Music Legal Elite 2025: Meet the Attorneys Behind the Top Stars, Big Deals and Complex Cases Rocking the Biz from AI and Beyonce to Shaboozey and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
For the top attorneys on this year’s Music Legal Elite list, it is a time of plenty. After being decimated by illegal downloading in the 2000s, the music business is riding high on legal streaming, which hit $20.5 billion in global revenues in 2024, marking a 4.8% year-over-year increase, according to the IFPI Global Music Report 2025. This has, in turn, bolstered the brisk market for lawyers who broker music catalog deals, such as Big Loud’s sale of a minority interest in Morgan Wallen’s catalog to Chord Music Partners for $200 million in April. Touring and brand deals have also been increasingly lucrative. But looming over it all is AI, which has opened up a new and largely unsettled legal frontier, rich with opportunities for both litigation and dealmaking.
Elsa Ramo, Michael Peters
Founder; managing partner
Michael Peters
Senior associate
Ramo
Ramo yearned to be involved in the music end of the business, but by the time she launched her firm in 2005, Napster had effectively obliterated that dream. But, six years ago, she decided to add attorney and multi-instrumentalist Peters to help to serve the multimedia music needs of her client roster. Together, they have applied their expertise to live concert specials (“The Weeknd Live at SoFi”), interactive music experiences (Netfilx’s “The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience”), music festivals (Elements Music Festival) and film scores (“Bride Hard”).
AI music tools for film and TV auteurs: “A lot of filmmakers have very precise and inspired musical ideas, but they just don’t have the background, the technical ability or the training to execute them,” says Peters. “You might get a lot more personal music on lower-budget projects than you’ve ever seen before.”
View this article at Variety.
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