THE BOSS MAKES BANK: Bruce Springsteen sells his entire music catalogue for $500m.
Bruce Springsteen has sold the master recordings and publishing rights for his life’s work to Sony for a reported $500m (£376m).
The deal gives Sony ownership of his 20 studio albums, including classics like Born To Run, The River and Born In The USA, according to multiple US reports.
A 20-time Grammy winner, Springsteen’s music generated about $15m in revenue last year.
Warner Music bought the worldwide rights to Bowie’s music in September, and Dylan sold his catalogue of more than 600 songs in December last year to Universal Music Group at a purchase price widely reported as $300m.
The deals provide immediate financial security to the artists and their estates, while the rights-holders hope to profit by building new revenue streams for the music via film and TV licensing, merchandise, cover versions and performance royalties.
But will Bruce survive the Great Forgetting?
As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.
In the meantime, while Springsteen has been a Democratic Party operative with a Shure SM58 microphone for decades, given his many songs over the decades worshiping muscle cars and his hatred of zero carbon emission nuclear power plants, in today’s lefty freakout environment of “we only have 12 years left before the climate apocalypse,” why aren’t they shunning “The Boss” for such reactionary views?
Related: ‘Born In the USA’ Now Fits The Conservative Message.
It’s a trenchant commentary on the failures of the Great Society and radical environmentalism.