Various stars have recently sold rights to their life's work.

Pink Floyd is currently exploring the market.

Should the band ultimately sell both their author rights and those of their recordings, the British could top US musician Bruce Springsteen.

The boss gave up both rights packages in December.

He is said to have received around 550 million dollars for it from Sony Music, whereby Sony's publisher had teamed up with the US holding company Eldridge Industries in the case of author rights.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Justin Timberlake has already negotiated with potentially interested parties.

The 41-year-old American, who became known as a member of the boy band *NSYNC and is now also a successful solo artist and actor, has sold his rights to the lyrics and compositions of the songs he (co-)wrote to the investment company Hipgnosis.

As both parties announced on Thursday, the purchase was made via the Hipgnosis Songs Capital fund, which was set up together with Blackstone in mid-October and is worth around one billion dollars.

As part of this partnership, the financial investor had also acquired shares in Hipgnosis Song Management, which also manages the separate Hipgnosis Songs fund, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

$100 million for Timberlake?

The deal includes rights to around 200 songs, including hits like "Cry Me A River" or "Sexy Back", but also soundtracks for films Timberlake was involved in.

He has released five solo albums in total, the most recent, "Man Of The Woods", was released in 2018. The rights to Timberlake's recordings are therefore not part of the sale and are likely to remain with his label RCA Records from Sony or partly with him .

As is the norm with such sales, no financial details were disclosed.

However, The Wall Street Journal refers to informed circles, according to which the price was just over $ 100 million.

Founded in 2018 by former artist manager Merck Mercuriadis, Hipgnosis has been one of the busiest music rights buyers in the recent music boom.

Since mid-2018, more than $2 billion has been spent on shares in more than 65,000 songs through the exchange-traded fund.

Among other things, Hipgnosis holds 50 percent of the texts and compositions of Neil Young as well as shares in the work of Blondie, Lindsey Buckingham and Shakira.

Most often, the fund buys authors' rights, but it also retains the royalties due to Jimmy Iovine from the marketing of the works he produces.

The Timberlake deal is the third purchase through the private Blackstone fund.

Previously, Hipgnosis had acquired interests in marketing country music star Kenny Chesney's recordings and a portion of the rights to Leonard Cohen's lyrics and compositions.