Britney Spears has sold her song catalog and an unclear number of other rights to Primary Wave, two sources confirm to Variety. Reps for both Spears and Primary Wave declined Variety‘s requests for comment; the news was first reported by TMZ.
Details were unclear —and likely under iron-clad non-disclosure agreements — but TMZ estimated the deal to be in the low nine figures.
It seems safe to assume that Spears’ artist royalties and publishing rights were included in the deal. The TMZ report, which is based on legal documents the publication says it has viewed, says she sold “her ownership share of her catalog” to Primary Wave; it notes that the price was not included in the legal documents.
Spears has songwriting credits on nearly 40 of the songs in her catalog, although few of them were major hits apart from the ballad “Everytime” and fan favorites like “Me Against the Music,” “S&M” and others.
It seems extremely unlikely that Spears’ NIL rights (name and likeness) were included in the deal, unless it was for exponentially more than the price TMZ speculates.
Spears has not released an album since 2016’s “Glory” and has not performed in concert since October of 2018, closing out her “Piece of Me” tour with a final show at the Formula One Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. She had been scheduled to return to Las Vegas in 2019 for a second residency, “Domination,” following the success of her first residency, “Britney Spears: Piece of Me,” which concluded in 2017. However, she ultimately postponed the “Domination” show and stepped away from performing indefinitely.
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She was released from her 13-year conservatorship in 2021 and has kept a relatively low public profile since then, although she frequently posts free-form and sometimes-unnerving notes and videos of herself dancing at home on social media.
Just over a month ago, she quashed fans’ hopes for a concert tour when she wrote on social media that she “will never perform in the U.S. again” for “extremely sensitive reasons,” although she apparently left the door open to performing in other territories.
“I will never perform in the U.S. again because of extremely sensitive reasons but I hope to be sitting on a stool with a red rose in my hair, in a bun, performing with my son… in the UK and AUSTRALIA very soon,” she wrote.
In the post, the singer also shared a throwback photo of herself sitting beside a white Yamaha piano, writing in the caption, “Sending this piano to my son this year!!! Interestingly enough, I dance on IG to heal things in my body that people have no idea about. Yup and it’s embarrassing sometimes… but I walked through the fire to save my life.”
From Variety US