Britney Spears has sold off some of her rights tied to her catalog to music company Primary Wave, sources confirm to The Hollywood Reporter.
With the deal, Spears sells off a stake in one of the most iconic catalogs in modern pop music, which includes hits like “Oops!… I Did It Again!,” “…Baby One More Time,” “Gimme More,” “Circus,” and “Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman,” among others. Currently unknown is how much Primary Wave spent on the rights, though TMZ, which first reported on the news of the sale, suggested it was comparable to Justin Bieber’s $200 million sale back in 2023.
It’s unclear what type of rights Primary Wave acquired. Sony Music owns and controls the rights to her recorded catalog. Spears isn’t a songwriter on most of her biggest tracks, which means the bulk of her most valuable rights would stem from the recordings themselves. (Music publishing royalties are tied to a song’s composition and lyrics, whereas recorded royalties stem from the recording itself.)
Reps for Primary Wave declined to comment.
The deal follows an eventful few years for Spears, who managed to finally be freed of a 13-year conservatorship back in 2021. She married Sam Asghari in 2022, though the two subsequently split. In 2023, she published her much-discussed memoir The Woman in Me. The rights to her memoir were acquired by Universal in 2024, with the biopic set to be directed by Jon M. Chu and produced by Marc Platt.
Primary Wave is one of the most-notable companies in the catalog acquisition space, having previously purchased catalogs from the likes of Stevie Nicks as well as the estates of Prince, Whitney Houston and Biggie Smalls. Primary Wave is known to be active in working with the copyrights it acquires, looking for ways to breathe new life into music it invests in. The company has hosted many “flip camps” in the past focused on specific catalogs Primary Wave purchased, where songwriters can sample and interpolate older tracks to make new hits. Primary Wave was also a producer on the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.
This is a developing story and will be updated with more details. More to come.
