Max Martin's Hit Factory Sells Swift and Grande Songs to Investment Firm

HarbourView Equity Partners has acquired the Wolf Cousins catalog — home to some of pop music's biggest singles — in a fresh sign that songwriting rights remain a blue-chip asset class.

HarbourView Equity Partners has purchased the publishing rights to the Wolf Cousins catalog in a deal with the collective co-founded by Max Martin and collaborator Shellback.
The catalog includes songs written for Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, among other major pop artists.
Wolf Cousins is the Stockholm-based songwriting and production collective built around Martin and Shellback's long creative partnership.
HarbourView, which has previously acquired rights from artists including Nas and Journey, continues an aggressive push into premium music publishing.
Financial terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed.

The Tuesday after a stadium tour ends, the business of pop music moves on without missing a beat. While fans are still rewatching concert footage, the publishing rights to the songs themselves have a way of quietly changing hands — and the latest transaction is a significant one.

HarbourView Equity Partners, the New York-based investment firm that has spent recent years assembling a portfolio of high-value music catalogs, has acquired the publishing rights to the Wolf Cousins catalog in a deal reported by Variety. Wolf Cousins is the Stockholm collective built around hitmaking partnership Max Martin and Shellback — two names that, taken together, account for a staggering share of the pop charts over the past two decades.

The catalog includes songs written for Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, though the full tracklist scope of the deal has not been disclosed. Martin's fingerprints on both artists' catalogs are well-documented: his production work helped shape some of the defining pop records of the 2010s and into the 2020s, across Swift's transition-era albums and multiple Grande releases.

For HarbourView, the acquisition follows a pattern the firm has pursued since its founding — targeting catalogs with proven commercial longevity and identifiable streaming income. The firm previously struck deals touching work associated with artists including Nas and Journey's surviving members.

The financial terms of the Wolf Cousins transaction were not made public, which is standard practice for catalog acquisitions of this kind. What the deal does signal, clearly enough, is that the market for premium songwriting rights has not cooled — and that Stockholm's most famous writing room still commands serious attention from institutional money.