Decoding Wall Street's content arms race.
The Apollo Global Management CEO has spent five years rebuilding the firm around a single conviction: that the most valuable thing in finance is not a leveraged bet but the ability to manufacture investment-grade paper nobody else can manufacture, and then place it with insurance money that needs somewhere to sit for thirty years. Apollo crossed $1 trillion in assets under management in the first quarter. Recorded music is one of the asset classes Rowan's people have dragged onto that balance sheet, and they got there first.
The proof priced on April 27, when Apollo structured and anchored a $500 million bond deal for Chord Music Partners, the catalog platform Dundee Partners runs in partnership with Universal Music Group. The notes came at a yield of 5.560%, or 160 basis points over the benchmark — the tightest spread any music royalty securitization has ever fetched. Behind them sit royalties from more than 3,750 compositions and master recordings. Apollo Global Securities and ATLAS SP ran the books; Redding Ridge, an Apollo affiliate, structured it. Nobody at that closing table was arguing about guitar solos.
Rowan laid out the logic on Apollo's first-quarter earnings call in May. In credit, he told analysts, "almost everything we've done recently is upmarket" — moving toward investment grade, toward structure, toward protection. Better than 80% of what the firm originated last year was investment grade, he said, and Apollo's credit assets under management are now majority investment grade as well.
That is a defensive crouch dressed as a growth story, and Rowan spent much of the same call explaining why. He is worried about concentration in enterprise software and what AI does to it; Apollo has cut its software exposure below 2%, holds roughly $40 billion of cash and Treasuries at Athene, and is, in his words, positioned for corrections it expects. What he wants to own instead is origination — contractual, long-duration cash flows that can be wrapped in structure and rated. Apollo originated some $310 billion of new investments last year, with Intel, BP, AT&T and AB InBev among the counterparties.
Song royalties fit that template almost too neatly. Streaming converted music from a hit-driven gamble with a spiky revenue curve into something closer to a subscription utility — diversified across thousands of copyrights, contractually collected, and, crucially, forecastable enough for a ratings agency to put a letter on it. The result is a rated, tranched, insurance-company-friendly fixed-income product where a speculative asset class used to be.
The Concord playbook
The firm's flagship music client has been Concord, the Nashville-based independent whose catalog runs from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Rodgers & Hammerstein and Kidz Bop.
Apollo structured and anchored a $1.8 billion securitization for Concord in December 2022, then an $850 million follow-on in October 2024, then a $1.765 billion refinancing in July 2025 that included a privately placed 10-year tranche — the longest-dated music ABS issued at scale. That last deal was rated A+ by KBRA and A2 by Moody's against a catalog valued above $5.1 billion, and it came in more than three times oversubscribed.
Concord's CEO, Bob Valentine, has said publicly that Apollo has "a true understanding of all the intricacies of the music business," a line the firm now features in its own marketing. Take it for what it is, but the working relationship is real: four offerings, north of $3 billion raised, one issuer.
Apollo's other route into the business is quieter. In July 2024 the firm provided a $700 million "capital solution" to Sony Music Group on behalf of its insurance clients and other investors — high-grade securities on Apollo's side, acquisition firepower on Sony's. Apollo partner Jamshid Ehsani framed it as letting clients buy investment-grade paper while Sony executed its business plan. Music Business Worldwide reported that the money helped finance Sony's roughly £1 billion purchase of Queen's catalog, the largest single-artist deal ever struck. Accounts filed at Companies House this July for Rock Bidco Ltd., the London vehicle Sony used, show £1.079 billion arriving from its U.S. parent as an irrevocable, interest-free advance subscription — booked as equity, not debt.
Rowan's own framing is macro, not musical. Apollo originated about $310 billion of new investments last year, roughly 80% of it investment grade, with names like Intel, BP, AT&T and AB InBev on the other side. Music royalties fit the same template: long-duration, contractual, diversified across thousands of copyrights, and increasingly rated. The people actually doing the deals — Ehsani, Paul Sipio, Bret Leas, Michael Paniwozik — sit in Apollo's asset-backed finance and capital solutions groups, not in a music division. There isn't one.
Everybody else got there too
The catalog trade started as a public-markets story. Hipgnosis Songs Fund listed in London in July 2018 and raised £202 million, promising investors that proven songs were as reliable as gold. It ended badly: Blackstone took the fund private in July 2024 for $1.58 billion, folded it together with its other holdings, and rebranded the whole thing Recognition Music Group.
Blackstone's exit closed in July. Sony Music Publishing bought Recognition's entire portfolio — more than 45,000 songs across roughly 145 catalogs, including works tied to Fleetwood Mac, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Leonard Cohen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers — through the acquisition venture Sony Music Group launched with Singapore's GIC in January. Bloomberg and the Financial Times put the price near $4 billion. Sony's Jon Platt called it a bet on "the enduring power of great music." It was also a bet made with a sovereign wealth fund's balance sheet rather than Sony's own.
The one attempt to reprice a major in public markets went nowhere. Pershing Square proposed a cash-and-stock takeover of Universal Music Group on April 7, valuing it at €30.40 a share — a 78% premium, about $64 billion all in. UMG's board rejected it in late May as materially undervaluing the company. Days later Bill Ackman placed his entire stake, roughly 80.6 million shares at €17.66, and walked away from a position he had held in some form for five years.
Where the music goes next
KBRA has now assigned 81 ratings across 18 music royalty issuers since 2020, covering $12.9 billion of bonds. The agency also expects 2026 issuance to fall about 25%, to just over $2.5 billion — not because demand is drying up, but because the catalogs are being bought by institutions that don't need the ABS market to finance them.
That absorption is well underway. BMG and Concord confirmed a merger in April. Primary Wave agreed in March to buy Kobalt from Francisco Partners. Influence Media, backed by BlackRock, signed a deal on July 29 for substantially all of Anthem Entertainment's rights — publishing, film and TV assets and masters tied to Rush, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears — for more than $600 million, with closing expected in the fourth quarter. Iconoclast, the PIMCO-backed vehicle Olivier Chastan founded in 2021, is in the late stages of a sale to Irving Azoff's Iconic Artists Group at around $500 million. Northleaf Capital has been in advanced talks to sell Crescendo, which holds Pete Townshend's publishing from the Who repertoire along with T. Rex.
Read those together and the shape of the next phase is visible. The independent catalog funds that defined the last cycle — assembled by financial sponsors on five- to seven-year clocks — are cashing out, and their assets are landing with majors, sovereign wealth funds and permanent-capital vehicles that intend to hold them indefinitely. The trade stops being about buying songs cheaply and starts being about financing them efficiently, which is the business Apollo is actually in. Fewer issuers, bigger trusts, tighter spreads. The Chord deal at 160 basis points is what that endgame looks like when it works.
The financial engineering has a precedent, and it did not originate on Wall Street.
By late 1996, the distribution license on David Bowie's first 25 albums was reverting to him. Bowie was a rarity for his generation — he had negotiated to keep his masters and copyrights rather than take a bigger advance — and the question of what to do with them was being argued out at the Rascoff Zysblat Organization, the firm Joseph Rascoff and Bill Zysblat built into the quiet center of the touring business, with the Rolling Stones, U2, Sting and Paul Simon on the books alongside Bowie. Rascoff, a CPA who had made partner at a KPMG predecessor before deciding the interesting money was in musicians, ran the numbers on the two obvious options: sell the catalog outright, or license it again.
The third option came from outside the room. RZO was a client of the banker David Pullman, and Pullman was on the phone with Zysblat about an unrelated matter when he learned Bowie was stuck. He suggested a bond. Four months later, in February 1997, $55 million of notes backed by royalties from 287 songs went to Prudential at 7.9%, against a 10-year Treasury yielding 6.37%. Moody's issued its first music royalty rating on the deal: A3, investment grade. Bowie used part of the proceeds to buy out his former manager's interest in his RCA masters, and kept everything else.
Then Napster arrived, CD sales fell off a cliff, and Moody's cut the bonds to Baa3 in 2004, one notch above junk. Zysblat has since argued the deal did exactly what it was built to do — bondholders paid, Bowie got his catalog and his cash, both sides won. He's right on the arithmetic. The notes retired in 2007 without defaulting. But the asset class went dormant for more than a decade afterward, and nobody issued another one.
Streaming is what revived it, and streaming is what underwrites every deal above. Apollo's structures are more diversified and better collateralized than anything Pullman built — thousands of copyrights instead of one artist, cross-collateralized master trusts, real servicing platforms. The Bowie bonds were investment grade too.
