By Ralph Greco, Jr.
“Money it’s a…”
It seems that the crick will rise, locusts will circle, and pink pigs will fly. My beloved Pink Floyd (or what is left of it) managed to quell their historic in-fighting and near-agreements and finally reached a deal to sell the rights to their recorded music to Sony Music. The deal is reported to be worth just around the $400 million mark.
The money to be handed over is also for rights to the band’s name and likenesses, but not songwriting copyrights, which the individual songwriters will retain. As is true of anybody’s recorded music, the Pink Floyd songs carry two sets of copyrights — one covering the actual songwriting; the other, the actual recordings, or master copy.
David Gilmour, guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and Floyd’s designated leader after Roger Waters’ departure (and lawsuit) said that he doesn’t really care what Sony does with the recordings, “If it comes on an advert, I’m not gonna give a shit,” he claimed, happy as he is to give up the “last 40-odd years trying to fight the good fight against the forces of indolence and greed to do the best with our stuff that you can do.”
Who can blame or damn the guy?
The end of all this Floydian brouhaha comes a good year-and-a-half after Pink Floyd seemingly saw a $500 million deal die. At that time, more than just Sony was in the mix to buy the band’s catalog. By all accounts, the actual deal was stalled over questions about interest rates and taxes, how strong the pound wasn’t at the time, and the worry over that fact that ex-Floyd bassist, songwriter, vocalist Roger Waters had been making some interesting, if not downright provocative political and cultural statements to the press.
As of late, we are seeing more and more vintage rock artists taking the big payout, although not all are as lucrative as the sale of Pink Floyd’s catalog. As touring becomes more problematic for anybody reaching their seventh and maybe even eighth decade (not everybody is Mick Jagger), and musical trends changing as fast as how people disseminate (some would say steal) their favorite music, it seems a welcome boost for an artist to get what they can in a big final sale. Setting up a comfortable (numb or not) rest of one’s days, as well as fattening the bank accounts of one’s kids and even grandkids is just too good to pass up.
Is this technically ‘selling out?’ Hell, one could say that once you reach the level of signing a record deal, shaking hands with a devil machine that could keep you on the road and making records year after year, pretty much locked into a relationship where the artist feels like an indentured servant (and lots of the old contracts these vintage artists signed really did lock them in like this), that one pretty much sells out in the strictest sense of the terms. And let’s not look too deeply at supposed classic bands still touring who don’t even feature any original members. If this is not bamboozling audiences for coin of the realm, I don’t know what is.
I would come down just as hard on any ‘new’ act who go out each night lip syncing in front of paying audiences. Yes, you know who you are!
Be it a Bruuuuuce, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, David Crosby — no one but the artist can say what’s right or wrong for their career and sensibility and if they should or shouldn’t “grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”
Selling out? Nah, not really, and surely there are worse things.
