Celebrating 50 years of Wise Music Group

In the 2022-2023 season Wise Music Group is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Trading under the name of Music Sales from the early 1970s Wise Music Group at first operated in both print publishing and copyright acquisition with headquarters in London. Wise Music Group now offers genuine international reach with active offices located in USA, UK, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and Japan.

The company has grown in to a global group under the leadership of Robert Wise. His sons Tomas Wise (CEO, Wise Music USA) and Marcus Wise (Group Head of Media) are today fully involved in the business. Throughout its long history the company has remained a family business at heart, flexible and ideally suited to responding to industry challenges both big and small.

Today the group concentrates on its core strength: catalogue ownership and control. This acquisitions-driven strategy has rapidly flourished, and the group has acquired more classical and popular song catalogues, adding many world-class new names. In total, Wise Music Group currently owns or controls some half a million copyrights. Wise Music catalogues reflect a broad range of popular music encompassing, evergreen, jazz, reggae, blues and pop/rock songs from all territories.

The group’s publishing houses and imprints include some of the most famous names in the history of music including Chester Music, G. Schirmer, Associated Music Publishers, Novello & Co, Éditions Alphonse Leduc, Première Music, Le Chant du Monde, Edition Wilhelm Hansen, Unión Musical Ediciones, Bosworth Music GmbH, and Campbell Connelly.

Historically one of the group’s strengths has been its roster of contemporary classical composers. This division has also been expanded so that today’s list of contracted composers is one of its strongest ever with over a hundred of today’s most successful living composers and songwriters working in classical music, opera, ballet, pop, film, television and advertising. Represented composers include Ólafur Arnalds, Hans Abrahamsen, Samuel Barber, John Corigliano, Ludovico Einaudi, Philip Glass, Aram Khachaturian, Missy Mazzoli, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Hania Rani, Dmitri Shostakovich, Kaija Saariaho, Jean Sibelius, Igor Stravinsky, Tan Dun, Joby Talbot, John Tavener and Anna Thorvaldsdottir.