Mergers and Acquisitions Trends

Introducing the Music Tech Ownership Ouroboros, 2025 edition ✨ The music-tech sector has come of age. What started as a relatively niche investment thesis five years ago has matured into a powerhouse market segment, drawing tens of billions in capital since 2020. For five years, we at Water & Music have been mapping these shifting power dynamics through our “Music Tech Ownership Ouroboros” — a living document that traces the complex web of investments, ownership stakes, and strategic acquisitions shaping music and tech. Our latest update adds over 30 new relationships to the map, primarily from growth investments and M&A deals in 2024. The takeaway: Private equity firms and major labels are locked in a battle for control over independent music infrastructure. As indie market share keeps climbing, owning the tech backbone is becoming as valuable as owning the actual rights. Highlights from 2024 include: - Hellman & Friedman's majority stake in Global Music Rights — making GMR the third PRO owned by a private equity firm - Virgin Music Group's acquisitions of Downtown Music ($775M), [PIAS], and Outdustry - Flexpoint Ford's growth investments in Create Music Group ($165M) and Duetti ($34M) - KKR's acquisition of Superstruct Entertainment ($1.4B) and debt financing in HarbourView Equity Partners ($500M) - EQT Group and TCV's co-ownership of Believe (alongside CEO Denis Ladegaillerie), as part of taking Believe private - Vinyl Group's acquisitions of Serenade, Mediaweek Australia, Funkified Events, and Concrete Playground Link to the full interactive chart with sources is in the comments. Would love to hear what you think, and if any of these deals feel particularly standout or surprising to you! #musicbusiness #musicindustry #musictech #privateequity #musicinvestment #musicrights

Every football transfer has winners and losers. Or does it? The Stankovic deal shows how both clubs can win. Every single time. ✅ The Numbers Inter → Brugge: €9.5m Buy-back clause: €23-25m (26 or 27) Sell-on percentage retained. Simple structure. Brilliant design. ✅ Why Inter Can't Lose Scenario 1: They don't buy him back → €9.5m profit from academy investment → Plus sell-on percentage if Brugge sells Scenario 2: They trigger the buy-back → Get a Champions League-tested player → Already knows the club culture → Proven at top level Either way, they win. ✅ Why Brugge Can't Lose Scenario 1: Inter buys him back → €13-15m profit in 12 months → Got a quality starter for crucial season Scenario 2: Inter doesn't buy back → Own a player potentially worth €30m+ → Full control of a rising asset Either way, they win. ✅ The Framework Most Clubs Miss Smart clubs design every transfer with three elements: 1. Downside protection (worst case = neutral) 2. Multiple winning scenarios 3. Aligned incentives (both clubs benefit from player success) Too many clubs still see transfers as zero-sum games. One wins. One loses. That thinking belongs in 1997. ✅ The New Reality Stop asking: "Did we get a good price?" Start asking: "Can we lose in any scenario?" If yes, restructure the deal. Add buy-backs. Retain percentages. Structure payments. Make losing impossible. Because in modern football, the best deals aren't about moving players. They're about creating value that compounds. For everyone involved. ❓ What's the smartest transfer structure you've seen recently? #FootballBusiness #TransferStrategy #Transfers

Most people see M&A as a straight line: LOI → Diligence → Close → Integrate. That’s not how deals actually work. Deal success comes from managing three interconnected levers. A concept I learned from Carlos Cesta,  and they’re in a constant feedback loop: 1️⃣ Deal Structure: How you pay and align incentives (cash, equity, earnouts, escrows). Defines who holds risk, how much control you have, and post-close alignment. 2️⃣ Due Diligence: What you uncover and your ability to validate it. Findings shift your comfort level with price, structure, and integration speed. 3️⃣ Integration Strategy: Your blueprint for combining people, go-to-market, and systems. The speed, depth, and sequencing directly impact value capture. Here’s the kicker: Change one lever and the other two have to adjust. Example – shaky revenue forecast?  ➡ Move to a contingent earnout (structure)  ➡ Slow down or phase integration (strategy) Buyer-led M&A™ is about running this loop intentionally: testing assumptions, making trade-offs, and keeping all three levers in sync to engineer success. Don’t manage M&A like a checklist. Manage it like a system.

Recently, I’ve been asked by several of my colleagues regarding the the structuring of the sale of AskBio Inc. to Bayer. Maintaining separate operating independence and control over therapeutic development after selling a biotechnology company requires proactive, legally binding structural mechanisms negotiated before the deal closes. The goal is to separate the economic ownership from the operational governance. The wholly owned operating subsidiary is the gold standard for maintaining independence. Instead of "absorbing" your company into their existing structure, the buyer keeps your company as a standalone legal entity. Key aspects are: 1. Maintain your own Profit & Loss statement. If you control your own budget and bank accounts, you retain the power to hire, fire, and invest. As we were not yet generating revenue, we negotiated a funding commitment for a period of years, where cash would be injected into the company to support product development. 2. Keep Distinct Branding and Culture: Contractually agree that the buyer will not rebrand the entity or force the adoption of their corporate HR/culture policies for a set number of years. 3. Implement "Arm's Length" Agreement: Ensure that any services the parent company provides (legal, accounting, IT) are governed by a services agreement so they cannot dictate how you operate under the guise of "integration." 4. Maintain Independent Board of Directors: Negotiate a Board for your subsidiary that includes representative from the company and the buyer, and possibly a neutral third party. 5. Create Reserved Matters List: Create a list of items that the parent company cannot vote on without your consent, such as: Changes to the R&D roadmap, discontinuation of products in development, clinical trial design and site selection, and key personnel appointments. 6. Negotiate Performance-Linked Budgets: Ensure that as long as you hit certain milestones, your funding is contractually protected and cannot be diverted to other corporate projects. 7. Require high legal standard for CRE (commercially reasonable effort efforts). If the buyer fails to put enough resources behind a drug in development, they are in breach of contract. 8. Consider a "Buy-Back" Option: Negotiate a right to buy the company or therapeutic back at a pre-set price (or for the cost of development) if the buyer decides to pivot away from your core therapeutic area. (Hard to get). Please include in comments any other suggestions. It took me three exits to figure out this list. Maybe next time I’ll get it exactly right! #biotech #companysale #therapeuticdevelopment #operatingindependence #exit #drugdevelopment #biotechnology

Yes, I write a lot about sports. 🎾🏀🏈   And yes, our firm is called SportsInvest Advisory.   But let’s be honest, "Sports,Media&EntertainmentInvest" Advisory sounded a bit too long.   However, our focus spans the entire 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬, 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 & 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦.   Why?   Because each of these segments is worth looking into from an investment standpoint.   Just the other day I was talking about content (series, cinema) as an investment opportunity with Louis Ladreyt from Logical Content Ventures, a fund deploying capital in films and series.   And several years ago, we also started exploring 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 as a new asset class—one that has now captured the attention of leading PE investors. 🎵 👉 BlackRock backed Alignment Artist Capital to deploy $5M-$20M deals for artists and songwriters (2015). 👉 Blackstone committed $1BN to Hipgnosis Songs (now Recognition Music Group) to acquire music catalogues (2021).   👉 Apollo Global Management, Inc. committed $1BN to HarbourView Equity Partners, led by Sherrese Clarke (2021). 👉 Providence Equity Partners launched Tempo Music in 2019 with Warner Music Group, later exiting to WMG for $450M. 👉 KKR acquired Kobalt Music's catalogue for $1.1BN (2021). What sparked private equity's interest in music rights?   ✅ Market growth—check out Goldman Sachs' Music in the Air report (link in comments).   ✅ Low correlation to macroeconomic trends & financial assets.   ✅ Stable, recurring royalties revenues (5-10% yield).   ✅ But also (and that's even more interesting) value creation opportunities through IP expansion (licensing, events, entertainment). One of my favorite investment teams in this space?   🔥 Pophouse Entertainment.   Why?   First, because it boasts an outstanding founding team, including ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and EQT Group founder Conni Jonsson, led by CEO Per Sundin and chaired by Lennart Blecher, EQT’s Head of Real Assets.    Second, because I had the opportunity to first connect with Pophouse Entertainment back in 2022 (Shahriar Shokofan, Parham Benisi, Joakim Andersson) and I was impressed by their visionary approach in IP expansion.    🎯 Investment focus? Music catalogs and IP, covering three key rights: publishing, recording, and brand rights (NIL—artists’ name, image & likeness).   🚀 Value creation? An artist-centric approach that goes beyond passive catalog ownership, expanding and monetizing IP across the entire entertainment ecosystem. They launched ABBA Voyage—a concert featuring digital avatars of the Swedish pop icons, and The Avicii Experience—a tribute to the late Swedish DJ. On Monday, they announced a €𝟏.𝟐𝐁𝐍 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭-𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝—one of the largest debut private equity funds raised in Europe in the past decade.   They have already deployed about 30% of the fund, acquiring rights to KISS, Cyndi Lauper, Avicii, and Swedish House Mafia.   Huge congratulations to the entire Pophouse team for this fantastic achievement. 👏

Starting my career in the corp finance and M&A industry during the first solar consolidation wave, I've watched buy-and-build strategies evolve across my entire journey. Thrasio raised billions to roll up Amazon brands, then went bankrupt. Some DTC aggregators tore up investor money like it was confetti. But some roll-up strategies create massive value. Constellation Software Inc. owns 1,000 profitable niche companies. Berkshire Hathaway turned their strategy into an ultimate cash-to-wealth compounding machine. What makes the successful ones work? From my observations, we can reduce the space to four archetypes. Three work under specific conditions. One is financial suicide. 1// The classic PE exit play works when you have liquid markets and can actually capture synergies. 2// The infinite cashflow compounder works when you buy only profitable, sticky businesses. 3// The thematic consolidator works when you're reshaping entire sectors with 10+ year vision and distribution advantage. 4// The anti-hero archetype: Buying cashflow-negative companies in competitive markets hoping "synergies" will magically appear. This is what killed the DTC aggregator wave. The brutal truth to roll-ups financed by venture capital is that predictable cashflows beat everything. Customer switching costs create real moats. And when everyone chases the same roll-up strategy in a sector, competition destroys margins faster than you can capture them. In construction: Can specialized trades with maintenance contracts work? (like HVAC) Can material distributors with loyal craftsmen networks work? (Brad Jacobs thinks so) General contractors dependent on project cycles? (Usually financial quicksand) Comment below: Which archetype have you seen work (or fail) in your sector? #rollups #construction #cashflow #acquisitions

One $22.8 Billion Deal. One Message: Infra’s Not Slowing—It’s Sharpening. Most investors think infrastructure is boring. But boring doesn’t drive $39.4 billion in deal activity in a single quarter. That’s what APAC infra did in Q1 2025. Even stripping out one mega deal, volumes held above the 2024 average. And the real headline? Renewables made up 61% of all deals. This isn’t just a trend. It’s the new core of infrastructure allocations. From solar in Southeast Asia to offshore wind in Japan, the region is doubling down on energy security—and investors are following. My take: - Forget ESG for a moment. This is about durable cash flows, regulatory support, and capital formation in an environment that’s desperate for predictable yield. The smartest infra allocators aren’t just backing “green.” They’re backing grid. Transmission. Storage. Digital infrastructure. And they’re doing it via direct deals, co-investments, and thematic funds with clear build-out pipelines. What we’re watching: - The rise of renewables-focused infrastructure managers in APAC - Institutional appetite for longer-dated, contracted revenue assets - The real impact of AI data center energy demand on infra deal flow Action Points: - Revisit your infra allocations—shift weight toward energy and digital enablers - Explore co-investment access or manager partnerships in Japan/SEA clean energy - Don’t wait for government clarity—follow where the deals are already happening #bealtetnative #alternativesforall

The best deal sourcer at one of Europe's largest private equity firms isn't a person. It's a machine called Motherbrain. In 2016, EQT, the Swedish giant with hundreds of billions under management, made a bet most of the industry quietly laughed at. They hired Henrik Landgren, the man who built Spotify's analytics engine, and asked him a question nobody in private equity was asking. What if deal sourcing isn't a relationships problem, but a data problem? Understand what he was up against. PE deal flow has worked the same way for 40 years. Bankers, brokers, conferences, warm intros. Everyone fishing in the same pond, paying the same auction prices when they catch something. Motherbrain was built to fish everywhere else. It tracks tens of millions of companies. Funding rounds, hiring patterns, web traffic, product reviews. Signals moving too fast and too wide for any analyst team to watch by hand. It ranks them, learns from every deal the partners do and don't pursue, and pushes the most interesting names onto investors' desks before anyone else has looked. Then it started working. Peakon, a Danish employee engagement platform, surfaced through the machine before it was on anyone's radar. EQT invested. Workday later bought it for $700M. More than a dozen EQT investments have now come from the machine rather than the network. The firm liked the engine so much it pointed it at due diligence and portfolio work too. Here's the detail most people miss. Motherbrain doesn't decide anything. It screens, ranks and surfaces. Humans still judge. EQT didn't replace investors with AI. They gave every investor a thousand extra analysts. Now the part that matters for the rest of us. At the top of the market, this arms race is already priced in. Every mega fund has data scientists now. But in the lower mid-market, where I operate, where real businesses change hands for one to five million, almost nobody is doing this. Deal sourcing still runs on broker mailing lists and gut feel. The same fragmentation EQT attacked with a nine-figure engineering budget is sitting there, unattacked, at the small end. And this is the shift: what cost EQT years and millions to build in 2016, you can now assemble a working version of for less than the cost of one analyst. I know because I've built my own. Systems that read public filings and surface opportunities before the phone rings. EQT's real insight was never the technology. It was that whoever sees the deal first wins, and AI now decides who sees it first. They acted on that in 2016, when it was a strange thing for a PE firm to believe. The question is what it costs you to still not believe it in 2026.

Three things stood out to me in Goldman Sachs' news today that it's acquiring RWE's U.S. distributed generation business. 1. Distributed energy is now being talked about as infrastructure. That may sound like semantics, but it signals a bigger shift. Customer-sited solar, batteries and other distributed energy resources are increasingly being viewed as an infrastructure asset class alongside transmission, digital infrastructure and other long-term investments. 2. Goldman isn't just buying projects. It's buying a platform. This isn't simply the acquisition of 348 MW of operating assets. Goldman is acquiring the development team, operations and maintenance organization, and asset management capabilities needed to keep growing. That's a platform investment, not just project finance. 3. Goldman is paying for a de-risked growth pipeline. The company emphasizes that the 1.2-GW development pipeline is "safe-harbored." That's infrastructure-investor shorthand for projects that have already secured key tax-credit protections, substantially reducing development risk. The quote that best captures Goldman's thesis comes from Juan Felix, managing director within Infrastructure at Goldman Sachs Alternatives: "Distributed generation is among the most critical segments of U.S. power infrastructure... this transaction reflects our conviction that a scaled, institutionally backed platform can capture outsized value." One of the world's largest infrastructure investors isn't just financing distributed energy projects—it's betting that distributed generation has become a core infrastructure asset class. https://lnkd.in/gkb9mp6S

Universal just acquired Downtown. Of course there is now a nice bump in market share but the real earthquake behind this deal is acquiring FUGA and Curve and it is going to rock the independent world. Whatever business you're in, imagine your biggest competitor taking over not only your means of getting your product to market, but also the processing system for your revenue. That is what just happened to many of the biggest independent labels. UMG now has access to the streaming performance and revenue streams of a good chunk of its competition in the indie world. FUGA and Curve are highly sophisticated tech companies that are market leaders in their space and foundations of the independent world's infrastructure. Leaders in the independent label world are going to be facing the fact that their only two options are: - Accept that UMG has taken control of their distribution and royalty processing - Rip up their infrastructure and go to a likely inferior supplier or build it yourself, which is highly disruptive even for labels who have been planning for it. Clearly neither of these options is that favourable. This is going to reverberate for a while given how essential infrastructure has become in managing the growth and complexities of data in the music industry. UMG is on a clear path to either acquiring or disrupting the infrastructure of its competition. It is exceptional strategically for UMG to the benefit of its artists and shareholders. And I'm certainly not saying that there aren't going to be benefits and synergies with FUGA and Curve in the UMG ecosystem. The reality is so many in the indie world are so explicitly anti-major that this is going to be a very hard pill to swallow. https://lnkd.in/eyCD5eed #UMG #musicindustry #Universal