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Controller of Bob Marley’s publishing inks $50M deal to find new ways to market old material,
When Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, first met a journeyman musician named Bob Marley in1972, he had a feeling the young man might find success.
“He had a kind of aura about him,” Blackwell, 80, said recently. “I had an idea that he could have an impact.”
But Blackwell did not imagine the kind of pop-culture sainthood that Marley ultimately would achieve: tens of millions of albums sold, instant name-and-dreadlock recognition around the world, and an estate that, in Forbes’s estimate, earned $23 million (U.S.) last year, partly from the sale of family-branded products such as speakers, coffee and Marley Natural cannabis.
While the family of Marley, who died in 1981 at 36, handles most aspects of his estate, Blackwell controls the rights to Marley’s music publishing catalogue, including copyrights to classic reggae songs such as “One Love” and “Three Little Birds.”
On Saturday, Blackwell signed a $50-million deal with Primary Wave Music Publishing, a boutique New York music company, the latest in a string of high-profile transactions reflecting how streaming has boosted the value of music catalogues.
“Basic publishing is absolutely important, but it’s not very exciting,” said Blackwell. “But now it is the music business. Record companies used to manufacture, and that was the difference between a record company and a publishing company. All that is really gone now.”
Under the deal, Primary Wave will control 80 per cent of Blackwell’s share of two catalogues: Marley’s songs and Blue Mountain Music, a publisher Blackwell set up in 1962.
Primary Wave has carved out a lucrative niche in music publishing by focusing on aggressive branding and marketing campaigns for what its founder, Larry Mestel, calls “the icons and legends business.” The company has a relatively small cata- logue of about 12,000 songs — its roster includes Smokey Robinson and Def Leppard — that it promotes heavily through commercial tie-ins, movies and TV shows. When Primary Wave managed Kurt Cobain’s catalogue, it struck a deal with Converse to drape sneakers in Nirvana lyrics; for Aerosmith, the company helped create a state lottery game, with each scratch-off card revealing words from Aerosmith songs.
For the estate of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, Primary Wave plans to send a hologram of Gould — who died in 1982 and famously hated playing live — on a concert tour.
Unlike most publishers, Primary Wave sees itself as a branding house and an asset manager, exploiting song catalogues on behalf of investors that have contributed to an acquisition fund. The company, Mestel said, has about $400 million to invest in music on behalf of those investors, a group that includes BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager.
In a competitive market, Primary Wave’s pitch to songwriters is that it can find new ways to market old material. For Robinson, who signed a $22 million deal with Primary Wave in 2016, the company did a deal with American Greetings to promote a new holiday, Father-Daughter Day, using Robinson’s song “My Girl.” When he was looking for a new home for his songs, Robinson said in an interview, those ideas sold him.
Mestel said that he seeks only tasteful deals. But the Marley family controls the use of their patriarch’s name and likeness, and Blackwell said that the family, which earns the majority of the songwriting royalties, has the final right to refuse any use.