Dark side

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This week’s memo is about Pink Floyd’s $400 million music rights deal with Sony. It might be the most drama-filled deal to date, so it’s a great opportunity to discuss the various aspects of how complicated deals get over the finish line. Let’s dive in.

Pink Floyd’s drama-filled deal

It’s the deal that dragged on for years. Pink Floyd’s music rights sale has had plenty of twists and turns, like a screenplay stuck in development hell. But the legendary English rock band has agreed to sell its recorded music, name, image, and likeness to Sony Music for $400 million.

It’s a discount from the $500 million that floated around in 2022. But it’s rare to see a deal that large that doesn’t include publishing rights. Pink Floyd’s publishing belongs to the individual members who have been at odds for nearly 40 years. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour reiterated that he has no plans to tour alongside fellow band member Roger Waters due to Waters’ comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accusations of anti-Semitism, among other disputes.

For Sony, the lack of publishing rights, plus Waters’ reputation sensitivity, makes any Pink Floyd biopic, sync licensing, and other multimedia opportunities harder to pull off. Instead, this Pink Floyd deal should be looked at as a pure streaming revenue play given its focus on recorded music.

Pink Floyd has nearly 20 songs in Spotify’s 500 most streamed songs from the 1970s, more than any other act from the decade. The group’s most popular song, “Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2,” will likely join Spotify’s Billions Streams Club in 2025. Other acts from the decade, like Fleetwood Mac, may have bigger hits, but Pink Floyd’s distribution of streams among its hit songs is relatively more spread out.

The group’s name, image, and likeness rights are a nice addition to the deal for Sony Music. The album cover for Dark Side of the Moon is so ingrained in pop culture that younger generations may be more familiar with its merchandise than the underlying fourth-best-selling album of all time. It’s a sign that the band’s cultural relevance can live on with future generations, regardless of how many Pink Floyd songs the youth can name.

Pink Floyd’s music rights sale is a contrast to Sony’s other recent mega-deal for another 70s British rock band. In July, the major label paid $1.2 billion for Queen’s catalog and various rights.

In the 1970s, Pink Floyd was more popular than Queen. Floyd’s albums sold more and its music was more critically acclaimed. But the script flipped over the following decades. Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and the group never toured as a whole or made new music as a complete group ever again.

Meanwhile, Queen continued to tour and had legendary performances like 1985’s Live Aid benefit concert. Queen’s lead voice, Freddie Mercury, became a symbol for the AIDS epidemic and gay rights, two societal issues that evolved in their public perception and understanding over time, especially after Mercury’s death in 1991. And thanks to memorable sync placements in Wayne’s World (1992), the long legs of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which is Spotify’s 30th most-streamed song of all time), and a $910 million-grossing 2018 biopic, Queen’s legacy continues to live on.

Despite the absence of Queen’s recorded music rights from the deal (which sat with Disney), Queen’s rights sold for 3x the price of Pink Floyd’s rights to the same major record label. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison given the masters and publishing differences, but even if the elements were identical, Queen’s would still sell for much more.

Pink Floyd and Queen’s value in music rights is another example of how music popularity can shift over time for a wide range of reasons. There are examples like this every decade. For instance, in 2016, Adele was widely considered one of the two or three most popular artists of the decade given her massive album sales. But in future decades, it will be fascinating to see how her music’s popularity will compare to Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, and other peers from the same era.

Chartmetric Stat of the Week - Pink Floyd

As of today, the legendary British rock band has 18.5 million monthly listeners. It’s an impressive number for Pink Floyd since it’s not too far off from the 19.7 million who listen to U2, a group with more recent music and still actively tours today!

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