KINGSTREET MEDIA, a privately held British music publishing group, has paid more than $50 million (£28 million) for two catalogues that it hopes will help to establish it as the largest independent music publisher in the world.
One of the catalogues is Deston Songs, which contains hits such as Cher’s We All Sleep Alone and Just Like Jesse James, Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Ricky Martin’s Livin’ la Vida Loca.
Kingstreet, which is headed by Andrew Wilkinson, a former manager of the Rolling Stones, paid an estimated $20 million for Deston, which was co-founded in 2000 by Desmond Child, a writer and producer whose works have helped to sell more than 200 million records.
The company also acquired The Corinthian Group/Maranatha, a major publisher of religious music with more than 3,500 copyrights, in a separate deal thought to be worth about $30 million.
Deston was until recently half owned by its founders and half by Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of Warner Music Group (WMG). Warner/Chappell is understood to have sold its share in the business back to the founders in the past month for an undisclosed sum.
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To further its global ambitions, Kingstreet has secured a debt facility of £66 million from Royal Bank of Scotland and additional funding from venture capital sources.
The company told The Times that it was planning to spend “between $400 [million] and $500 million in music copyright acquisitions over the next couple of years”.
Kingstreet is close to securing a fourth acquisition that would take its total outlay to almost $100 million since it was founded late last year. This year it acquired the Palan Music Publishing catalogue, which includes the rights to Peter Green’s compositions for Fleetwood Mac, for about $25 million.
The company is thought to be positioning itself to swoop on either of the music publishing businesses owned by EMI or WMG should the two music conglomerates merge, as is widely expected to happen over the next 18 months. A merger of EMI and WMG would require one of them to sell their publishing business.
Michael Bungey, the executive chairman of Kingstreet, was chief executive of Cordiant, the advertising group that collapsed and was swallowed by WPP last year.
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Paul Russell, the former chairman of Sony Music in Europe, is Kingstreet’s director of music publishing acquisitions.