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Music historians will look back at this decade as when some of the biggest catalog deals of all time were made, both in terms of the artists and the money. Since 2020 we’ve seen rock and pop greats like Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie (and randomly also Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry) sell varying degrees of rights for hundreds of millions of dollars. And now add to that list, iconic British rockers Pink Floyd. After apparently difficult negotiations over a few years within the band itself, the group has finally settled on selling their entire music catalog and name and likeness rights to Sony for $400 million. Even once you divide that sum among the members, it should still be enough to make each of them comfortably numb… to debt. AV Club has more reporting on the sale:
Pink Floyd is about to find out if money really is a gas. After what Variety describes as “years of false starts,” the brand has finally completed a deal to sell their entire music catalog as well as their name-and-likeness rights to Sony for $400 million. The deal includes all of the band’s recorded albums — such as hits like The Wall, The Dark Side Of The Moon, and Animals — as well as merchandise, theatrical rights, and presumably, according to Variety, access to their iconic album artwork. Songwriting credits were left out of the deal and will remain with individual writers.
But while the band hypothesized that cash was “the root of all evil” in their 1973 song “Money,” its individual members — lead songwriters Roger Waters and David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and the estates of keyboardists Richard Wright and founding singer-songwriter Roger “Syd” Barrett — might have slightly more nuanced answers if you asked them today. Financial Times, which originally reported the deal, claims that it was delayed at least two years due to infighting among the band about tax structures and, more saliently, some incendiary comments made in recent years by Waters. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Rogers spoke out against Israel, in favor of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and against the United States, which he called “the most evil [country in the world] of all by a factor of at least 10 times.”
In this case, the money might actually buy happiness for at least one member of the band. In a separate Rolling Stone interview, Gilmour said that he wanted to close the deal less for financial reasons than “to be rid of the decision making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going,” which he called “my dream.” In 2018, Mason — who has been caught in the middle of all of this for years — said of the infighting in his own interview with Rolling Stone, “It’s really disappointing these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads.”
Pink Floyd adds to Sony’s growing collection of “heritage” artists, into which they’re invested over a billion dollars in recent years. Other artists in the catalog include Queen, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, and more.
I understand the appeal to older artists of selling off their catalogs for a tidy sum. They won’t be writing and touring (i.e. generating income) the way they used to, and it removes the headache of having to review and approve all uses of their songs. Plus all the time and lawyering it takes just to combat the Trump campaign using stuff without permission! So I get it from that viewpoint. On the other hand, there’s something sad about the best pop cultural music of the 20th century — music borne out of free-minded, free-spirited artists responding to the mad world around them — all belonging to four or five mega corporations. (Yes, I know my hippie is showing.) With Pink Floyd in particular, though, it also appears that a big impetus to sell was some of the members really and truly wanting to run like hell from each other. Within hours of the sale being announced, an interview with guitarist David Gilmour came out in which he unequivocally said he would “absolutely not” ever perform with frontman Roger Waters again. Bandmates having a dramatic falling out? Now that’s classic rock & roll.
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