In October 2024, months after Blackstone won a bidding war with Concord to take Hipgnosis’ troubled public royalties fund private, British rapper KSI’s “Thick of It” featuring Trippie Redd, which samples Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh),” debuted at No. 84 on the Billboard Hot 100.
KSI’s best commercial mark to date, “Thick of It” went on to be certified platinum in Australia and gold in the United States, and it was nominated for song of the year at the BRIT Awards in 2025. The song resulted from Recognition pitching writers on the Peppers’ 2006 hit at an Atlantic Records UK songwriting camp — one strategy from Recognition CEO Ben Katovsky’s playbook for reintroducing songs from his company’s portfolio by collaborating with musicians and industry partners.
“In the last 12 months, we’ve put out 60-odd interpolations, held 13 writing camps with our different publisher and label partners, and our interpolations have generated about 500 million streams,” Katovsky says. “That gives you a sense of what we can do.”
Katovsky says it’s been a transformative 18 months for the company that used to be Hipgnosis Songs Fund (HSF), whose in-house manager, Hipgnosis Song Management (HSM), was accused of accounting and financial projection missteps, leading to an eventual buyout. (Hipgnosis founder Merck Mercuriadis is no longer part of the picture.)
In July 2024, Blackstone bought out the aggrieved shareholders of the publicly listed HSF and consolidated its 45,000-song catalog — which included compositions by Neil Young, Shakira, Journey and the Chili Peppers, among others — with the private Hipgnosis fund Blackstone backed in 2021. Katovsky was named CEO in February 2024, and by the end of that year, HSM completed a $1.47 billion asset-backed securitization (ABS). In mid-2025, after consolidating the many Hipgnosis companies under the single name Recognition, Katovsky raised another $372 million through an ABS, this time with an A rating from both Fitch and S&P — a mark of Wall Street’s approval. It worked: The ABS, which reaped three times the demand it expected, landed Recognition 16 new investors, including eight who are new to music.
The collection of cultural treasures Mercuriadis amassed still attracts attention. Recognition’s move in June to sell subsidiary Hipgnosis Songs Group, which housed Big Deal Music and its administration business, to Sony Music Group prompted some to speculate Recognition was more keen to sell than acquire assets. (Before going private and rebranding as Recognition, Hipgnosis Songs Fund also sold off 20,000 songs for around $23 million.)
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Katovsky, who previously held senior roles at BMG, including as COO, says Recognition is being opportunistic in a cooler, more mature market than the one that Mercuriadis navigated.
“We are in a very fortunate place where we have scale — 45,000 songs, 150 catalogs — and don’t need to be buying,” Katovsky says. “We look at those opportunities. The other side is seeing when there are opportunities to be a seller as well.”
For its 45 employees, one of Recognition’s top priorities is what Katovsky blandly calls “administrative optimization”: “making sure that everybody in the world knows what songs we own, what shares of those songs we own, and collect all of the royalties that are due to us in a cost effective and timely manner,” he says.
While that sounds like table stakes, this work remains a challenge for a large-scale catalog with songs that are played worldwide, interpolated, covered and occasionally go viral.
An example of this so-called optimization arrived in September, when Rihanna’s 2007 track “Breakin’ Dishes” — a song for which Recognition owns part of the copyright through its ownership of Tricky Stewart and The Dream’s catalogs — went viral on TikTok and charted on the Hot 100 for the first time. After seeing the spike in consumption, Recognition partnered with Roc Nation and Def Jam to re-pitch the song to streaming services, maximizing international coordination and spearheading influencer marketing campaigns. The company also recruited German artist Ely Oaks to do a viral dance music remix of the song that gained traction on U.K. and European radio. The campaign nicely sums up Recognition’s strategy across its catalog.
“We saw virality starting to bubble on the infrastructure that we built to monitor our tracks,” says Katovsky. “Then we were able to engage with management, the label, build on those relationships we have there, and really focus everybody together around [it].”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com ’
