L-R [Top]: Steve Bunyan, Cristian Larrosa, María José Clutet, Marina Mánica, José María Escriña, and Rafael Aguilar Grabowski.
Latin America and the Middle East & North Africa are two of the fastest-growing recorded music regions on the planet.
Music fintech company Larrosa, with operations spanning Europe, the US, and the Middle East, is betting big on both.
LATAM was the fastest-growing recorded music region in the world in 2025, with revenues up 17.1% year-on-yearaccording toIFPI’s Global Music Report. MENA wasn’t far behind, posting growth of 15.2% YoY. Two powerhouse Latin American recorded music markets, Brazil and Mexico, meanwhile, now sit in the global Top 10.
For Larrosa, a music rights and technology company with a portfolio weighted toward Spanish-speaking and emerging markets, those growth trends align closely with its latest moves.
The company, founded by CEO Cristian Larrosa in 2020 (following the 2019 sale of his earlier venture, Viel Music), raised over $16 million in 2023 to acquire catalogs and deploy advances to artists. Larrosa has since relocated its headquarters to Dubai and developed a technology ecosystem spanning royalty administration, AI-powered analytics, and investor infrastructure. Most recently, it established an LLC in the United States to secure licensing for its Lyra Bank neobank division.
Now, Larrosa’s MusicTraders, which operates a marketplace for music catalog investment opportunities as well as a rights management infrastructure, has launched a dedicated Deals & Acquisitions division staffed with executives drawn from TikTok, BMG, Spotify, YouTubeand PeerMusic.
The launch comes as Larrosa overhauls the MusicTraders platform following six years of operations and more than $50 million in music rights transactions executed on it. Larrosa says it currently manages $25 million in assets itself.
The new division is led by a team of five. Rafael Aguilar Grabowski, formerly head of PeerMusic’s Latin region, joins as Strategic Partnerships Advisor, covering Spain, Europe and major Latin American markets.
José María Escriña, whose CV includes director-level licensing roles at TikTok and Spotify, takes on the Music Acquisitions Specialist role from Miami, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and the US Hispanic market.
Steve Bunyan, previously at BMG, heads Investor Relations. Marina Mánica, the company’s COO and a Spotify and YouTube alumna, coordinates deal flow and execution “across jurisdictions”.
María José Clutet, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, handles the legal side.
Together, the team covers US Latin, Spanish-speaking markets, the UK, and, following Larrosa’s relocation to Dubai, the MENA region and parts of Asia.
“When your investors have real deployment capacity and a genuine interest in shaping the industry’s future, the scope has to expand beyond pure catalog M&A.”
Cristian Larrosa
Larrosa says the ambition behind the new division extends beyond pure catalog M&A, with the team also targeting investment opportunities in music companies and technology projects.
“When your investors have real deployment capacity and a genuine interest in shaping the industry’s future, the scope has to expand beyond pure catalog M&A,” the CEO tells MBW.
“The team brings strong collective know-how across markets and genres, with a particular edge in high-growth territories that remain underserved by institutional capital. The goal is to connect the best opportunities with the best capital, with a team that understands both sides of that sentence.”
While the team’s experience skews heavily toward Latin American and Spanish-speaking markets, Larrosa says the mandate is “genuinely global,” adding: “We’re sourcing across every market where quality opportunities exist.”
MusicTraders wasn’t originally designed as a marketplace. Cristian Larrosa says the platform’s royalty management tools were built to service his company’s own catalog acquisitions, and only later opened up to outside investors.
“For over six years it operated privately,” he explains. “When you’re buying and managing catalogs yourself, you build different tools than someone designing a marketplace from scratch. That’s the real USP: it’s not theoretical, it’s operational. The same system an investor uses to monitor a catalog they acquired through us is the same one our team uses internally.”
The platform now serves two functions: a curated dealroom where vetted investors can access music catalog investment opportunities, and a full-service royalty administration layer offering real-time revenue tracking, territory-level breakdowns, automated distributions and contract management across more than 200 territories.
Larrosa is both a principal buyer of catalogs and a platform operator, facilitating transactions between rights holders and third-party investors through the platform.
“We have our own catalog portfolio, much of it built through years of involvement in production and publishing before Larrosa existed,” says the company’s CEO.
“We started identifying high-yield opportunities in Asian and Latin American catalogs early, markets being dramatically undervalued by the majors,” Larrosa explains.
“Today we’re executing larger deals, predominantly in the Spanish-speaking market, Argentine, Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, US Latin, which we know better than almost anyone, and which continues to outperform on catalog growth and streaming trajectory.”
Larrosa tells us that the company’s portfolio spans a range of genres and territories, including Cuban, Brazilian, UK rock, country and R&B. It includes catalogs recognized with Latin Grammy and Hollywood Music in Media Awards.
As part of the platform renovation, MusicTraders has introduced Prestige, described as an invitation-only option aimed at institutional investors.
“Prestige isn’t a plan or a pricing tier, it’s a private membership, and that distinction matters,” says Larrosa. “The entry point is a minimum $5 million annual investment commitment. What you’re accessing is structurally different from the standard platform experience: first-look at opportunities before they reach the broader market, visibility into off-market and private transactions, and a direct relationship with the MusicTraders team — not just deal flow, but the intelligence around it.
“There’s also integrated financial infrastructure so unallocated capital doesn’t sit idle while opportunities are being evaluated.”
Prestige also includes access to Wolfie, the company’s AI-powered intelligence tool. “Investors who acquire through Prestige automatically receive Rightsholder access too, with advanced analytics and tools built for managing assets at scale,” says Larrosa.
Larrosa explains that Wolfie, along with the broader Larrosa.ai analytics engine, plays an increasingly central role in the company’s operations. Internally, the Deals & Acquisitions team uses an AI agent with full context on live deal pipelines, investor relationships and catalog financials.
“You ask it where a conversation stands, what a catalog looks like financially, or what the next step on a deal is, and it responds in plain language with full context,” says Larrosa. “Less like using a tool, more like having a very well-briefed colleague available at any moment.”
“The mysticism around music rights valuation is disappearing,” he says. “Streaming data is real-time, royalty flows are increasingly traceable, AI is accelerating due diligence.”
Cristian Larrosa
Prestige members also access Wolfie directly for portfolio queries, though Larrosa notes that all AI-generated valuations are reviewed by the company’s financing team using specialized due diligence tooling, including stream fraud detection and bot analysis.
MusicTraders is part of a wider Larrosa ecosystem that includes Rose Talent, a frontline artist development division, and Lyra Bank, described as an “AI-powered neobank” for the music industry currently in development.
The team expansion arrives during what Larrosa describes as “‘a post-correction market”.
The company notes in an announcement that “after multiples reached 20–30x annual royalties at the peak of the catalog acquisition boom, the sector has recalibrated toward more disciplined pricing”. Larrosa argues the current environment favors operators with infrastructure rather than those competing purely on price.
Looking further ahead, Larrosa says MusicTraders‘ longer-term goal is to become the default meeting point between rightsholders and investors in a market that is becoming increasingly data-driven.
“The mysticism around music rights valuation is disappearing,” he says. “Streaming data is real-time, royalty flows are increasingly traceable, AI is accelerating due diligence. In three to five years, MusicTraders should be where that convergence lives naturally, the platform that made this asset class feel as legible and accessible as any other.”
Rafael Aguilar Grabowski, Strategic Partnerships Advisor, adds: “The correction acted as a filter. What remains is a market that rewards rigour, thorough analysis, cultural knowledge, and long-term relationships, and that’s exactly where this team has been operating.”
On the broader outlook for music rights M&A, Larrosa predicts that technology will compress deal timelines and shift the competitive dynamics of the market over the next 12 months.
“It won’t be about who has the relationships to get a deal done anymore,” he says. “It’ll be about who has the infrastructure to evaluate, close, and manage it efficiently. The window to build category-defining infrastructure in music finance is open, and it won’t stay open indefinitely.”
The company was recognized earlier this year at Fintech Week Dubai 2026, where it received the Financial Company of Excellence Award for Excellence in Investor Relations (Early-Stage Startup). Larrosa delivered a keynote at the event titled Where Music Becomes Finance.
