Less than two months after supporting the Vampr music network platform, Downtown Music Holdings has officially acquired the four-year-old Curve Royalty Systems processor.
This morning, Downtown, headquartered in New York, announced the purchase of Curve, a London-based company. Curve, founded by former Essential Music and Marketing executive Tom Allen, former ADA digital sales director Richard Leach and managing director of The Music Royalty Company Ray Bush, positions itself as an “outstanding royalty processing platform.”
As part of the recently completed purchase, Downtown is expected to provide Curve with “expanded resources, infrastructure and global scale,” according to executives. Meanwhile, the newly sold company will continue to serve existing customers, including Epitaph Records, Ingrooves and Cooking Vinyl, as it is integrated into Downtown, stakeholders indicated.
According to Curve, in total, these clients include more than 1,000 labels and publishers who claim to have processed about $1 billion in revenue for 2.3 billion rows of data last year.
Although the financial terms of the deal were apparently not made public – exact details about the owners are also missing from the companies’ release — Leach in a LinkedIn message said that the beatBread Downtown investor had “fully acquired” Curve.
And in his own post, Downtown Commercial Director (and former CEO of CD Baby) Tracy Maddux wrote: “We are pleased to welcome Curve Royalty Systems, Tom Allen and Richard Leach to the Downtown Music Services team.”
Of course, Bush’s name is missing from the message, and the LinkedIn profile of FatCat Records’ CFO shows that his time with Curve ended in December 2022. Similarly, Downtown CEO Andrew Bergman did not mention Bush when talking about the Curve deal in his statement. .
“For some time we have been fans of the technology and quality of services that Tom and Richard have been creating at Curve,” said Bergman, whose subsidiary FUGA is partnering with Beggars Group.
“As we got to know them and their team, it became more and more obvious that their dedication and visionary vision were great for Downtown,” Bergman continued. “Accuracy, clarity, timeliness and innovation in licensing services are the foundation of Downtown’s mission to support authors and the businesses that serve them.”
“During our discussions,” Curve co—founder Tom Allen added in part, “it became clear that we have a common vision: the city center provides real value to its customers and focuses on providing best—in-class products and services. This is exactly what we were trying to achieve with Curve. So when the opportunity came to work together, we realized that it was perfect for our team and customer base.”
