Britney Spears, the queen of millennial-era bubble-gum pop, has sold her music catalog, according a person familiar with the deal.
Her music rights were acquired by Primary Wave, a New York-based music and marketing company that specializes in catalog deals, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Spokespersons for Spears and Primary Wave declined to comment. The news was reported earlier on Tuesday by TMZ.
Details of the transaction were unclear, including the price and exactly what rights were transferred. Similar catalog acquisitions frequently include the artist’s royalties as a performing artist and any songwriting rights, which are separate from those for recordings.
With hits like “ … Baby One More Time,” “Oops! … I Did It Again” and “Toxic,” Spears, 44, became an icon of the new wave of candied electronic pop that dominated the music industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She sold tens of millions of albums, scored five No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and was tracked incessantly by the celebrity media machine.
While the terms of the Spears deal are unknown, the prices for the catalogs of other star recording artists have soared, with top tier performers like Bruce Springsteen, Sting and Justin Bieber receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Spears has writing credits on a number of her tracks, including “Everytime”; “Me Against the Music,” with Madonna; and a remix of the Rihanna song “S&M,” which reached No. 1.
Born in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana, Spears began her entertainment career as a preteen cast member on the Disney show “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” before signing to Jive Records at age 15. She becoming a chart-topping star one year later with “ … Baby One More Time.”
At her peak, she was a top touring attraction, had lucrative brand deals and, along with Christina Aguilera, the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, was played constantly on MTV, defining a new era of pop music.
But by 2007, when she was pictured with a shaved head, hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella, her personal struggles had begun to take over her public narrative. The next year she was placed in a conservatorship, after her father petitioned a court for authority over his adult daughter’s life and finances, citing her very public mental health struggles and possible substance abuse.
That conservatorship dominated her life for nearly 14 years. In June 2021, Spears spoke out in court, telling Brenda Penny, the judge overseeing her conservatorship, “I just want my life back.” Five months later, the judge agreed, terminating the arrangement.
In October 2023, Spears released a memoir titled “The Woman in Me,” which frequently returns to a theme of feeling too much in the public eye.
In 2024, she disputed rumors she was planning a new album, writing on Instagram, “I will never return to the music industry!!!” Last month, she wrote, “I will never perform in the U.S. again because of extremely sensitive reasons,” but teased a desire to take the stage overseas with one of her sons.
Her last performance was in 2018, when she ended her Piece of Me Tour in Austin. She last released a song in 2022 — a collaboration with Elton John, built around his own “Tiny Dancer.” A planned Vegas residency called “Britney: Domination” was canceled before it began in 2019. Her last studio album, “Glory,” arrived in 2016.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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