With $50M+ in music rights offers so far, Larrosa’s MusicTraders builds out new M&A group concentrating on LATAM and rising market catalogs
Latin America and the Center East & North Africa are two of the fastest-growing recorded music areas on the planet.
Music fintech firm Larrosa, with operations spanning Europe, the US, and the Center East, is betting massive on each.
LATAM was the fastest-growing recorded music area on the planet in 2025, with revenues up 17.1% year-on-year in accordance with IFPI’s World Music Report. MENA wasn’t far behind, posting progress of 15.2% YoY. Two powerhouse Latin American recorded music markets, Brazil and Mexico, in the meantime, now sit within the international High 10.
For Larrosa, a music rights and know-how firm with a portfolio weighted towards Spanish-speaking and rising markets, these progress tendencies align carefully with its newest strikes.
The corporate, based by CEO Cristian Larrosa in 2020 (following the 2019 sale of his earlier enterprise, Viel Music), raised over $16 million in 2023 to accumulate catalogs and deploy advances to artists. Larrosa has since relocated its headquarters to Dubai and developed a know-how ecosystem spanning royalty administration, AI-powered analytics, and investor infrastructure. Most just lately, it established an LLC in america to safe licensing for its Lyra Financial institution neobank division.
Now, Larrosa’s MusicTraders, which operates a market for music catalog funding alternatives in addition to a rights administration infrastructure, has launched a devoted Offers & Acquisitions division staffed with executives drawn from TikTok, BMG, Spotify, YouTube and PeerMusic.
The launch comes as Larrosa overhauls the MusicTraders platform following six years of operations and greater than $50 million in music rights transactions executed on it. Larrosa says it at the moment manages $25 million in belongings itself.
The brand new division is led by a group of 5. Rafael Aguilar Grabowski, previously head of PeerMusic’s Latin area, joins as Strategic Partnerships Advisor, masking Spain, Europe and main Latin American markets.
José María Escriña, whose CV consists of director-level licensing roles at TikTok and Spotify, takes on the Music Acquisitions Specialist position from Miami, masking Latin America, the Caribbean and the US Hispanic market.
Steve Bunyan, beforehand at BMG, heads Investor Relations. Marina Mánica, the corporate’s COO and a Spotify and YouTube alumna, coordinates deal stream and execution “throughout jurisdictions”.
María José Clutet, a lawyer who focuses on mental property, handles the authorized facet.
Collectively, the group covers US Latin, Spanish-speaking markets, the UK, and, following Larrosa’s relocation to Dubai, the MENA area and components of Asia.
“When your buyers have actual deployment capability and a real curiosity in shaping the business’s future, the scope has to develop past pure catalog M&A.”
Cristian Larrosa
Larrosa says the ambition behind the brand new division extends past pure catalog M&A, with the group additionally concentrating on funding alternatives in music firms and know-how tasks.
“When your buyers have actual deployment capability and a real curiosity in shaping the business’s future, the scope has to develop past pure catalog M&A,” the CEO tells MBW.
“The group brings sturdy collective know-how throughout markets and genres, with a specific edge in high-growth territories that stay underserved by institutional capital. The purpose is to attach the perfect alternatives with the perfect capital, with a group that understands either side of that sentence.”
Whereas the group’s expertise skews closely towards Latin American and Spanish-speaking markets, Larrosa says the mandate is “genuinely international,” including: “We’re sourcing throughout each market the place high quality alternatives exist.”
MusicTraders wasn’t initially designed as a market. Cristian Larrosa says the platform’s royalty administration instruments had been constructed to service his firm’s personal catalog acquisitions, and solely later opened as much as exterior buyers.
“For over six years it operated privately,” he explains. “Whenever you’re shopping for and managing catalogs your self, you construct completely different instruments than somebody designing a market from scratch. That’s the true USP: it’s not theoretical, it’s operational. The identical system an investor makes use of to observe a catalog they acquired via us is identical one our group makes use of internally.”
The platform now serves two capabilities: a curated dealroom the place vetted buyers can entry music catalog funding alternatives, and a full-service royalty administration layer providing real-time income monitoring, territory-level breakdowns, automated distributions and contract administration throughout greater than 200 territories.
Larrosa is each a principal purchaser of catalogs and a platform operator, facilitating transactions between rights holders and third-party buyers via the platform.
“We now have our personal catalog portfolio, a lot of it constructed via years of involvement in manufacturing and publishing earlier than Larrosa existed,” says the corporate’s CEO.
“We began figuring out high-yield alternatives in Asian and Latin American catalogs early, markets being dramatically undervalued by the majors,” Larrosa explains.
“Right this moment we’re executing bigger offers, predominantly within the Spanish-speaking market, Argentine, Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, US Latin, which we all know higher than virtually anybody, and which continues to outperform on catalog progress and streaming trajectory.”
Larrosa tells us that the corporate’s portfolio spans a variety of genres and territories, together with Cuban, Brazilian, UK rock, nation and R&B. It consists of catalogs acknowledged with Latin Grammy and Hollywood Music in Media Awards.
As a part of the platform renovation, MusicTraders has launched Status, described as an invitation-only possibility geared toward institutional buyers.
“Status isn’t a plan or a pricing tier, it’s a non-public membership, and that distinction issues,” says Larrosa. “The entry level is a minimal $5 million annual funding dedication. What you’re accessing is structurally completely different from the usual platform expertise: first-look at alternatives earlier than they attain the broader market, visibility into off-market and personal transactions, and a direct relationship with the MusicTraders group — not simply deal stream, however the intelligence round it.
“There’s additionally built-in monetary infrastructure so unallocated capital doesn’t sit idle whereas alternatives are being evaluated.”
Status additionally consists of entry to Wolfie, the corporate’s AI-powered intelligence device. “Traders who purchase via Status mechanically obtain Rightsholder entry too, with superior analytics and instruments constructed for managing belongings at scale,” says Larrosa.
Larrosa explains that Wolfie, together with the broader Larrosa.ai analytics engine, performs an more and more central position within the firm’s operations. Internally, the Offers & Acquisitions group makes use of an AI agent with full context on dwell deal pipelines, investor relationships and catalog financials.
“You ask it the place a dialog stands, what a catalog appears like financially, or what the following step on a deal is, and it responds in plain language with full context,” says Larrosa. “Much less like utilizing a device, extra like having a really well-briefed colleague accessible at any second.”
“The mysticism round music rights valuation is disappearing,” he says. “Streaming information is real-time, royalty flows are more and more traceable, AI is accelerating due diligence.”
Cristian Larrosa
Status members additionally entry Wolfie straight for portfolio queries, although Larrosa notes that each one AI-generated valuations are reviewed by the corporate’s financing group utilizing specialised due diligence tooling, together with stream fraud detection and bot evaluation.
MusicTraders is a part of a wider Larrosa ecosystem that features Rose Expertise, a frontline artist growth division, and Lyra Financial institution, described as an “AI-powered neobank” for the music business at the moment in growth.
The group enlargement arrives throughout what Larrosa describes as “‘a post-correction market”.
The corporate notes in an announcement that “after multiples reached 20–30x annual royalties on the peak of the catalog acquisition increase, the sector has recalibrated towards extra disciplined pricing”. Larrosa argues the present surroundings favors operators with infrastructure relatively than these competing purely on worth.
Wanting additional forward, Larrosa says MusicTraders‘ longer-term purpose is to grow to be the default assembly level between rightsholders and buyers in a market that’s turning into more and more data-driven.
“The mysticism round music rights valuation is disappearing,” he says. “Streaming information is real-time, royalty flows are more and more traceable, AI is accelerating due diligence. In three to 5 years, MusicTraders needs to be the place that convergence lives naturally, the platform that made this asset class really feel as legible and accessible as every other.”
Rafael Aguilar Grabowski, Strategic Partnerships Advisor, provides: “The correction acted as a filter. What stays is a market that rewards rigour, thorough evaluation, cultural data, and long-term relationships, and that’s precisely the place this group has been working.”
On the broader outlook for music rights M&A, Larrosa predicts that know-how will compress deal timelines and shift the aggressive dynamics of the market over the following 12 months.
“It received’t be about who has the relationships to get a deal executed anymore,” he says. “It’ll be about who has the infrastructure to guage, shut, and handle it effectively. The window to construct category-defining infrastructure in music finance is open, and it received’t keep open indefinitely.”
The corporate was acknowledged earlier this 12 months at Fintech Week Dubai 2026, the place it acquired the Monetary Firm of Excellence Award for Excellence in Investor Relations (Early-Stage Startup). Larrosa delivered a keynote on the occasion titled The place Music Turns into Finance.
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