Avex Music Group on Monday closed the first acquisition under its $100 million publishing-catalog fund, purchasing the catalog of producer and songwriter Marco Rodriguez, known as Infamous, whose credits include Teddy Swims's Hot 100 No. 1 "Lose Control." [1] The fund is financed by a credit line from City National Bank. [2] The first deal sits inside a $100 million phase-one commitment to acquire catalogs, copyrights, and publishing companies over the next twelve months. [3]

The paper's Tuesday account of why Avex's launch made publishing rights a $100 million catalog bet framed the company's announcement as a balance-sheet thread, not a roster story. Wednesday's news closes the first deal and confirms the structure: a Tokyo-listed parent, a U.S. subsidiary led by Brandon Silverstein, an LA bank line, and a producer's catalog as the inaugural asset.

The bank-financed catalog model is not new in music — Hipgnosis, Concord, and Primary Wave have all leveraged debt against songwriter rights. What is new is Avex's posture: a publicly traded Japanese parent using a U.S. bank facility to acquire English-language pop catalogs as a complement to its frontline publishing roster. The Infamous catalog includes credits with Lil Wayne and Charlie Puth. [3] The producer's work has generated billions of streams. [3]

City National Bank is the operative detail. The bank — a Royal Bank of Canada subsidiary based in Los Angeles — has built a specialty entertainment lending practice that prices music IP as collateral. [2] The Avex line extends that practice to a Japanese-headquartered acquirer. The structure converts catalog acquisitions from equity-funded fund vehicles (the Hipgnosis model) to bank-funded acquisition lines (the Avex model). The cost of capital is different. The risk allocation is different. The disclosure regime is different.

Avex's CEO Brandon Silverstein described the $100 million as "phase one" of a "broader, long-term commitment to building a scaled global catalog business." [4] CFO Ryusuke Kamada and SVP Spencer LeBoff are co-leading the strategy. [3] The phasing language — phase one, twelve months, scaled global — is corporate vocabulary that markets a sustained acquisition program, not an opportunistic one-off. The bank line is the instrument that makes the program a program.

The terms of the City National facility have not been disclosed. What can be inferred from the structure: an asset-backed line where the borrowing base is the projected royalty cash flow of acquired catalogs, with advance rates calibrated to genre, vintage, and song-level diversification. Music-finance lenders typically advance 50% to 70% against the discounted cash flow of a top-tier catalog. A $100 million commitment implies acquisitions of perhaps $140 million to $200 million in headline value over the year, depending on Avex's equity contribution.

The Hipgnosis-era valuation reset of 2023-2024, in which large public catalog vehicles took write-downs after AI-streaming and royalty-rate disputes compressed multiples, has changed who is buying. Sovereign-wealth and family-office buyers have receded; corporate music-publishing acquirers, often subsidiaries of major labels, have stepped forward. Avex sits between those categories — a corporate publisher with a non-American parent — and the City National line places it on the bank-financed side of the dividing line.

The Infamous deal also tests whether the strategy can compete on the front-line side. Avex recently signed Bruno Mars to a global publishing administration deal, and houses co-writers for Kehlani, Drake, and Tate McRae. [4] The catalog-acquisition arm is meant to complement that roster — a buyer of legacy work paired with a publisher of new work. Whether that pairing produces synergies or governance conflicts (favoring catalog assets over frontline songwriters in pitching contexts, for example) is the question the next twelve months will test.

What Wednesday's disclosure changes about the catalog market: a new bank-financed acquirer has named a phase-one budget and a first close. Sellers of mid-tier catalogs — songwriters with a single Hot 100 hit and a substantial back catalog — now have a buyer with a calendar. The market for $5 million to $30 million catalog transactions, which has been quiet since the Hipgnosis reset, has its first 2026 active bidder.

The Tuesday handover from the paper to today asked whether the second acquisition would arrive. The bank line means the second acquisition is mechanical: phase-one budget, twelve-month window, City National facility. The interesting question is the third. By the time Avex's third deal closes, the market will know whether the bank line prices catalogs to compete with the major-label publishers, or whether it prices them at a discount that limits Avex to mid-tier assets.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles