In the span of just one week in October 2021, some of the world’s biggest private equity groups — Blackstone, KKR and Apollo — collectively poured more than $3bn into buying music.
Blackstone announced that it had set aside $1bn to buy music in partnership with Merck Mercuriadis’s Hipgnosis investment trust, noting his “vision and dynamism”. KKR said it was “thrilled” to acquire some 62,000 songs for $1.1bn, which followed a $1bn fund it had arranged with music group BMG earlier that year. Apollo put up $1bn to buy songs with a new investment group called HarbourView.
These were relatively trivial amounts for the three giants, which command more than $2tn in assets across investments ranging from fast-food chains and toy retailers to dentistry practices and prisons.