Avex Music Group has closed the first transaction on its $100 million publishing-catalogue fund: the catalogue of Infamous, the songwriter and producer credited as a co-writer on Teddy Swims's "Lose Control." [1] The fund's structure is the artifact more than the deal itself — $50 million in equity from Avex against up to $50 million in non-recourse debt from City National Bank, the Los Angeles arm that has been writing music-industry paper since the Paul Anka era. Half the fund is the bank's risk. Half is the Tokyo balance sheet's.

That capital architecture is the same one yesterday's brief named as the missing variable. With the first deal closed and the second still unnamed, the fund is now on the runway; Variety reports the strategy is to acquire publishing, master, and small-company catalogues over the next eighteen to twenty-four months. [2] Billboard's coverage of the launch flagged that City National's non-recourse line means default scenarios extinguish at the asset, not the parent — a structure that has become standard in song-rights paper since Hipgnosis. [3]

What that places into the entertainment-IP weekend is a precise echo of the Paramount-WBD merger filings, where Saudi PIF, Mubadala's L'Imad, and the Qatar Investment Authority booked a combined 38.5% non-voting equity stake. Different jurisdictions, same instrument: bank-financed, balance-sheet-isolated, rights-asset acquisition. The Olivia Rodrigo verse that pushed The Cure back onto the Billboard 200 is the cash flow this fund is built to capture.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles