Primary Wave is an acquisitive publishing company led by its CEO and founder, Larry Mestel.<\/p>\n
Mestel founded the company in New York in 2006, launching with a deal agreed with Courtney Love to acquire 50% of Kurt Cobain\u2019s song catalog.<\/p>\n
Primary Wave then bought interests in the works of John Lennon, Steven Tyler, Lamont Dozier and others.<\/p>\n
In 2013, Mestel\u00a0sold Primary Wave\u2019s<\/a> catalog to BMG in a $150 million deal.<\/p>\n In 2016, Mestel re-started Primary Wave via a $300 million acquisition fund, whose investors were led by Black Rock.<\/p>\n In 2019, Primary Wave confirmed that it had raised over $500 million in a second fund, taking its total spending power since Mestel re-launched the firm to over $800 million.<\/p>\n Since 2016, Primary Wave has acquired substantial interests in the song catalogs of icons such as\u00a0Ray Charles<\/a>,\u00a0Bob Marley<\/a>,\u00a0Whitney Houston<\/a>, Burt Bacharach, Smokey Robinson and the\u00a0Four Seasons<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to being a music publisher, Primary Wave also runs a talent management division, representing artists including Melissa Etheridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2016, Larry Mestel re-started Primary Wave via a $300 million acquisition fund, whose investors were led by Black Rock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":98196,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-98195","companies","type-companies","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/companies"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}