Bruce Springsteen In Talks to Sell Recorded Music Catalog to Sony Music. When music sales last boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, with many fans snapping up CD versions of the albums they already owned on cassette and vinyl, record companies quietly offered a rare concession to some of their top-selling ’70s and ’80s stars in order to re-sign them: they granted the artists ownership of their earlier albums. Now, as streaming fuels another boom, the major labels are paying handsomely to get those classic albums back. Sources say Springsteen is also shopping his publishing catalog, with some of those sources adding that the Springsteen camp had been looking for upwards of $350 million for both the publishing and recorded master’s catalogs. The Springsteen album catalog, which has racked up 65.5 million sales in the United States according to the RIAA website, and which includes the 15-times platinum Born in The U.S.A. and the five-times times platinum The River, still has plenty of firepower, as his music has generated 2.25 million album consumption units in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018, according to MRC Data.
