Primary Wave Music recently announced its new partnership with Donna Summer's estate, which includes acquiring rights to her name, image and likeness (NIL).
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Legendary artist Donna Summer is back in the headlines nearly fifteen years after her death, with Primary Wave Music announcing a new partnership with the late singer’s estate. The independent music publishing company will work with the estate on Summer’s award-winning music catalog and recordings from the “Queen of Disco,” including smash hits like “I Feel Love” and “Bad Girls.”
Notably, the deal will also allow Primary Wave to share in Summer’s name, image, and likeness rights in order to spearhead new marketing, branding, digital, and sync opportunities, as well as film and television projects – a feature that’s becoming increasingly more appealing to music investors.
Tina Turner's name, image and likeness were acquired by Pophouse Entertainment in March 2026.
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When acquiring rights from an estate, name, image and likeness (NIL) rights can be especially valuable because they allow investors to capture more of the upside created through active management of the underlying music catalog. Investors may work to make a catalog more discoverable, more efficiently administered, and more widely streamed. That increased engagement can strengthen the commercial value of the artist’s name and likeness, creating opportunities for immersive experiences, branded collaborations, merchandising, and other extensions of the legacy. Those NIL initiatives can then drive renewed interest in the music itself, increasing catalog consumption and reinforcing the value of both asset classes.
In large catalog transactions, buyers are increasingly looking beyond passive royalty collection toward opportunities to actively manage an artist’s work and legacy. Securing NIL rights gives them additional tools to build that legacy over time and to participate more directly in the value they create.
We saw this play out in March 2026, when Pophouse Entertainment, a Swedish company known for digital avatars and immersive experiences, acquired the late Tina Turner’s NIL rights alongside a majority interest in her music catalog rights from BMG. At the time, CEO Jessica Koravos told the Associated Press that “one of the reasons that we were so interested in Tina is because she has such an incredible visual presence and such an incredible stage energy.” She added that Pophouse was considering projects that could portray and, to some degree, recreate that presence, and that Turner’s estate was informed and participating in the conversations.
The terms of Primary Wave's partnership with Summer's estate have not yet been disclosed.
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Although the terms of Primary Wave’s deal with Summer’s estate have not been disclosed, estates typically, though not always, retain meaningful consultation or approval rights over collaborations of this kind. Those rights matter because the same activity that increases the commercial value of a catalog can also reshape the public value of an artist’s name, image, and likeness. The objective is not simply to generate new revenue, but to do so in a manner that remains consistent with the artist’s legacy.
Turner’s estate completed its transaction with Pophouse roughly three years after her death in 2023. By contrast, Summer’s estate may have had a longer runway to consider how her music, identity, and legacy could be developed, given that Summer died in 2012.
As the industry’s appetite for posthumous, estate-supported dealmaking grows, the full benefits of these arrangements for both fans and investors are still emerging. In an era when artists are increasingly focused on protecting their intellectual property, particularly against unauthorized AI uses, meaningful collaboration with an estate can help ensure that new projects reflect the late artist’s wishes and their family’s stewardship of the legacy.
Whether these deals ultimately protect and enhance the legacies they invoke will depend on the guardrails estates negotiate today. But if the conversation around Summer is any indication, the Queen of Disco has not yet had her “Last Dance.”
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