While Jimmy Iovine is best known as one of the music industry’s biggest power players — a cofounder of both Interscope Records and the Beats by Dre headphone empire, and as an Apple Music executive — he began his career as music producer and engineer, working with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, John Lennon, Patti Smith, U2, Stevie Nicks, Dire Straits and many others from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

The ever-growing Hipgnosis Songs, which has invested more than US$1.5 billion in music catalogs in just two and a half years, announced that it has acquired 100 percent of Iovine’s catalog of worldwide producer royalties, comprising 259 songs, and his film production royalties for the Eminem-starring “8 Mile” and 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Iovine was represented by Paul Wachter of Main Street Advisors and attorneys Eric Sacks and Don Friedman of Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks.

Iovine was barely 20 years old when his engineering career began in earnest with work on Lennon’s “Walls & Bridges” and “Rock and Roll” albums, and continued with countless hours expended on the notoriously demanding Springsteen’s albums “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” His breakthrough as a producer came with Patti Smith’s top-selling album “Easter,” which spawned a global hit single with the Springsteen-cowritten “Because the Night.” His hot streak continued over the next dozen years, with smash albums for Petty (“Damn the Torpedoes”), Dire Straits (“Making Movies”), Nicks (“Bella Donna”), U2 (“Under a Blood Red Sky” and “Rattle and Hum”), Simple Minds (“Once Upon a Time”), and the Pretenders (“Get Close”), among others. Those albums include hits such as Petty’s “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That,” Nicks’ “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and “Edge of Seventeen.”

Iovine said: “I’m happy that my work as a producer with so many great artists has found the right home with Merck and Hipgnosis. I am going to use the proceeds from the deal to help Iovine Young Academy’s initiative to build a high school in South L.A. as part of the Iovine Young Academy at USC and continue our efforts to support education.”

(SD-Agencies)