Music Publishing

"The fourth quarter will belong to the Beatles," Mr. Bandier predicts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/business/23marty.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em

I'm tired of them already and the overkill hasn't even started yet. *sigh*

I know/I'm sure we've had threads on this specific subject but anyway -- good new Geoff Edgers piece in WaPo (gift link) on various facets of large catalog sales these days etc. Plus some anecdotes, thus:

This spring, a commercial for the home fix-it service Frontdoor began circulating with a tune anyone with an FM radio or MTV in 1985 would know intimately. Except, somehow the words were wrong. Yes, “We Built This City,” the No. 1 hit for Starship, had been recast and rerecorded as “We Fixed This Toilet.”

“I thought it was disgusting and a new low for the business,” said Jeff Jampol, who manages Starship but does not control the publishing of the band’s biggest hit.

He texted Cimino, since Universal administers the song.

But Jampol should have been grumbling to Martin Page, who wrote “We Built This City” with longtime Elton John collaborator Bernie Taupin. He was thrilled about the use. Page and Taupin could have blocked the commercial. Page first heard about it from his manager.

“I said, ‘What’s it about?’” Page said. “She said, ‘Plumbing.’ I was like, wow. And when she told me the amount of money they were going to pay, you go like, ‘Uh, okay.’”

“We Fixed This Toilet” is pretty funny, ngl!

True! And makes me think of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtubs_Over_Broadway

How dare they tarnish the integrity of "We Built This City". Marconi must be rolling in his grave

“The crapper by the bay, the commode that rocks, the shitter that never sleeps…”

Marconi must have used a mamba to unclog that toilet

We adjusted the fill tube
And swapped in a shorter chain
Oh, now it’s silent
We fixed this toilet
We fixed this toilet that kept running…

“He hasn’t put out a Smokey Robinson watch” is a very good way to get me on the side of the rich asshole buying Justin Bieber’s catalogue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3JiWJbQ7tY

Thanks for the gift link Ned! Fascinating piece, very bizarre, it sounds like some of these...song investment firms? Aren't merely licencing tunes for commercials but also working with the songwriters themselves in a promotional/marketing capacity, isn't that what record labels used to do? In theory?

Or is this what publishing companies used to do? Maybe both? Anyways I guess I'm glad that Lindsey Buckingham gets 100 million dollars before his inevitable toilet commercial

and if you don't fix me now
you will never flush me again

^some recent articles on this:
https://pitchfork.com/features/overtones/everything-is-interpolated-inside-musics-nostalgia-industrial-complex/
https://www.billboard.com/pro/merck-mercuriadis-hipgnosis-billboard-cover-story-interview-2021/

Why don't you ask him who's pooping wrong?
Why don't you ask him as he sits on the throne?
Don't say that you strain well
Just tell me that you wipe well
Flush

Anyway what I really like about the piece, per milo z, is the shade these assholes attempt to deliver on one another.