Shot Tower Capital advised Imagem Music Group in connection with its sale to Concord Bicycle Music for a reported price of between $500 and $600 million.
Imagem Music Group holds the rights to notable theatrical works including The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, The King and I, Carousel, and South Pacific, as well as songs written by Phil Collins and Genesis, Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, Mark Ronson, Linkin Park, Sammy Cahn, Iron Maiden, Chet Faker, M.I.A., R. Kelly, Billy Ocean, Will Smith, Steve Miller, Cathy Dennis, Lionel Richie, Kaiser Chiefs, 30 Seconds to Mars, The Revivalists, and Oh Wonder, among many others. Imagem is also the largest specialist classical publisher controlling works by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofieff, Richard Strauss, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, along with popular contemporary composers such as John Adams, Steve Reich, and Sir Karl Jenkins.
As reported by Music Business Worldwide,Concord Bicycle Music’s purchase of Imagem is one of the biggest music business acquisitions in history. The most recent music industry acquisition of a comparable size was Sony Corporation’s $750 million acquisition of the 50% in Sony/ATV Music Publishing it did not already own from the Estate of Michael Jackson, which was completed in September of last year. In company-to-company music publishing buyouts, Concord’s Imagem deal is the biggest since a Sony led consortium paid $2.2 billion to acquire EMI Music Publishing, which closed in 2012. Shot Tower also advised on both of those transactions.
The purchase represents Concord Bicycle’s largest to date and will bring the size of the company to over $1 billion with $290 million of revenue. Concord Bicycle will now control over 380,000 copyrights adding Imagem’s high quality catalog to its existing roster, which includes Paul Simon, James Taylor and the Creedence Clearwater Revival. Holland and UK based Imagem Music also adds a large European presence to Concord Bicycle, making the combined company truly global in nature.
Shot Tower Capital was founded by David Dunn and Robert Law in 2012 with the specific intent to focus exclusively on media and entertainment companies and intellectual property. Since its founding just over five years ago, Shot Tower has advised on M&A and financing transactions in the US, Europe and Asia with an aggregate value of in excess of $5 billion.
