I guess Michael Jackson “owns the rights” to the Beatle’s song catalogue. Leaving aside how wrong that is on the face of it, in what way does he actually profit from this ownership? With all the rumors that he is going broke, isn’t it strange that he isn’t he licensing Beatle tunes like crazy to the likes of Nike, Apple, IBM, SBC, and so on, to raise some cash? What prevents him from doing this?
Does Michael make a buck every time a Beatles tune is played on the radio, or every time their sheet music is sold, or every time a White Album CD is bought, or all three or none of the above? Along those lines, how profitable is it to own the rights to a popular song? If I owned the rights to…say… “Yesterday,” would I ever have to work a day in my life?
Finally, is there a connection between Jackson owning the rights to the songs, and the fact that (almost) none of the Beatle’s albums have been re-mastered?
Thus Spake Cecil (from 1995)
Jackson had apparently taken out loans using the songs as collateral and risked losing them at one time. I don’t know the current status.
Thank you Mr. Blue Sky. I should have checked Cecil first :smack: what was I thinking? Several of my questions above are still interesting to me though:
What if I DID own the rights to “Yesterday?” Or, even "Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? What might something like this bring in over the course of a year?
And, is the reason the Beatles stuff hasn’t been re-mastered because they don’t want to put one thin dime in MJ’s pockets?
That didn’t stop them from releasing the Anthologies, the Yellow Submarine Songtrack, Beatles 1, or Let It Be … Naked, so I’m gonna say no, it has nothing to do with Jackson. Besides, the Songtrack and the Anthology DVDs both contain proper remixes of Beatles tracks, so it’s not like it’s never happened at all. So why not redo the entire catalog?
For one thing—and this is probably the most important—the Beatles and George Martin mastered the Beatles CDs with the intention that fans would never have to buy them again; they considered it improper to charge fans twice for the same material. There have been a few exceptions that I can think of: The 25th Anniversary release of the White Album, which was exactly the same music repackaged in a limited edition, numbered paper sleeve replicating the original. Let It Be … Naked contains quite a bit of material that either wasn’t on the original at all or was present in different form. And the Capitol box set is mostly old wine in new bottles, but it does use the mixes that were created for those albums, including stereo versions of Beatles songs that aren’t otherwise officially available in stereo.
But I think it boils down to the fact that the Beatles and George Martin aren’t interested in rewriting history (much); the albums sound the way they did when they came out, and they’re always going to sound like that.
Another thing to consider is there are technical challenges to remastering some of the Beatles’ work. The first album was recorded onto twin track mono with no post-production mixing at all; it sounds as good as it’s ever going to, apart perhaps from some noise reduction. Some of their more ambitious productions like “Tomorrow Never Knows” were created by playing the mixing desk as an instrument; you could recreate something similar to the current master, but it would be impossible to reproduce exactly what John Lennon did at that session.
Some dudes write a bunch of songs. Why shouldn’t they be able to sell the rights to those songs to someone else and make a pile of money? It’s not like Michael Jackson stole the songs. He paid for them. A lot.
I agree that the technical challenges would be great for re-mastering some of the tunes–Revolution #9 and a lot of Sgt. Peppers come immediately to mind–but when you listen to the stuff from “One” next to their counterparts in the current CD mixes, I think the public would be getting their money’s worth in a new attempt of any kind.
Why is it “wrong” for MJ to own the Beatles catalogue? 'Cause it’s him. If the catalogue was all owned by Sony, I wouldn’t care, but MJ owning the Beatles? It’s like Wal-Mart buying A Starry Night and hanging it in their corporate headquarters.
It feels “icky” to a lot of people that he owns the publishing rights to those songs. [I’ve met a bunch of them who blame Yoko, even though it had nothing to do with her - proving that some people will blame Yoko for anything.] But I don’t think Paul is interested in owning them anyway. If Jackson is or goes broke, Sony will have them and I suppose nobody involved will care.
I remember seeing on a show on E! that Paul McCartney asked Jackson to buy the songs as a favor to him (he needed money I suppose), since Jackson was a close friend of his at the time. I think it was understood that McCartney would eventually buy them back, but their friendship fell apart when Jackson licensed songs like Revolution for a shoe commercial and such.
I heard it was that Paul was telling Jacko how much he wanted to buy his songs again (he and John had basically been tricked into signing them away when they were teenagers), and how he was having trouble getting Yoko to cooperate. Then Michael turned around and bought them right out under Paul’s nose. Paul was so hurt, and he made fun of Jacko, mimicking his high-pitched voice, “It’s just business, Paul.”
What pissed me off was Katherine Jackson talking about the fact that her son is probably going to lose the rights to them, saying something like, “Well they’re his-he earned them, he deserves them!” No he didn’t, you stupid cow.
You’re talking mainly about remixing, not remastering. You’re absolutely right that many of the Beatles’ more complex tracks would be impossible to recreate from the multitrack masters, but there’s nothing from a technical standpoint stopping EMI from remastering the catalog to give it a better EQ, expand or compress the dynamic levels, and clean up some noise issues.
BTW, George Martin did remix Help and Rubber Soul for their CD releases in 1987, being careful to remain faithful to the original mixes while producing a more balanced stereo image than the primitive '60s stereo mixes.
I remember reading a ‘where are they now?’ article about Andrew Ridgeley (the part of Wham! that wasn’t George Michael). Michael gifted 50% of the rights to the song “Careless Whisper” to Ridgeley; there was some comment to the effect that this was still bringing in £20,000 or so per year for Ridgeley by the late '90s.
This is all from memory, but it’s an approximate idea of the payback that comes from a hit record.
IIRC, Norman Greenbaum has lived fairly comfortably off the royalties on “Spirit in the Sky” since it was released in 1970 (it didn’t even go to #1 - it peaked at #3 in the US).
… and if you owned the rights to “A Day in the Life,” would you have to work yesterday?
My understanding is that most Beatles albums, if not all (?) had band involvement only for the mono mixes. Channeling a lot of that work for stereo was already jiggering with it, which is why some purists are willing to shell out some serious cash for a clean copy of mono Sgt. Pepper on vinyl.
Paul recently told Q magazine that as he is getting older, some long-dormant clauses in his and John’s original publishing agreements are about to be activated, and that ‘some things’ would therefore be reverting to him. He didn’t elaborate any further, but he at least tried to give the impression, as Marley23 said, that it didn’t bother him very much.
Regrettably, he did. They’re his for the same reason that anything you own is yours. It’s not like he got Paul drunk and beat him at Liars Poker. Property belongs to its owner, not to its creator or its most charismatic spokesman.
Paul McCartney owns the Buddy Holly catalogue. Don’t worry about Paul.
