According to Variety.com, Britney Spears has reportedly sold her song catalog and an unclear number of other rights to Primary Wave. Details were unclear and likely under iron-clad non-disclosure agreements  but TMZ has estimated that the deal is to be in the low nine figures. It seems safe to assume that Spears’ artist royalties and publishing rights were included in the deal. The TMZ report, which is based on legal documents the publication says it has viewed, states that she sold “her ownership share of her catalog” to Primary Wave and it notes that the price was not included in the legal documents.

Sony Music owns and controls the rights to Spears’ entire recorded music catalog, so it seems likely she sold the rights to her artist royalties. Spears has songwriting credits on nearly 40 of the songs in her catalog, although few of them were major hits apart from the ballad “Everytime” and fan favorites like “Me Against the Music,” “S&M,” “Work Bitch!” and other tunes. It seems extremely unlikely that Spears’ NIL rights (name and likeness) were included in the deal, unless it was for exponentially more than the price TMZ speculates.

There are any number of options for exploitation of the catalog, including the forthcoming biopic based on the artist’s memoir, The Woman in Me, which landed at Universal Pictures in 2024. A jukebox musical based on her hits, “Once Upon a One More Time,” premiered on Broadway in 2023. Spears has not released an album since 2016’s Glory and has not performed in concert since October of 2018, closing out her Piece of Me Tour with a final show at the Formula One Grand Prix in Austin, Texas.