TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA/Tampa Today) – Canadian singer-songwriter Justin Bieber joins a growing list of songwriters who have sold the rights to their songs for huge sums of money.
Justin Bieber, 28, has sold his entire musical repertoire, with 290 titles including his most recent album Justice, for a one-time payment of more than $200 million. The valuable pop asset has been acquired by the Hipgnosis Song Fund, a UK investment company that has been steadily buying up some of the most important and influential songbooks in modern music history.
“Justin Bieber’s impact on world culture over the past 14 years has been truly extraordinary,” said Merck Mercuriadis, founder and CEO of Hipgnosis Song Management, according to Variety. “This acquisition is among the largest deals ever for an artist under the age of 70, such is the power of this incredible catalog that has nearly 82 million monthly listeners and more than 30 billion streams on Spotify alone.”
Billboard magazine has called the deal “the biggest yet for any artist of his generation.”
On the Billboard Hot 100, Bieber has collected 26 top 10 hits, including eight No. 1s. His albums have generated 28 million equivalent album units in the United States, of which 13.2 million are traditional album sales, according to Luminate.
Sales of musical repertoires saw a rise in 2021, with million-dollar deals such as those of icons Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon. In 2022, Justin Timberlake, Leonard Cohen, Nile Rodgers, Kenny Chesney, Neil Young, and Nelly Furtado sold some of their rights to Hipgnosis. Sting, the estate of David Bowie, Phil Collins and his Genesis bandmates Future, the estate of Frank Zappa and Neil Diamond also sold certain assets to investors in 2022.
