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HarbourView Equity Partners likes to present itself as a straight-faced asset manager, not a celebrity buyer. Yet its name keeps showing up beside artists who shaped the streaming era. In February 2025, the firm agreed to buy T-Pain’s publishing catalogue and select masters, a deal that later became a talking point after the artist described it publicly as a $100 million sale.
Sherrese Clarke Soares, HarbourView’s founder and chief executive, came up through structured finance, then decided to build a firm that could own the assets rather than just lend against them. HarbourView launched publicly in October 2021, backed by Apollo-linked capital, and set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, close enough to New York’s money, far enough to signal independence.
A childhood shaped by hustle and numbers
Clarke Soares keeps some personal details private. Her exact birthdate is not widely published, though an industry profile in 2022 described her as 45, placing her birth in the mid-1970s.
What she does talk about is how she grew up, and who taught her to think in deals. She has credited her father, Desmond Clarke, a Jamaican immigrant who drove a taxi while studying, then moved into real estate, building a brokerage and investing in property. She has described listening at home as he worked through transactions, interest costs and risk, in plain language that made finance feel practical rather than abstract.
Music ran alongside the numbers. Clarke Soares has been described as a classically trained pianist, and she acted as a child. That mix matters because it shaped the way she later talks about music rights. Songs are culture, yes, but they are also contracts, royalties, usage data and long-tailed payments that can be modelled.
The early lesson was simple: ownership changes the outcome. It is one thing to advise on a deal or arrange the lending. It is another to sit on the asset and collect for years.
Harvard and Wall Street built her toolkit
Clarke Soares studied finance at Georgetown, then joined Morgan Stanley early in her career. She left to attend Harvard Business School, earning her MBA in the mid-2000s, then returned to the world of credit and entertainment finance.
Her path through the industry is important because it explains HarbourView’s posture today. This is not a firm built around artist access or social proof. It is built around underwriting. Clarke Soares worked in entertainment finance at CIT Group and later returned to Morgan Stanley, rising to managing director and working on capital solutions tied to entertainment, media and sports assets.
Inside a bank, that work is about structure and downside protection. Cashflows are discounted, covenants are debated, and the asset has to keep paying even when sentiment turns. Those instincts now sit at the centre of HarbourView’s pitch to institutional investors.
Tempo Music was the bridge between financing and ownership. Backed by Providence Equity Partners, with Warner Music Group involved strategically, Tempo was designed to buy rights and manage them, not just lend against them. Clarke Soares ran it as founding chief executive, then left and began building HarbourView.
She has said publicly that she resigned from Tempo in late 2020 and started working on HarbourView in early 2021, before the October launch.
HarbourView scaled fast through disciplined buying
HarbourView’s timing was sharp. Investors were hunting yield, streaming was providing clearer consumption signals, and music royalties were being sold as a durable alternative asset. Apollo-linked capital gave HarbourView the credibility and balance sheet to compete in auctions, where speed and certainty matter.
The firm moved quickly. One of its early headline deals was the purchase of Latin star Luis Fonsi’s publishing catalogue, anchored by the global hit “Despacito”. It was an early marker that HarbourView would not confine itself to the usual Anglo-American catalogue lane.
It then added transactions across genres and eras, including stakes tied to legacy repertoire such as Christine McVie’s recorded royalties, and rights connected to Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo. It also leaned into modern catalogue value, doing deals in hip hop and pop where streaming still drives meaningful revenue.
T-Pain sits neatly inside that logic. His work is not just a nostalgia trade. His songs keep resurfacing in playlists, social video, samples and licensing, which is the point. The asset is not the artist’s current chart position. The asset is the persistence of listening, and the legal right to collect when listening happens.
Behind the headlines, HarbourView has also built financing capacity. Royalty streams can be used as collateral, and the firm has tapped lenders and structured facilities to keep buying without relying solely on equity cheques. That matters in a market where catalogue prices can jump quickly, and where sellers want confidence a buyer can close.
Clarke Soares has also signalled that HarbourView is not a pure-play music shop. The firm has taken stakes in media businesses, and it has described itself as investing across entertainment and sports, with music as the engine that built early scale.
Her bet is clear, and it is not romantic. Songs with proven demand behave less like speculative art and more like contracted consumption, especially when bundled, financed and professionally managed. If that sounds clinical, it is meant to. The point is to make music rights legible to pension funds and insurers.
The next test will come from the cycle. Capital gets more expensive, bidding wars cool, and buyers have to show that cashflows can hold up without hype. Clarke Soares has lived through those shifts from inside a bank. Now she is running the platform that has to perform when the mood changes, and when the songs have to do the work.
