Hipgnosis Bought RedOne’s Catalogue in 2020. A Blackstone Takeover and an Unpriced Sony Deal Later, It Is Named Only Through ‘Bad Romance’

Nobody has published a line-item list of what changed hands. But two company statements, filed six years apart, name the same song, and a regulatory filing in between accounts for every step connecting them. Put together, they show that the entire songwriting and producer-royalty catalogue of Moroccan-Swedish hitmaker RedOne, born Nadir Khayat in Tetouan, Morocco, now sits with Sony Music Publishing, after passing through a Blackstone take-private and a rebrand that no single announcement described as affecting him by name.

What RedOne sold, and to whom, in 2020

On 16 July 2020, the London-listed Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited announced it had acquired RedOne’s catalogue outright: 100 per cent of his songwriting copyrights, his writer royalties and his producer royalties across 337 songs, according to the company’s own announcement at the time. The price was not disclosed, a standard feature of Hipgnosis deals in that period, and this record found no other party that has stated a figure.

The catalogue included RedOne’s work on Lady Gaga’s early hits, “Just Dance,” “Poker Face,” “LoveGame,” “Alejandro” and “Bad Romance,” a run Hipgnosis founder Merck Mercuriadis called “one of the greatest producer/artist songwriting relationships of all time.” “Bad Romance” matters here for a reason that becomes clear later: it is one of the few songs from this catalogue that a company statement names twice, six years apart.

What Hipgnosis bought was not the master recordings. RedOne’s deal covered his songwriter’s copyright share in the compositions and his contractual royalty participations as a producer, which is an income stream, not a recording copyright. The sound recordings themselves, the actual masters of “Bad Romance” and the rest of Gaga’s catalogue, sit with her label and have not moved as part of any transaction described in this record.

The company that bought him stopped existing as that company

Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited was itself acquired four years later. Blackstone’s acquisition vehicle, Lyra Bidco Limited, took the fund private through a court-sanctioned scheme of arrangement under Guernsey law, after seeing off a rival bid backed by Apollo. The company’s own regulatory announcement states the scheme became effective on 29 July 2024 at USD 1.31 cash per Scheme Share; trading in Hipgnosis shares was cancelled from 8am the following day. Trade press at the time of the offer put the aggregate value at roughly USD 1.58 to 1.59 billion, a figure not stated in the completion filing itself and attributed here to that reporting, not to the company.

From that date, every catalogue the fund held, including RedOne’s, was owned by funds managed by Blackstone. In March 2025, Blackstone combined that fund’s assets with a separate vehicle it already controlled, Hipgnosis Songs Capital, and with Hipgnosis Song Management, and renamed the combined business Recognition Music Group. CEO Ben Katovsky described it at the time as managing “over 45,000 songs” across more than 145 catalogues. No announcement of the rebrand names RedOne specifically; it is a description of the whole pool his catalogue had become one part of.

The sale to Sony, and the one word that closes the loop

On 11 May 2026, Sony Music Publishing, working with Singapore’s GIC, confirmed an agreement to acquire Recognition Music Group’s complete music rights portfolio from the Blackstone-managed funds that owned it. Trade press put the price at between USD 3.5 and 4 billion; neither Sony nor Recognition has put a figure to it in anything this desk has found. The companies’ own announcement named a handful of the catalogue’s biggest copyrights as illustrations, including Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

On 15 July 2026, Sony Music Publishing and Recognition issued a joint statement confirming the deal had closed: “the acquisition of the entire music rights portfolio of Recognition Music Group by Sony Music Publishing has completed following regulatory approvals.” That statement named “Bad Romance” again.

No party has published a catalogue-by-catalogue manifest of the 45,000-plus songs in this sale, and this desk found none. But “Bad Romance” is not a generic standard; it is one of a small number of songs Hipgnosis’s own 2020 announcement named as part of what it bought from RedOne specifically, and it is not associated with any other Hipgnosis catalogue acquisition this desk could find. A song named as RedOne’s in 2020, inside a fund later folded whole into Recognition, named again in 2026 as part of the “entire” portfolio Sony completed buying, is the closest thing available to a paper trail connecting a Moroccan-born songwriter’s catalogue to one of the largest music-rights transactions of the year, in the absence of a line-item list naming him.

What this means for artists

The mechanics here are ordinary for anyone who signs away 100 per cent of a copyright for an undisclosed sum: the seller gives up any further say in who owns it next. RedOne sold his songwriting and producer-royalty interests to Hipgnosis in 2020. From that point, what happened to those rights, a stock-market takeover, a corporate rebrand, a nine-figure (or ten-figure) resale, was entirely outside his control and required no further consent or disclosure from him, because he was no longer a party to any of it. His 2020 contract almost certainly did not, and need not, give him visibility into where the asset went afterward.

That is the trade a full-catalogue sale makes: certainty of payment now, against permanent loss of any claim on what the catalogue is later shown to be worth. Hipgnosis’s RedOne catalogue was one piece of an asset pool that a buyer was willing to pay billions for within six years of the original purchase. None of that appreciation, disclosed or estimated, is RedOne’s to share in; he sold the asset, not a stake in its future.

For any songwriter weighing a full buyout against a long-term administration deal, this is the distinction that matters more than the headline price: a sale is final, and the seller’s only remaining interest in the catalogue is whatever that one cheque already represented.

What could not be established

Neither Sony Music Publishing nor Recognition Music Group has published a complete list of the catalogues or songwriters included in the 11 May 2026 agreement or the 15 July 2026 completion, and no source checked for this record states in explicit terms that RedOne’s catalogue specifically transferred to Sony. This record’s conclusion rests on the fact that “Bad Romance,” a song both the 2020 Hipgnosis announcement and the 2026 Sony/Recognition statements name individually, cannot be traced to any other acquisition Hipgnosis made, and that the 2026 statement describes the transaction as the “entire” Recognition portfolio with no disclosed carve-out. No party has named RedOne in connection with the 2026 sale, and no figure for what Hipgnosis originally paid him, or for what portion of the Sony price his catalogue represents, has been disclosed by anyone.