Apparently Happy Birthday to You is owned by AOL Time Warner and brings in about $2 million/year.
For 6 notes!
I’m wowed. That’s… capitalism at work.
True capitalism:
I’m going to learn to program, then I’m going to get myself a very fancy industrial-powered computer, and I’m going to make it write every combination of notes not as yet written. I’ll copyright all of them, and then I will be the only future of music.
Anything that’s not melodic in nature I’ll license to jazz musicians; the rest will go to advertisers of automobiles.