Casey Wasserman, 2025 (Photo: Joyce N. Boghosian)
Watching stuff go down in flames is never easy, though Wasserman majority owner Providence Equity Partners is sporting a stiff upper lip.
After Wasserman Music suffered yet-another major artist defection — this time involving mega-superstars Imagine Dragons — serious questions are now surfacing on the future of this once-lofty Hollywood agency. Various birdies landing on DMN’s shoulders have pointed to even bigger artist exits ahead, as if Chappell Roan, Imagine Dragons, John Summit, and others weren’t enough.
Incidentally, it’s still unclear whether Imagine Dragons cut ties because of Wasserman’s flirty emails involving Jeffrey Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell back in 2003. For starters, Imagine’s deal may only be linked to North American representation, and the broader divorce appears to be rooted in factors that went way beyond the Epstein scandal.
Indeed, in the ultra-competitive agency world, artists are constantly weighing competitive offers — and often following their super-agents to their newfound companies.
Either way, Casey Wasserman has now agreed to sell his baby, apparently after facing a mutiny on deck from frazzled mega-agents. But Wasserman reportedly only owns a sizable minority — roughly 40% — while Providence Equity Partners owns the controlling 60%. So how might his duo dispose of the Wasserman Agency?
In an email to Digital Music News on Friday, Providence insisted that Wasserman won’t be broken up.
“We believe strongly in the value of the business as a whole and we are not currently considering a break-up of the company, as some have inaccurately speculated,” a Providence spokesperson emailed.
That followed a spicy report by TheWrap that claimed Providence was pressuring Wasserman to immediately divest his 40%, then calculating to break up the various Wasserman divisions sell them piecemeal. Apparently, Wasserman had plans to ride out the brouhaha over his Ghislaine exchanges before getting back to business, though Providence didn’t like the idea of sipping a martini while its jumbo-jet investment crashed.
Also in the mix here is investment bank Moelis & Co., which is theoretically attempting to follow Providence’s wishes by selling the thing whole. But let’s see how that attempt fares.
Meanwhile, more than a few onlookers are wondering why Casey Wasserman is getting broiled to this extent.
Few in Hollywood or the music industry would characterize Wasserman as a beacon of wholesomeness. But Wasserman’s verified crimes ultimately amount to sexual email exchanges with Ghislaine and a trip to Africa on the Epstein plane — more than twenty years ago.
That might explain Wasserman’s strategy to ride this one out while pointing to ‘limited’ exchanges, though perhaps Chappell Roan triggered a domino effect that was simply impossible to stop. And in an industry that revolves around talent, the resulting artist fallout — fitting of the crimes or not — is now having a seriously damaging impact on the ultimate valuation Wasserman Music and the broader Wasserman Agency.
Whether the next domino to fall involved Wasserman’s chairmanship of the ‘LA28’ Olympics committee remains to be seen, though Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is pushing for his dismissal.
