Warner Chappell Music has signed an exclusive sub-publishing agreement with Round Hill Music.
The new global deal covers everything outside the US, Canada, the British Isles, and the Nordics. Of course, those are monstrously large territories, though maximizing value in the Rest of the World (or ‘ROW’) requires considerable scale and infrastructure.
Accordingly, Warner Chappell will administer Round Hill copyrights and explore various creative opportunities for Round Hill songs and songwriters.
Round Hill is headquartered in New York and was founded by Josh Gruss, Richard Rowe, and Neil Gillis in 2010. Nearly a decade later, the publisher enjoys a venerable catalog of tracks.
The Round Hill catalog includes a number of classic songs, including “Happy Together,” “All of Me,” “She Loves You,” “Video Killed The Radio Star,” “Calendar Girl,” “Living in America,” “Cool Kids,” “Best Day Of My Life,” “Fever, I Saw Her Standing There,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “The Kids Are Alright,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Cherry Pie,” and “What A Wonderful World,” just to name a few.
Top artists and songwriters from Round Hill include Valerie Broussard, Brittany Howard, Des Rocs, Topaz Jones, Morgan Taylor Reid, Tim Myers, Cobi, Thutmose and more.
Round Hill Music raised more than $263 million to acquire rights to hit songs in 2018. That’s part of a broader rush to acquire publishing assets and catalogs, with Round Hill just one company bidding up price tags on sought-after music IP.
President Neil Gillis noted that Warner Chappell is a good fit for administering Round Hill’s catalog overseas. That includes more expansive catalog exploitation, but also firmer royalty collection from far-flung and oftentimes inscrutable foreign PROs and rights agencies.