A new issuing vehicle linked to Universal Music Group-backed investment platform Chord Music Partners is set to raise $500 million in debt through an Asset-Backed Securitization (ABS) transaction.
That’s according to a pre-sale report published by Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) on April 16, which assigns a preliminary A (sf) rating to the $500 million Series 2026-1 Notes to be issued by Canon Music Issuer Trust.
Canon is a newly established vehicle that sits beneath the broader Chord platform, with its collateral pool representing a specific portion of Chord’s assets.
The notes are collateralized by royalties from a catalog of more than 3,750 works from artists and songwriters, including Suicideboys, Morgan Wallen, Ryan Tedder, Diplo, and Twenty One Pilots.
As of February 2024, Chord’s overall portfolio spanned more than 60,000 copyrights. That figure will have grown since, with MBW revealing in August 2025 that Chord was raising more than $2 billion in additional capital for further catalog acquisitions.
Chord is controlled by Dundee Partners, the investment office of the Hendel family, with UMG holding a minority stake.
An independent valuation prepared by Virtu Global Advisors has valued the Canon Music collateral pool at $830 million as of September 30, 2025, using a discounted cash flow method with an 8.00% discount rate. KBRA notes that the valuation “developed long-term projections for the Catalog over a projection period of approximately 40 years.”
According to KBRA’s report, the single largest sub-catalog within the Canon Music Issuer Trust collateral pool is G59 Records – the independent label co-founded by the New Orleans rap duo Suicideboys – which contributed 23.3% of the catalog’s net royalty income in the twelve months to June 2025.
The KBRA report does not specify when or how Chord acquired an interest in the G59 catalog, nor the scope of that interest – whether it covers master recordings, publishing rights, or both; whether the interest is a full acquisition or a stake; or whether the arrangement is structured as a direct buyout or a joint venture.
In March 2025, Billboard first reported that Suicideboys (aka cousins Scrim and Ruby da Cherry) were shopping both their master recordings and publishing rights via Tim Mandelbaum of law firm Fox Rothschild, with the masters alone touted at over USD $300 million.
At the time, MBW reported that Sherrese Clarke Soares’s HarbourView was the rumored frontrunner for the publishing rights. No buyer has been publicly announced since.
Chord Music Partners declined to comment.
Publishing rights account for approximately 34% of the Canon Music catalog’s net royalty income in the twelve months to June 2025, with sound recording rights making up the remaining 66%.
After G59, Morgan Wallen follows at 15.8% of Canon catalog’s trailing-twelve-month net royalties, with Ryan Tedder at 15.3%, Diplo at 9.6%, and Twenty One Pilots at 3.8%.
Taken together, G59 Records, Morgan Wallen and Ryan Tedder account for 54.4% of the catalog’s net royalty income over that period. Based on the Valuation Agent’s sub-catalog valuations, the top three sub-catalogs (Ryan Tedder, G59 and Morgan Wallen) account for 51.7% of the overall catalog value before uplifts, recaptures and third-party royalty reductions.
The weighted average age of the Canon catalog is approximately 10 years, with 46% of content released more than 10 years ago and 74% released more than five years ago.
The Series 2026-1 Notes represent the first issuance from Canon Music Issuer Trust, and the second ABS deal linked to Chord’s broader catalog.
Chord’s first securitization was issued in February 2022 through a separate vehicle, Hi-Fi Music IP Issuer, while Chord was majority-owned by KKR.
The new issuance comes two years after UMG’s $240 million acquisition of a 25.8% stake in the platform from KKR, which valued Chord at $1.85 billion.
Chord was originally established in 2021 by KKR and Dundee Partners to acquire a $1.1 billion portfolio of copyrights from a Kobalt fund. KKR exited the business in March 2024 via the UMG/Dundee buyout.
In August 2025, MBW exclusively reported that Chord was raising more than $2 billion in investable capital, with another $1 billion-plus on the way. New investors confirmed at the time included Searchlight Capital Partners, which contributed $400 million in equity.
As reported by MBW at the time, Chord had been ‘deliberately quiet’ in terms of announcing deals over the past year, sources told MBW, but some nine-figure agreements leaked in the meantime, including a Morgan Wallen acquisition reported in May 2025.
That deal saw Big Loud, the Nashville-based record label home to the country superstar, sell a minority stake in Wallen’s master recording catalog to Chord for north of USD $200 million, according to MBW’s sources, although financial details were not officially disclosed.
According to the pre-sale report, the Morgan Wallen sub-catalog – the second-largest in the Canon Music Issuer Trust collateral pool at 15.8% of the catalog’s trailing-twelve-month net royalties – sits within a notable structural carve-out.
Rather than owning the Wallen rights directly, the Issuer will hold a 24.5% limited partner interest in a partnership that owns the Wallen sub-catalog through a subsidiary. That partnership is a joint venture between Chord and Wallen’s record label, Big Loud – a structure that reflects Chord’s acquisition of a minority stake in Wallen’s masters from Big Loud in May 2025.
The Canon Music deal arrives in the middle of a busy cycle for music-rights ABS.
In July 2025, Concord closed a $1.765 billion ABS that it billed as “the largest and longest tenured asset-backed term securitization of music rights to date.”
Other recent issuers include Blackstone-owned Recognition Music Group (formerly Hipgnosis), Kobalt, HarbourView, Influence Media Partners, and Seeker Music Group.
The manager of the Canon Music transaction will be Universal Music Investments Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of UMG. Redding Ridge Asset Management LLC – an Apollo affiliate that has structured multiple music ABS deals, including Concord’s – will serve as backup manager, with The Bank of New York Mellon acting as trustee and calculation agent.
The notes carry an advance rate of 60.2% against the catalog value, providing 39.8% overcollateralization, with an Anticipated Repayment Date of May 2031 and a final maturity date of May 2076.
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