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Hipgnosis Drama Continues: Blackstone Bids $1.5 Billion for Troubled Music Fund, Topping Concord
The drama around Hipgnosis Songs Fund continues as Blackstone bids $1.5 billion for the company, which owns catalogs by Neil Young, Journey and more.
The already-complicated battle over control of Hipgnosis Songs Fund grew even more so on Saturday, as the private equity firm Blackstone bid $1.5 billion to the troubled fund — which includes the rights to catalogs by Neil Young, Shakira, Blondie, Journey, Lindsey Buckingham and others — pushing aside Concord’s $1.4 offer made earlier in the week. The market followed, spurring a gold rush on catalogs that drove up their value enormously — Hipgnosis paid a reported $100 million for half of Neil Young’s songs catalog; in separate deals Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen reportedly were paid as much as four to six times that for theirs — but grew overextended as investors questioned Hipgnosis’ ability to exploit the catalogs it had acquired. Adding to its woes, interest rates rose and the price of available catalogs grew untenably expensive; Hipgnosis’ value plunged to at times less than half of its 2021 peak of $2.6 billion, according to Citrin Cooperman.
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