Queen’s complete music catalogue is expected to fetch $1 billion in a prospective sale to Universal Music Group.
According to a person familiar with the acquisition, talks are ‘well underway’ for UMG to acquire Queen’s catalogue from Disney Music Group.
According to the insider, the deal could potentially exceed $1 billion and is likely to ‘close within one month’.
This ostensibly massive agreement would include everything from their self-titled first album in 1973 to their 1995 record Made in Heaven, the last of which featured lead singer Freddie Mercury, who died four years previously.
If the transaction goes through, it will be the largest single-artist music catalogue sale in history.
Queen band members Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon, as well as the Freddie Mercury estate, own equal shares in Queen Productions Ltd, which owns the band’s recorded catalogue outside of the United States and Canada.
The price would easily exceed the $550 million spent by Sony Music Group in late 2021 to buy Bruce Springsteen’s recorded music and publishing catalogues.
In 1970, singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon established Queen in London.
Queen has sold 300 million records worldwide and has nine Top 20 hits, including the No. 1 singles ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Another One Bites the Dust.’
Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was named the most-streamed song of the twentieth century in 2018.
It has topped over 1.6 billion streams globally across all major streaming services at the time.
That number has already risen to over 2.1 billion on Spotify alone.
