Founded in 2006, Cutting Edge Group is a global player in media music investment and management with a $1 billion portfolio of rights from films, TV shows and video games.
With producer Tommy Pearson, the company recently staged Interstellar Live at the Royal Albert Hall with Hans Zimmer’s score performed live by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, conducted by Ben Palmer, along with organist Roger Sayer.
“It’s unbelievable, the score heavily features the organ, and it’s just absolutely amazing in that kind of environment in that venue,” said Cutting Edge Group chief operating officer Tara Finegan.
Here, Finegan discusses their part in the publishing catalogue boom, the power of scores on screen and the rise of orchestral film concerts…
Cutting Edge is marking its 20th anniversary, how has the company expanded in recent years?
“We’ve been able to grow exponentially over the last few years. We’ve been a company focused on media music really since inception, and at that time, 20 years ago, people were really overlooking and undervaluing those types of rights. It gave us an opportunity to come into Hollywood and start to acquire those rights. Over the last three or four years, we’ve been able to really buy catalogues of these types of rights and fuel our growth into the next level. But it all stems from those same principles that we started with 20 years ago.”
Were you a part of the publishing catalogue boom of several years ago?
“Yes, absolutely. We have carved out a niche where we’ve been able to take those same trends and tools but bring it into media music. We were able to see this explosion in the headline of the biggest music stars in the world selling those rights. And we were able to use that to explain to film composers why it should be something they would consider too, and bring that kind of liquidity to the composers who had never been able to access that type of deal-making and be able to actually have those types of wealth events before. So the overall music market helped us to be able to get to this scale, but we really took it and focused it in this media music space.”
Where are the bulk of the income streams coming from?
“It’s mainly the audiovisual platforms. So in media music, most of the income is coming from royalties that are generated when the film or TV show plays on the cinema, TV or on streaming services. So instead of Spotify and Apple Music and Deezer, we’re talking about Netflix, HBO Max and Amazon Prime video. The same kind of trends [as audio streaming] bear out, which is that you have this increased value in back catalogue of film and TV content, people doing big re-run watches. All of that just fuels the music royalties in those films and TV shows.”
Over the last three or four years, we’ve been able to buy catalogues and fuel our growth into the next level
Tara Finegan
How does the launch of HBO Max in the UK help to accelerate that?
“We have a joint venture that we did with Warner Brothers at the beginning of 2025 where we now co-own and co-manage the Warner Brothers back catalogue of music, which is very predominantly featured on HBO Max. So their expansion into Europe is very exciting for us.”
How comprehensive is the deal when it comes to new launches such as the Harry Potter TV series?
“Our joint venture is really about the music that was already created when we did the deal. When it comes to their franchises, Harry Potter, or recently the Superman movie, one of the amazing things about music is it really becomes part of the DNA of the brand. So even though the Superman movie that came out this past summer is a completely new reboot, a fresh take on the character, you still hear John Williams’ iconic Superman theme from the 1970s in that movie. It’s really eliciting that emotional response from the audience about why they fell in love with that character in the first place, and that piece of music sits in our joint venture.”
So would that include the original Game Of Thrones music included in the new spin-off series, A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms?
“Absolutely. When we did the deal in 2025, it was the entire back catalogue of Warner Brothers. So it was over 100 years of copyrights across both the film, television and other ancillary titles, it was everything from Game Of Thrones and Harry Potter to Lord Of The Rings and Friends. What is very interesting is that even though it is a historic back catalogue, music does become this through line in everything they’re doing in these universes.”
What is the scope of your rights management for the catalogue when it’s being used in new properties?
“It’s the new TV shows, the new rebooted films. But it’s also when they’re launching one of these properties in a theme park as a ride, when they’re doing a mobile app game, when they’re working on a piece of merch or a toy that might play a musical theme. We find that music becomes this kind of perfect horizontal that can really go across all these different types of formats, products and media. I personally believe it is the emotional heart of these franchises and these brands. The music is telling you how to feel whenever you are in these stories.”
Are there any parts of the music catalogue for which you feel a special responsibility?
“For me personally, I was just a huge Lord Of The Rings fan, from a little girl reading those books and then seeing those films come out in the early 2000s. I thought they were just spectacular pieces of filmmaking. So the idea that I’m now involved in some way with that kind of musical fingerprint and Howard Shore’s music is just a complete joy.”
Interstellar Live at the Royal Albert Hall (credit: Andy Paradise)
What does your recent AMC deal encompass?
“So that’s all of The Walking Dead series and offshoots, an extraordinary franchise. We continue to work very closely with AMC on their ongoing series. So we’re right now in the midst of working on the next season of Interview With A Vampire, which is very musically themed. In the Anne Rice books, the vampire turns into a rock god, so we’ve been having a lot of fun with that this season.”
What are the opportunities in terms of revenue from short form and social media?
“We’re involved anywhere that royalties get generated. I think it’s really interesting, over the last couple of years, how essentially all of these music libraries now are accessible for people just to soundtrack their own lives. So you can put the Lord Of The Rings theme on your own Instagram video, your own TikTok video, and it really does bring this cinematic weight. Historically, there was a concern about cannibalisation [of royalties]. But what we’ve really seen play out is that the more that people are allowed to use these things, it actually does just keep generating more and more money.”
What’s the main revenue driver for Cutting Edge?
“I would say the main growth is in more of the traditional SVOD streaming services, Netflix, HBO Max and the like. There is growth both in terms of subscription pricing and in terms of subscriber growth, particularly in international territories. So the royalties generated are directly tied to the overall health and revenue of those platforms. As we’re seeing a trend for those types of services to grow more and more, that’s giving a tailwind to all of the music royalties.”
Are there new growth areas?
“One area that we believe will become more and more dominant over the next few years is on advertising video on demand, which is a major focus for a lot of these platforms to broaden out alongside their premium subscription offering. When you think about it that way, YouTube is the largest entertainment platform across the board, and it is essentially an advertising video on demand platform. We’re finding a lot of long-form content that performs well on YouTube, not just short-form content.”
There is really a huge dedicated fanbase who love soundtracks… they’ve formed this connection to the music in this emotional storytelling
Tara Finegan
Has audio streaming helped to further commercialise the soundtrack space in music?
“There is really a huge dedicated fanbase who love soundtracks for their underlying musicality, but also love the fact that they’ve formed this connection to the music in this emotional storytelling, and they want to relive that by listening to it on Spotify. I think this past year in particular has really shown how important music is to film and television. Wicked is a big example, movies like A Complete Unknown and K-Pop Demon Hunters, which obviously platformed on Netflix, but if you look at their singalong karaoke version that went into movie theatres and how many people came out to see that, it’s just extraordinary.”
How do you work with video game music at Cutting Edge?
“It’s a growth area and it’s an area we’ve been focused on for a very long time. Within Cutting Edge, Lakeshore records has been a pioneer in getting video game soundtracks out. It campaigned for quite a long time for the Grammys to award a separate category for best video game music, which happened a couple of years ago now, because of the artistry in that space.”
How is the soundtrack live concert sector performing?
“We have a division that focuses on live-to-picture concerts where you have an orchestra who plays the score live to the actual film. We’re seeing more and more fans come out for those types of events. We’re seeing that industry grow year on year.”
Finally with Cutting Edge representing a music catalogue worth $1 billion, how do you reflect on the scale of the business that has built up over two decades?
“I’m delighted. The ambition we had when we started 20 years ago, we’ve definitely reached. And we see a lot more places to go, which is what’s so exciting about it. Even having reached that kind of pinnacle of that amount of catalogue under management, we still know that there’s a great deal of depth in this media music space, and there’s a lot more we can do. When we closed the Warner Bros [Discovery] deal, our CEO, Philip [Philip Moross], said, ‘We’ve tackled Everest, now we have to go after all the other peaks.’”