Influence Media Partners has emerged as the winning bidder for Anthem Entertainment‘s music assets.
That’s according to Billboard, which reported this week that the BlackRock and Warner Music Group-backed firm offered a little over USD $650 million for the assets, though the transaction remains unclosed.
Billboard noted that Anthem, a Canada-based music rights company, “houses music publishing assets and recorded masters royalties from the likes of Rush and Timbaland.”
It is the third time in a decade that Anthem’s music assets have been put up for sale, and the first to produce a buyer, after earlier auctions in 2017 and 2022 failed to draw a high enough bid.
The process was run by Goldman Sachs, with around a dozen suitors examining the company and at least two offers topping $600 million, Billboard reported.
The remaining suitors clustered between $500 million and $600 million before bowing out.
The assets changing hands include Anthem‘s music publishing catalogs, its master-recordings portfolio and the Sony Pictures Entertainment publishing catalog, whose holdings span the Spider-Man and Men in Black franchises.
Not part of the sale are Compact Media, the audiovisual secondary-rights administration business, and the Anthem Entertainment platform itself.
By Billboard’s account, publishing supplies about half the revenue from the assets being sold, passive artist royalties roughly a fifth, and the film and TV catalog the remaining 30%.
Following the 2024 sale of its production-music business, Anthem‘s annual net publisher’s share and net label share now sit between $45 million and $50 million, sources told Billboard.
At that level, the price implies a blended multiple of roughly 13 to 15 times. That NPS/NLS figure is down from the $70 million Anthem was generating in 2022, before the production-music portfolio sale.
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Anthem’s controlling shareholder, looks set to exit after the two earlier attempts fell flat.
The company first explored a sale in 2017, when it was still known as ole and the process was led by RBC Capital Markets.
In November 2017, Bloomberg reported that ole had twice failed to sell itself for $600 million, with bidders deterred by a catalog weighted toward lower-multiple production music and audiovisual rights.
A second attempt followed in 2022, shopped by Moelis & Co., Billboard reported in April.
That process was hampered by an onerous non-disclosure agreement that deterred some bidders, alongside the same production-music weighting that had held down the price the first time, according to Billboard.
In 2024, Anthem sold its production-music division – Jingle Punks, 5 Alarm Music, and Cavendish Music, roughly 650,000 tracks in all – to licensing firm Slipstream.
Stripping out those lower-multiple assets left a leaner, publishing-led catalog, the kind of asset, Billboard notes, that the rights funds and institutional investors now scouring the market find more attractive. This time, the bids apparently cleared a bar Anthem’s two earlier auctions never reached.
The acquisition must still pass review by Canadian Heritage, the federal cultural department, a process sources expect to be slow given that the portfolio holds national touchstones such as the Rush catalog. Influence Media would carry the breakup fee should the deal fall through.
Influence was founded in 2019 and led by Lylette Pizarro, Lynn Hazan, Rene McLean, and Jon Jashni.
In early 2022, it announced a $750 million fund to invest in what it calls “high-value compositions from diverse artists” with backing from BlackRock Alternative Investors and Warner Music Group.
Influence Media has invested in several music catalogs to date from Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated artists.
Those deals include artists such as Enrique Iglesias, Blake Shelton, Julia Michaels, Tyler Johnson, Logic, Ali Tamposi, Future, and more.
In January 2025, Influence Media Partners confirmed that it has secured approximately $360 million in debt financing through an inaugural private securitization, collateralized by music royalties from its portfolio of music rights.Music Business Worldwide
