Vivendi's Universal Music, the world's biggest music company, sold 90,000 songs yesterday, including the European publishing rights to most of the Spice Girls' hits, for about £75 million.

The buyer was CP Masters, a little-known Dutch music publishing company, in conjunction with ABP, a Dutch pension fund. The deal was understood to include music copyrights for the Backstreet Boys and Bryan Adams.

Universal Music was told to dispose of the songs to meet competition concerns over its $2 billion (£1.1 billion) deal to buy BMG Music Publishing. That created the world's biggest music publishing group, overtaking EMI. Regulators at the European Commission had expressed concerns that the deal would have put Universal in control of more than half the hits on the charts.

Music publishing is the lesser-known half of the music business, in which revenues are generated from royalties attached to the song as opposed to the individual recording. Widely seen as being a safer bet than recorded music, publishing generates revenues from radio airplay as well as from music sales, on which recorded revenues depend.

CP Masters beat off competition from the Los Angeles-based Bug Music, which is also bidding for Chrysalis, the quoted music publisher put up for sale by its founder Chris Wright. CP Masters is the music publishing arm of CTM, an independent television and film production company. It will work with ABP on future acquisitions. It owns the music copyrights to songs by Johnny Nash, Macy Gray, Eric Clapton and Aerosmith.

Separately, Universal is poised to buy the rights to distribute a CD by the Jonas Brothers for Walt Disney in Europe, replacing EMI. It has triggered speculation that Disney is preparing to switch the distribution of its catalogue in Europe and most of Asia from EMI when its current agreement expires within the next year.

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