New York-based publisher Round Hill Music is aiming to raise $375 million for its new royalty fund when it on the London Stock Exchange next month, according to reports in the U.K.’s Times and Music Business Worldwide. The company is expected to announce the IPO formally this week.
According to the reports, it intends to purchase a portfolio of 120,000 songs from 40 catalogs by artists including the Beatles, Celine Dion and the Rolling Stones.
Round Hill was founded a decade ago by former Bear Stearns banker Josh Gruss, who had previously worked at Sony Music and Atlantic Records. In 2012, it bought the US rights to six early Beatles songs, including “She Loves You” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” and bought Carlin Music — which includes more than 100,000 copyrights as well as the Elvis Presley catalog — in 2018 for $245 million. It has also acquired rights to songs by Bruno Mars, Rob Thomas, James Brown, AC/DC, Florida Georgia Line and others, and catalogs from of The Offspring and Bush (whose catalog is co-owned by the company alongside the band’s frontman, Gavin Rossdale).
In addition to its New York HQ, Round Hill runs additional offices in Nashville, Los Angeles and London. In 2017, it acquired a majority stake in the sync operation, Zync, which is now its in-house sync division.
The value of song catalogs has been on the rise since streaming services took hold in the 2010s, and has accelerated dramatically in the past two years, thanks in no small part to Hipgnosis Songs, which launched on the LSE in July of 2018 and has since spent more than $1 billion on catalogs.