By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
The pop superstar Britney Spears has sold the rights to her music catalog to the independent music publisher Primary Wave.
Unconfirmed media reports put the price tag for Spears’ catalog at approximately $200 million.
Given Spears’ determination to stay out of the U.S. music industry at this point, the move isn’t that surprising. In January, 2024, Spears said she “would never return to the music industry,” and her last song was a duet released with Elton John in 2022.
Instead, her idea was, to quote one of her hit song titles, to “Gimme More” for the music she’s already created.
Now 44, Spears dominated pop music charts in the 1990s and 2000s with hits like Baby One More Time, Oops! … I Did It Again, and Toxic.
Her music still retains a large fan base despite the fact Spears has not toured or performed in public for years, making her catalog a perfect fit for Primary Wave, which also owns the rights to the estates of Prince, Whitney Houston, and Notorious B.I.G., among others.
Details of the sale and the exact price of Spears’ catalogue have not been made public, but USA Today quoted unnamed sources who revealed the closing price at approximately $200 million.
The sale comes during a slow-down in the music catalog business, which soared from the late 2010s and reached a peak in 2022.
Until 2016 investment in music catalogs never cracked the half-billion-dollar mark, but in 2016 the sales of these musical treasure chests began to take off.
In that year sales of music catalogs reached roughly $900 million compared to only $200 million in 2015. The number surpassed $1.2 billion in 2017, reached $2.5 billion in 2018, and soared past the $4 billion mark in 2019. By 2022 the sales of publicly stated music catalog acquisitions hit $5.29 billion, or 26 times more than music catalogs earned in 2015.
Bruce Springsteen likely holds the record for the most expensive catalog ever sold, taking in roughly $500 million in 2021.
Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, and Shakira recently sold their catalogues too, but the industry did see a cooling off in 2024 and 2025.
Primary Wave is one of the big movers in music catalogs and synch licensing.
The publisher was founded 20 years ago by music executive Lawrence Mestel after purchasing 50% of Kurt Cobain’s portion of the Nirvana catalogue.
Spears is one of the best-selling female artists in history, with more than 150 million records sold worldwide. Her catalog includes nine studio albums since her debut in 1999.
The sale comes after a difficult period for the singer, who in 2021 ended a 13-year-long conservatorship; a legal guardianship that saw her finances and personal life controlled by her father.
The singer published her memoir in 2023 titled The Woman in Me, which detailed her struggles living under the conservatorship.
Her ex-husband Kevin Federline released his own memoir, You Thought You Knew, at the end of 2025.