THE NEW WORTH OF OLD HITS

As the giants of the genre contemplate retirement, companies are dreaming up increasingly innovative ways to bring new value to older sounds

Jeff Jampol has managed the estates of everyone from the Doors and Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. “None of my clients tour,” he says. “They’re all dead.”

But that hasn’t stopped him from generating big money on their behalf, whether it’s organizing a touring exhibition of Cobain’s artwork, setting up Oliver Stone’s 1991 Doors biopic (which tripled the band’s catalog sales), or producing the 2015 Joplin documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue.

Jampol compares an artist’s legacy to a dark, cold fireplace with five or six matches on the mantelpiece. Each represents a tool that can spark new interest in the brand — from a book to a docuseries, Broadway musical, or biopic. “If you light the fire incorrectly with one of those matches, it glows for 15 seconds,” he says, “and then you’re left again with a cold, empty, dark fireplace and one burnt match.”

Up till now, living, breathing classic-rock icons like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan haven’t had to worry much about tending to their respective flames. Touring, merch, and clever marketing of their catalogs have sustained them for well over six decades. But the pandemic has kept them off the road for more than a year, and several of them are reaching an age where road work won’t be possible much longer. “Mick Jagger is 77,” Jampol says. “At some point you’ve got to go, ‘I’m going to enjoy my grandkids.’ ”

It’s at that point when a band or artist, and the team around them, faces a crucial question: How can the afterlife of a career in rock maintain, or even surpass, what that act achieved in their prime?

Among artists and investors, an aging group of classic-rock superstars and the inevitable wave of retirements on the not-too-distant horizon has set off something of a gold rush. Entrepreneurs have begun entering Jampol’s line of work and trying to concoct new ways to profit from the legacy of rock stars from days past. Some well-heeled investors are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars for lucrative publishing catalogs; others are making use of TikTok and developing technologies like holograms. And industry experts say that’s just the beginning.

While today’s technologies are new and the dollar figures larger than ever, rock has been trying to broaden its audience and keep older artists in the public consciousness since the very beginning, with everything from documentaries about the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock to rock biopics to tell-all memoirs, docuseries, jukebox musicals, Vegas residencies, and traveling museums.

Through it all, artists did everything they could to hold on to their lucrative publishing rights. But in the past few months alone, not coincidentally at a time when touring hasn’t been possible, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul Simon, and David Crosby, as well as Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and Mick Fleetwood, have all sold their songs to outside investors. The Beach Boys and Linda Ronstadt went a step further by each parting with the rights to their name, image, and likeness, meaning the bulk of the money generated by T-shirts, tote bags, potential biopics, and Broadway musicals will no longer go to them.

Some experts cite historically low interest rates as the reason for the recent surge in sales, while others point to fears that the Democratic majority in Congress will raise capital gains and estate taxes. There’s also the simple fact that artists want to put their estates on proper footing while still able to call the shots. “Time is passing,” Young explained to fans on his website. “I want to cover my family and my art. . . . A good father plans on how to take care of his children.”

One of the biggest players in this field is Merck Mercuriadis, whose new company Hipgnosis recently bought the catalogs of Young, Buckingham, Shakira, Jimmy Iovine, and many others. Details of the sales haven’t been disclosed, but the Young catalog alone cost him an estimated $150 million. “Once a song becomes part of the fabric of our society, it almost always stays part of the fabric of our society,” Mercuriadis said earlier this year. “If you were listening to a Nirvana record 25 years ago, chances are you’re still listening to that record when you’re 42 or 60, [and] when you look at those traits of predictability and reliability, those are the same reasons we invest in things like gold and oil.”

And Richard Foos, the co-founder of Rhino and Shout Factory, says the show-business aspect of publishing is attracting a new breed of investor. “If you can be certain that a Van Morrison song is going to generate a million dollars a year, you feel really good about paying 20 times that to own it,” he says. “And it’s a lot more fun to own ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ than just getting interest from a bank.”

Queen are a rare example of a band to find a new audience on the road decades after the death of their frontman. They’ve been gigging with Adam Lambert for nearly 10 years, but it was in 2019, after the release of the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, that keyboardist Spike Edney started to notice something incredible. “People were lustily singing along to every song that was in the movie,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019, “and looking blankly during every song that wasn’t.”

The movie grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide and earned Rami Malek a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury. Elton John’s 2019 Rocketman biopic grossed nearly $200 million and helped goose ticket sales for the singer’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour. Now, biopics are in the works for Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Bob Dylan, who will be played by Timothée Chalamet. “That could bring lots of young fans,” Jampol says. “What 14yearold is going to resonate with Bob Dylan now? A movie might change that.”

There’s even talk of a new Doors movie. “The Oliver Stone one was 31 years ago,” Jampol says. “That means that everybody on planet Earth who’s 31 and under was not alive when that movie came out. That’s why we’re looking at making a new one.”

While big screens matter, so do smaller ones. During the lockdown in particular, artists and their reps have been learning how to extend their brands using technology. When TikTok breathed new life into Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” last year — thanks to a clip of a skateboarder serenely sipping cranraspberry juice to a Mac soundtrack — drummer Mick Fleetwood deftly recreated the clip (in the rain, no less). In the weeks that followed, the song climbed to Number Two on the Rolling Stone Top 100 Songs chart.

Thomas Scherer, president of repertoire and marketing at BMG, says the label has been tracking technological developments as they emerge. “We are exploring NFTs,” he says. The skateboarder behind the Fleetwood Mac TikTok is even selling that clip, sans the music. “I mean, when was it, two weeks ago when it comes to NFTs? I was like, ‘Oh, that’s quite interesting.’ So then immediately we started really to put a work group together [on it].”

The extension of a band’s or artist’s lifespan doesn’t always have to play out online. Before the pandemic, artists, living and dead, engaged fans through traveling museums and immersive events. During the past decade, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and the Velvet Underground, among others, have taken cues from the Hard Rock Cafe and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, displaying their guitars, costumes, handwritten lyrics, and even Syd Barrett’s bike for fans to see up close. Floyd heads got to stand right up against the Wall.

As technology improves, the ways some artists hope to reach fans are beginning to look more and more like scifi. Touring holograms of Buddy Holly, Frank Zappa, and Ronnie James Dio made respectable money before the pandemic. Scherer says the Buddy Holly touring hologram that BMG backed worked so well, “we have two more hologram tours in the making.” Olivier Chastan, CEO of Iconic Artists Group — which now owns most of the Beach Boys’ intellectual property — hopes to bring the group’s California girls to the final frontier. “In five years, I could send you a text and say, ‘At 2 p.m., let’s put our Oculus Rift glasses on, and let’s go see the Beach Boys record ‘Good Vibrations’ at Western Recorders,’ ” he said after the acquisition.

Jeff Pezzuti, whose Eyellusion launched both the Zappa and Dio holograms, decided to leave the world of finance and help put the specters of some of his favorite artists back on the road. His tours use uncirculated live recordings of the singers, unique visuals, and performances by live musicians on each date. Nowadays, he’s especially eager to work with living artists on creating holograms they could use now and after death. “With living artists we would actually set up a stage of some kind, and we would actually record one show with the intention of creating holographic performances,” he says. “So basically you’d be creating a show where the artist looks like they’re there.” He even has an idea to take it a step further. “A lot of times you can’t have two Alevel artists, unless you’re charging $200, $300 a ticket. But in this scenario, you could charge like a $50 ticket and still make the financials work. You could have some triple bills that could never, ever [otherwise] assemble.”

Others, like Jampol, are skeptical. His major gripe with the technology is that many hologram companies use a 19thcentury magician’s illusion called Pepper’s ghost, a projection on a translucent screen, for their socalled holograms. “You can’t walk around it,” he says. But as Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp founder David Fishof says, holograms might be more appealing to the next wave of classic rock — Gen Xers who grew up with technology. “There’s a lot of new AR and VR experiences,” says BrandMark Agency president Maureen ValkerBarlow. “There’s this ‘volumetric video experience’ now where we can record Travis Barker in a studio. If we did a livestream with him, you could pick him out of the livestream and have [it look like he were] playing on your livingroom table.”

“There’s always money out there,” Pezzuti says. “And when people see this industry kind of come to a complete halt, they always want to say, ‘OK, how do we get this industry reignited?’ And they reach out, and I say, ‘Oh, well, what are you guys doing to circumvent this? Well, here’s the solutions we have in play.’ ”

“Once a song becomes part of the fabric of our society, it almost always stays part of the fabric of our society,” says a leading music-biz exec.