Primary Wave Music has announced a partnership with the estate of legendary R&B singer Donna Summer, best known for such disco-era hits as “I Feel Love,” “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff” and many others.
Summer’s estate will work alongside Primary Wave on her award-winning music catalog and recordings, as well as share in her name, image, and likeness rights, utilizing Primary Wave’s marketing team and publishing infrastructure, working closely on new marketing, branding, digital, and synch opportunities, as well as film & television projects.
Summer, who died in 2012, has sold an estimated 100 million-plus albums worldwide and dominated the music charts in the late 1970s, many of them via her musical partnership with producer/cowriter Giorgio Moroder. Among many other feats, she was the first female artist in history to record four Hot 100 No. 1 songs in a 13-month span including “MacArthur Park” and “No More Tears (Enough is Enough” with Barbara Streisand, as well as “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls”, all included in this new partnership, as are the hits “She Works Hard For The Money,” “Last Dance,” “On The Radio,” “Love To Love You Baby,” and others.
Summer was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2025, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the early ‘90s.
While Summer is best known for her lustrous voice and her hits, her work with Moroder was immediately noticed by legendary music innovator Brian Eno, who was recording the pioneering “Low” album with David Bowie when he first heard “I Feel Love,” with its pulsating synthesized rhythms. Eno famously walked into the studio and told Bowie: “I have heard the future!” Of all of Summer’s hits, that song may be the most influential.