for us what has been done is already in the past and we are only thinking about the next job.”
A bigger business now
The singer-songwriter Nacho Vegas (51 years old, Gijón) also puts the phenomenon into perspective. In his opinion, many news items simplify what is really sold: «When talking about selling the catalog it seems that all the copyrights are sold, but that is not the case; normally the editorial part is sold.» In that sense, he explains, the model is not entirely new: “This has been happening for decades through publishing houses, only now it has become a much larger and more visible business.” That economic background does not prevent some musicians from maintaining a critical outlook. Kiko Veneno warns that financial logic can end up influencing the cultural ecosystem: «Music is becoming more of a minority. The system only wants heritage if it can monetize it.» Nacho Vegas observes the phenomenon with a certain distance and distrust, partly due to his own experience with publishers. The musician explains that some of his first songs have been passed from one company to another without him having hardly any decision-making power: “I have the rights to songs that are currently on BMG and I didn’t even know they had ended up there.” According to him, these types of operations are part of the normal operation of the publishing sector, where catalogs change hands between companies. “When you start there is always someone who offers you a contract for four bitches… and then you regret it,” he remembers. In short, the model is not legally impossible in Spain, but it is less exploitable. Between non-transferable moral rights, fragmentation of ownership, fiscal uncertainty and lower availability of data, the Spanish music catalog is more difficult to convert into a financial asset than in the Anglo-Saxon world.
