There’s gold in them thar hills, though precisely how much varies wildly. I’m talking about old music, by which I am currently surrounded. Here is a three-CD compilation of the work of the late singer-songwriter John Martyn, maverick creator of the classic album Solid Air. It is £5.99, with an MP3 version thrown in; not so much gold. A great deal less, for example, than the £84.99 one would need to stump up for a vinyl version of Anthology: A Very British Synthesizer Group, last year’s gathering of the Human League’s greatest hits. It is described as “deluxe”; it would want to be. (Yes, it is unfair to compare CD and vinyl; much vinyl is expensive. You can also purchase Anthology on CD for £12.99, and on CD plus DVD for an eye-watering £79.99. Don’t you want me, baby? Not for that money, I don’t.)
However it is packaged, there is no more valuable back catalogue than that of the Beatles: globally popular, unendingly hip, continuously selling. Even their very first recording contract has proved lucrative, fetching $75,000 at auction in 2015. Not only was the band pre-Brian Epstein and pre-Ringo Starr, it wasn’t even called the Beatles, with John, Paul, George and Pete Best signing under the name the Beat Brothers. That was back in 1961, and a lot of water – and even more paperwork – has flowed under the bridge since; so why, in his 75th year, his life apparently settled and certainly solvent, is Paul McCartney preparing to dip his toe in?
In brief – and because it is near unfathomable without signing over years of your life to legal study and taking a jeweller’s eyepiece to a forest of small print – McCartney is firing a shot across the bows of Sony/ATM, which holds the rights to many Beatles songs, including Let It Be and Yesterday. Those rights are set to revert to McCartney in 2018, but, partly due to a roughly similar case involving Sony/ATV and Duran Duran, which the band lost last month, he appears not entirely confident that this will come to pass, not least because Sony is not returning his calls.
Why is Sony giving Sir Paul the cold shoulder? Doesn’t it know who he is? The suggestion is that the company is waiting to see how Duran Duran’s challenge to the high court, which ruled that English contract law excluded them from seeking reversion of rights in the US, pans out before it makes its move.
There’s a touch of “let no good deed go unpunished” about all this. McCartney certainly has reason to wish that back in the 1980s he had not advised Michael Jackson that a good way to mobilise his surplus cash was by buying up the rights to songs, as he himself had done with artists such as Buddy Holly. Jackson took to this new activity with zeal and, some years later and via the purchase of ATV music for $47.5m, found himself in a position to, as it were, buy the Beatles. Later, Jackson oversaw the company’s merger with Sony; after his death, his estate sold his share back to Sony/ATV for a cool $750m. Good advice, Macca!
There is also, of course, a definite hint of #firstworldproblems #thestruggleisreal. McCartney is not about to have to flog off a townhouse or a slab of rolling countryside just yet. It’s perhaps more likely that he’s reaching a time in his life when he wants his affairs in order and optimised for his family’s benefit. But as well as provisions for the future, there is also a strong nod to the past.
Vincent van Gogh notwithstanding, one can make the argument that musicians, more than any other artists, have been exploited and impoverished by the industry in which they work: the blues musicians of the 30s and 40s, the jazzers of the 40s and 50s and most of the gold disc generation of 60s and 70s rockers signed contracts and made deals that led to remuneration that in no way reflected their artistic importance and commercial success. (This is slightly complicated by the fact that they have from time to time exploited one another; see Led Zeppelin and the series of court cases in which they have been forced to acknowledge the “influence” of several blues giants.)
As ever, there is often a class element at play. The Beatles, as McCartney told David Letterman in the aftermath of Jackson’s death, “got signed when we were 21 or something in a back alley in Liverpool”; they’ve surely made plenty of dough, but probably not as much as if they had been more sharply advised. The lower-middle class kids, the Rolling Stones, for instance, were a touch wiser to the game; their lawyer had as important a seat at the table as their manager. Fast forward to the 21st century and see if you can imagine the likes of Coldplay (sorry, Coldplay, you are always the example) signing up to an arrangement that had not been rigorously examined from every angle.
Similarly, as with the pre-TV money footballers, those household names who hail from the middle of the last century onward missed out on the truly kerching! stadium-tours-plus-merchandise years. Hence so many of them forcing themselves out of their home studios in the depths of leafy Surrey to reprise the life of the road.
So with that in mind, and against the backdrop of a vastly confusing era of global copyrights being policed across platforms that have yet to be invented, we might implore Sony to let it go. Give Macca back his rights and give peace a chance (I know, wrong Beatle).
Despite the vast amount of money involved, there are surely bigger issues to fight, key among them ensuring a viable culture in which musicians can make music. And there are many other avenues for the budding entrepreneur. Think of the seemingly unfettered appetite for vinyl, so popular that even not having a record player is no barrier to purchase! But where will all those platters come from?
Step forward the White Stripes’ Jack White, on the verge of opening a climate-controlled pressing plant in Detroit. Meanwhile, I am looking at another purchase, this time of new music. It is the latest release from rap duo Run the Jewels and features not only two rather beautiful gold discs and sheets of stickers, but also a piece of neckwear that is part old-school, hip-hop bling, part mayoral chain. I shall put it on the shelf next to my Run the Jewels virtual reality headset. Man, the times, they really are a-changin’.
