When Shaboozey counts one to five on his fingers in his Billboard-topping hit A Bar Song (Tipsy), more than four million savers with the FTSE 100 fund manager M&G should be singing along.
The American singer, who belted out a rendition of the earworm to crowds at Glastonbury this year, spent a record-breaking 19 weeks at No 1 with the song last summer.
The three-minute track about downing double shots of whisky is punctuated with Shaboozey’s distinctive counting rhyme, which is based — “interpolated”, in music industry jargon — on a 2004 hit by the American rapper J-Kwon. That earlier song is owned by a company belonging to M&G and, in a bizarre twist, this encouraged Shaboozey to borrow from it.
M&G’s role in Shaboozey’s success is down to a business called Seeker Music, which the fund manager set up in 2020 with a view to investing in the music industry.
The Californian-based business buys music catalogues to receive…
