Round Hill Music Royalty Partners

Josh Gruss, the firm's founder and CEO, leads investment strategy and execution. He previously worked at Bear Stearns and founded the firm to apply private equity structuring to music royalty acquisitions. The firm's leadership also includes Richard Rowe, a veteran music publishing executive who serves as a director.

Round Hill sources catalog acquisitions through its network across Nashville, New York, and London, combining financial relationships with direct outreach to artists, songwriters, and independent publishers. The firm's publishing operating arm, Round Hill Music, administers and manages the catalogs it owns, which generates visibility into additional deal flow from rights-holders seeking a structured exit or administrative partner.

Round Hill raises closed-end private equity funds that purchase portfolios of music publishing copyrights, master recordings, and royalty streams. In 2020, the firm launched Round Hill Music Royalty Fund, a publicly traded vehicle on the London Stock Exchange, to hold assets with permanent capital, though this vehicle agreed to be taken private by the firm's private funds in late 2023 (per Bloomberg, September 2023).

Round Hill targets established, cash-generating music intellectual property, including songwriter publishing catalogs, master recording income streams, and synchronization royalties. The firm avoids speculative early-career advances without proven revenue history, focusing instead on catalogs with decades of stable royalty collection from radio, streaming, and licensing.

Round Hill predates the post-2018 surge of royalty-focused funds by several years and operates with a hybrid publishing-administration model rather than purely aggregating catalogs for financial yield. Unlike passive aggregators, Round Hill actively manages and promotes its songs through its publishing arm, aiming to increase royalty income by placing songs in film, television, and advertising, which differentiates its operational intensity from most competitors.

Yes. Round Hill Music Royalty Partners manages the private equity funds that acquire catalogs, while Round Hill Music serves as the operating company that administers and exploits the song rights. This separation places royalty cash flows under professional publisher management, but the two entities are part of a common structure controlled by the firm's founders and governing entities.

Round Hill raises institutional capital through private equity fund structures, with limited partners including pension funds, endowments, and family offices. The firm also accessed public market investors through its London-listed fund until the 2023 take-private transaction consolidated that vehicle back into the private funds structure (per Bloomberg, September 2023).