A LITTLE-KNOWN independent British music business has beaten the world’s main record companies in securing the rights to thousands of hours of footage of artists, from the Rolling Stones to Radiohead, who have played at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The festival has agreed to a multimillion-pound offer from Eagle Rock Entertainment, based in London, to market the footage for DVDs and television.

Terry Shand, the executive chairman of Eagle Rock, said the company planned to spend “tens of millions of pounds” over the coming decade producing more than 100 DVDs of the concerts that have played at the festival over the past 37 years.

Claude Nobs, the founder of the festival, has been pursued for decades by the major music companies for the rights to reproduce footage of artists that have also included David Bowie, Paul Simon, The Corrs, and Bob Dylan.

M Nobs said that Eagle had “the qualities that Montreux Sounds needs in a worldwide distributor”.

Mr Shand said that Eagle’s offer had been selected over rival bids because of its neutrality in dealing with such a diversity in the range of artists. “If Sony had won it, then EMI or BMG might have had concerns about how their artists were going to be reproduced.”

He added that reproductions of the concerts would be be made only when the company had secured agreements from the record companies behind the various artists. The total archive of footage amounts to 3,500 hours, much of which is exclusive to Eagle Rock. The deal was secured at the recent Midem music trade fair in Cannes. The terms of the agreement are confidential, but it is understood that Eagle Rock paid an upfront fee and will also share a proportion of the profits with Montreux Sounds.

Mr Shand, along with Geoff Kempin and Julian Paul, took control of Eagle Rock in 2001 from Edel, the German music group, in a £34 million management buyout backed by HgCapital.

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