HarborView Equity Partners, a rising player in music acquisitions that has built a hip-hop and R&B-heavy song catalog, announced Tuesday (Dec. 4) that it amended its senior secured credit facility to increase its borrowing capacity from $200 million to $300 million. The additional $100 million of funding will be used to continue to acquire music royalty catalogs as well as for general corporate purposes.
The credit facility is led by Fifth Third Bank and includes California Bank & Trust, MUFG Bank, Regions Bank and BankUnited. For the amended facility, three new lenders were added to the syndicate: Bank of America, Barclays and First Bank & Trust Company.
“HarbourView remains committed to providing the best execution for our growing LP base, against a relatively challenging market environment. We are thankful to both our new and existing financing partners for their commitment to HarbourView’s success,” said HarbourView head of capital markets Carlos Cruz in a statement.
“As capital conditions evolve, we are grateful for the continued support of our banking partners who have helped support HarbourView’s tremendous growth since inception,” added HarbourView CEO/founder Sherrese Clarke Soares.
Clarke Soares, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who later founded Tempo Music and won the UBS & Billboard Trailblazer Award in February, has been attracted to R&B, hip-hop and Latin genres in addition to the classic pop and rock catalogs pursued by most investors.
Founded in 2021, the Newark, N.J.-based Harbourview is behind such recent acquisitions as the royalty income of select Nelly recordings, select recorded music and publishing assets of Wiz Khalifa and select publishing assets of Kane Brown. To date, HarbourView has acquired 45 music catalogs spanning about 26,000 songs. HarbourView owns the publishing catalog of “Despacito” co-writer Luis Fonsi and the publishing catalog of Dre & Vidal, the songwriting and production duo behind hits from Alicia Keys, Jill Scott and Mary J. Blige.
“We’re looking at the intersection of historical performance, growth trends, returns — and expectation in terms of price,” Clarke Soares told Billboard in 2022. “Where all that intersects is where we have found a lot of great opportunities.”
