Negotiations had been going on in the background for a long time, on Monday Warner Chappell Music and the heirs of David Bowie then gave up a press release out: Accordingly, the US music publisher has bought the worldwide publishing rights to the entire work of the singer and composer who died in 2016. No amount was officially named, the portal Variety however, cites unnamed sources, according to which Warner will pay $ 250 million (around 220 million euros).
The deal includes all David Bowie songs that have ever been released, including material that he used for soundtracks or his band project Tin Machine wrote – a total of hundreds of pieces such as “Space Oddity”, “Changes”, “Let’s Dance”, “Ziggy Stardust”, “Starman”, “Heroes” or “Fame”. The rights to the recordings of Bowie’s music since 1968 already belonged to the music label Warner Music – both companies belong to the Warner Music Group.
In the past few months, many artists who were still alive had also sold the rights to their songs. Around mid-December it became known that Bruce Springsteen ceded all of his rights to Sony – according to New York Times for $ 500 million. Also ZZ top, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon took the last step. The reasons are, among other things, declining sales of sound carriers and, due to the pandemic, collapsing concert income – while revenues from the streaming and series boom are becoming more valuable for the industry.