Miles Davis Catalog Sells to Reservoir Media, a Small but Savvy Player
“Reservoir, led by Golnar Khosrowshahi, has acquired the majority of music rights owned by the Davis estate ahead of the jazz master’s centennial next year.
In Golnar Khosrowshahi’s modest office at Reservoir Media, the independent music company she founded, the walls are bare save for a display of its logo in multicolored Finnish moss. The gold records her artists have earned hang elsewhere, and Khosrowshahi almost blushes when describing the deals she has struck with stars like Joni Mitchell and Snoop Dogg.
But over the last 18 years, Khosrowshahi — one of the very few female chief executives in the music industry — has quietly built a successful boutique business, thriving in a highly competitive market for music catalogs that is dominated by richly capitalized media conglomerates and private equity funds.
Now Reservoir has scored its latest plum deal, acquiring the majority of music rights owned by the Miles Davis estate ahead of the jazz master’s centennial next year. The transaction, which was completed in August, includes 90 percent of Davis’s music publishing rights and of the estate’s income from his recordings, as well as an agreement between Reservoir and the estate to share control of the name, image and likeness of Davis, the mercurial monolith who reshaped jazz multiple times before his death in 1991.
“It’s an opportunity of a lifetime,” Khosrowshahi, 53, said in an interview last week at Reservoir’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Founded in 2007 and publicly traded since 2021, Reservoir has grown from a small music publisher to an agile, full-service independent music company. Its portfolio includes songs by Sheryl Crow, the Isley Brothers, the Atlanta rap mainstay Offset and another jazz lion, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Reservoir also has stakes in modern standards like “Louie Louie,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and it owns the labels Chrysalis and Tommy Boy, which released hip-hop classics by De La Soul and Queen Latifah.
“We are not a passive holder of intellectual property,” Khosrowshahi said. “We have an active platform.”
Erin Davis, one of Miles’s sons, and Vince Wilburn Jr., a nephew, who are part of the team that manages the estate, said they met with various business suitors before choosing Reservoir. To celebrate and promote Davis’s 100th birthday, Khosrowshahi mentioned a possible Broadway show as well as an “experiential” event at Lightroom, a London arts venue (in which Reservoir owns a stake) that specializes in immersive, high-tech presentations. A biopic, “Miles & Juliette” — about the trumpeter’s romance with the French singer and actress Juliette Gréco — is already in production, with Mick Jagger among its producers.
“Uncle Miles was about evolution,” said Wilburn, who played drums with Davis. “He never looked back. So you want the music to continue to evolve long after we’re gone.”
Khosrowshahi, who was born in Iran, studied classical piano and has an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. By the mid-2000s, when the music industry was in its darkest throes of digital disruption, she began to develop a plan to invest in music. Portfolios of song rights are usually valued based on a multipleof their annual earnings, which varies with each deal. Nowadays, deals for 20 times earnings or more are not uncommon, but when Khosrowshahi entered the business, she said, good catalogs could be had for single-digit multiples.
“We should have bought everything that came across our desk at that price,” Khosrowshahi said. “If we overpaid for something at a four-times multiple? Big deal,” she added with a shrug.
Still, in a business of whales, Reservoir must survive as a relative minnow. Since its inception, Reservoir says, it has spent $876 million acquiring catalogs and other companies. By comparison, Sony Music said in June that over just the previous year it had spent $2.5 billion on various investments, including catalogs. (Sony still controls the recordings for much of Davis’s career, including his landmark 1959 album “Kind of Blue.”)
Reservoir has built a reputation for conservative deal making, paying an average multiple of 15.5 for most song catalogs, according to the company. Khosrowshahi said Reservoir’s “sweet spot” for transactions is $40 million to $60 million. Terms of the Davis deal were not disclosed, but are estimated to be in that range.
For an indie, Khosrowshahi said, the personal touch is key. “I’m in text contact with most of my clients all the time, whether it’s about a new baby or new music,” she said.
Reservoir’s deal to administer the publishing catalog of Mitchell, one of music’s most revered living songwriters, came about when another songwriting client, Bruce Roberts, introduced Khosrowshahi to Mitchell in 2021, “at the height of Covid,” Khosrowshahi said. She met Mitchell for dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant, and spent time with Mitchell at her home. Within two months, the deal was signed.
Khosrowshahi said that being a woman in the music business has sometimes been a help, but she noted that coming in as an outsider has been beneficial, too. “You see barely anyone who has grown up in the music industry and is in the C-suite now who’s a woman,” she said. “So maybe the only way to do it was to come in from the outside.”
Reservoir’s stewardship of De La Soul, whose recordings the company had acquired as part of a 2021 deal for Tommy Boy, built more good will. The group’s eclectic albums were some of the most influential in hip-hop history, but old problems related to sample clearances had kept those releases trapped in copyright purgatory for years; favorites like “3 Feet High and Rising” (1989) had never been made officially available online. Reservoir gave the group rights to its master recordings from Tommy Boy and worked with it for more than a year to resolve all clearance issues, allowing De La Soul’s catalog to finally join streaming platforms in 2023.
“Showing they could do the seemingly impossible with De La Soul was an incredible shingle for Reservoir to hang,” said Bill Werde, the director of the Bandier music business program at Syracuse University.
When asked how Reservoir, which has a market capitalization of about $520 million, can continue to compete against players who are still raising billions of dollars for music catalogs, Khosrowshahi pointed to the Davis deal as proof of her company’s strength.
“I’m waiting for the day that we can’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I still don’t see a situation where we are unable to execute.”
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.“
