Bowie estate sells songwriting rights to Warner Music
2022 is full of first steps to the Moon
David Bowie’s estate has sold the publishing rights to his “entire body of work” to Warner Chappell Music, the company said on Monday, the latest massive deal in a roaring song rights purchasing boom.
Warner Chappell did not reveal financial terms of the agreement, but according to trade publications the price tag is estimated at upwards of US$250 million (8.3 billion baht).
Recent years have seen a series of blockbuster music rights acquisitions by corporations — including from superstars Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Tina Turner — a trend driven by the anticipated stability of streaming growth combined with low interest rates and dependable earning projections for time-tested hits.
The Bowie deal includes hundreds of songs spanning the glam rock pioneer’s six-decade career, including Space Oddity, Changes, Life On Mars?
and Heroes.
“All of us at Warner Chappell are immensely proud that the David Bowie estate has chosen us to be the caretakers of one of the most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring catalogues in music history,” said Guy Moot, head of WCM, in a statement.
“These are not only extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever.” Warner now houses Bowie’s work as a songwriter as well as a recording artist. The owners of a song’s publishing rights receive a cut in a number of scenarios, including radio play and streaming, album sales, and use in advertising and movies. Recording rights govern reproduction and distribution. Warner Music Group has handled much of Bowie’s recorded catalogue since 2013, last year adding his recordings from 2000 to 2016 to the fold.
The announcement comes days before Bowie’s birthday on Jan 8, when he would have turned 75, as well as the sixth anniversary of his death on Jan 10.
Music catalogues have always changed hands but the current publishing sales frenzy has rapidly escalated, with financial markets increasingly drawn to lucrative music portfolios as an asset class.
Bruce Springsteen’s publishing and recorded music rights recently went to Sony for a staggering $500 million, with Bob Dylan also selling his full publishing catalogue to Universal for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The past year has seen other major sales including from Stevie Nicks, Paul Simon, Motley Crue, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Shakira.
The company that’s publiciced much of the business is Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a British investment and management company introduced on the London Stock Exchange in July 2018.
In its interim report released in September 2021, Hipgnosis said its rights vault has grown to 146 catalogues and 65,413 songs — a value the company places at $2.55 billion — with a 31% year-on-year revenue hike to $74.1 million in six months.
The company said Covid-19’s impacts including venue closures have impacted younger catalogues “that rely on promotion and live music events to drive consumption” — but that “vintage catalogues” have seen “outstanding streaming earnings as consumers turned to listening to classics during lockdown”.
Artists’ decisions to sell have fallen under criticism by some who accuse them of betraying their legacies.
But such sales are useful for estate planning, especially for older artists, said Alan Cross, a radio broadcaster and music analyst.
In the United States, making a lumpsum sale means artists are taxed at the capital gains rate, which is much lower than the income tax they or their estates would pay on regular royalty cheques.
The flurry of sales comes amid a wider debate over artists’ ownership of the work, amplified in large part by Taylor Swift, who has found resounding success as she makes good on her vow to re-record her first six albums so she can control their master recording rights.
“If I’m a successful artist right now, I’m looking to own everything I could possibly own so I could sell everything off at some later date,” said Cross, defending artist’ rights to cash in on their own work.
Robotic missions to Mars and advances in space tourism dominated the space activities of 2021. But this year, the Moon is likely to stand out, as companies and governments launch various Moonbound spacecraft.
Most of those missions revolve around Artemis, Nasa’s multibillion-dollar effort to return astronauts to the Moon later in the decade and conduct routine science missions on its surface in preparation for farther treks to Mars(a far more ambitious endeavour that willprobably not happen in this decade). But before astronauts make the Moonshot, a series of rocket tests and science missions withouthumans will need to be completed.
2022 is the year for those initial steps towards the Moon. Two new rockets central to Nasa’s lunar plans will launch to space for the first time, each with more power than the Saturn 5 rocket from the Apollo programme. And other countries are expected to join the march to the Moon as well.
NASA’S GIGANTIC MOON ROCKET DEBUT After years of development delays, Nasa’s Space Launch System, or SLS, could make its first journey to space — without any humans —as early as March.
The mission, called Artemis 1, will mark the first in a series of flights under Nasa’s Artemis programme by SLS, Nasa’s centrepiece rocket system for getting Moon-bound astronauts off Earth. For Artemis 1, SLS will launch from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to send a capsule named Orion around the Moon and back, rehearsing a trajectory that will be performed by Artemis 2, the subsequent mission that is scheduled to carry astronauts sometime in2024. The third mission, Artemis 3, will result in a Moonlanding.
Like any major space mission, Artemis 1 has been delayed several times. It was initially planned for 2020, then pushed to various times throughout 2021 because of development challenges and setbacks caused by the pandemic. Nasa blames the most recent delay to March on the need to investigate and replace a faulty internal computer controlling one of the rocket’s four main engines.
SPACEX’S NEXT STARSHIP TEST
Central to Nasa’s efforts to return humans to the Moon is SpaceX’s Starship, which will be used as a human lunar lander in roughly 2025. It will be the agency’s first astronaut mission to the Moon’s surface since 1972. Designed as a fully reusable rocket system, Starship also stands at the centre of Elon Musk’s ultimate goal of ferrying humans to Mars and will be crucial to SpaceX’s revenue-generating satellite launch business.
But first, Starship must reach orbit. That test flight, also with no people on board, could happen sometime in mid-2022.
Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, had hoped to launch Starship to orbit in 2021. But a protracted Federal Aviation Administration review of the environmental impact of SpaceX’s launch site in Texas and development delays with the company’s new Raptor engines have postponed the test flight. The FAA review is expected to finish in late February and determine whether deeper environmental reviews will be necessary, or whether SpaceX can resume Starship launches.
A successful orbital test will be a key step in Nasa’s Moon programme. Astronauts launching atop the SLS inside the Orion capsule will rendezvous with and transfer to Starship above the Moon to descend the rest of the way to the lunar surface. Starship would later liftoff from the Moon, then transfer the astronauts back to Orion for the journey home to Earth.
NASA-FUNDED
MOON ROBOTS
Three robotic Moon landers under a Nasa programme are scheduled to make their way to the lunar surface this year — if development goes as planned.
Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company, and Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, are each aiming to send small lunar landers carrying various scientific payloads to the Moon by the end of this year. Their landers were developed under Nasa’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme — part of the agency’s effort to rely on private companies for sending cargo and research instruments into space with the hopes of stimulating a commercial market.
Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, a six-legged cylindrical robot, is expected to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket early this year carrying a dozen payloads to the lunar surface. One of the instruments on board will measure the plume of lunar dirt kicked up during Nova-C’s landing, an experiment that could help engineers prevent messy lunar landings in the future. The lander will also deploy a small rover built by Spacebit, a British company. In the fourth quarter of this year, the company could also send a second mission to the Moon’s surface.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is a boxy, four-legged lander with an onboard propulsion system that will ease itself onto a basaltic plain on the sunlit side of the Moon’s northeastern quadrant carrying 14 research payloads. The company says Peregrine will be ready for launch aboard United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket in the middle of this year.
But whether it launches on time is dependent on when the rocket will be ready to fly. Vulcan’s debut has been held upby the engine supplier for the rocket, whichis Blue
Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company. Its new BE-4 engines have yet to be delivered.
TESTING A COMPLEX LUNAR ORBIT
Rocket Lab, which builds rockets for small launches, is poised to send in March a microwave-size satellite, or CubeSat, for Nasa called CAPSTONE from the company’s launch site in New Zealand.
The satellite will study an orbit around the Moon that a future space station called Gateway, being developed by Nasa and other space agencies, will reside in sometime in the next decade.
SOUTH KOREA’SFIRST MOONSHOT
The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, a boxshaped satellite, will be South Korea’s first foray to the Moon as the country aims to bolster its technical know-how for conducting missions in space.
Led by the Seoul’s space agency, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, the spacecraft carrying six main tools is scheduled to launch in August on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and arrive in lunar orbit by December. It will spend a year surveying the Moon’s geology and examine from afar the chemical composition of lunar dirt.
The satellite will also carry a Lunar Terrain Imager, which will survey potential landing sites for a subsequent South Korean robotic lunar lander mission.
EVEN MORE GLOBAL VISITORS
Lunar robots from three other countries — Russia, India and Japan — will also try to make their way to the Moon this year. © 2022