Warner Music Group (WMG) and the estate of David Bowie have signed a global, career-spanning partnership for Bowie’s recorded music catalog. With this new deal, Warner Music will now have worldwide rights to five decades of Bowie’s output including the most recent Heathen, Reality, The Next Day, and Blackstar. Details of how these reissues arrive outside of the Era series of box sets have not yet been disclosed.
Also up for speculation is the fate of Bowie’s two albums as a member of Tin Machine, of which nothing has been divulged in press releases.
It is suspected that Warner will take a similar approach to the Bowie discography as it has with Prince, the Paisley Park vaults, and posthumous releases. While under the Columbia banner, many of Bowie’s latter day efforts came in both single and double-disc configurations featuring b-sides and songs that did not make the cut. A gathering of such material appeared online (not officially) shortly after 2002’s Heathen. Titled Toy, it included b-sides, early versions of other tracks, and other things. It would not be inconceivable to see more of that material finally coming to light with this deal.