Garth Brooks Wants $2B For Music Catalog

Country music icon Garth Brooks is actively considering the sale of his entire music catalog — including both songwriting rights and recordings — with an asking price of roughly $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the potential deal would rank among the largest ever for a single artist’s catalog. Brooks, one of the best-selling recording artists in history, has been exploring a transaction for several years and recently signaled to investors that he is among the few superstars of his stature who has not yet sold, one person familiar with the discussions said. He has floated a valuation ranging from the high $1 billion range to more than $2 billion.

Brooks would sell both his publishing catalog and his master recordings. For comparison, Sony paid more than $1 billion in 2024 for the Queen catalog and more than $1 billion for half of Michael Jackson’s catalog that same year.

The 62-year-old superstar has sold more than 200 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, surpassing the Beatles for the most units sold by any artist in U.S. history. He is the only artist to have nine albums certified diamond (10 million copies each), with a tenth approaching that threshold. His string of hits — including “Friends in Low Places,” “The Dance,” and “Shameless” — defined country radio in the 1990s and 2000s. Brooks has won two Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012.

Brooks’ massive domestic popularity has not translated into the same global streaming dominance seen with many other catalog sales. He has largely kept his music off major platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, preferring to protect full-album sales over individual track streaming. In 2016, he struck an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music, where his albums are available in their entirety.