Iconic British rock band Pink Floyd has agreed to sell its recorded music and rights to Sony Music for approximately $400 millionas reported by the specialist magazine Variety. This media describes this agreement as one of the most important concluded recently.
The pact includes the rights to music already recorded and rights to name and imagebut not those of composition, which belong to the individual authors, Variety said. The magazine notes that “probably” most of their album artwork, designed largely by British company Hipgnosis, also falls under this decision.
In Pink Floyd’s musical catalog, albums such as “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (1967), “Meddle” (1971), “The Dark Side of the Moon” (1973)‘I Wish You Were Here’ (1975), “The Wall” (1979) or ‘Animals’ (1977). Variety recalled that Sony had invested more than a billion dollars in the catalogs of artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.
For Pink Floyd, as he pointed out, 500 million were requested dollars and the group was close to reaching an agreement in 2022, but internal differences eventually caused some interested parties to back down. David Gilmour told Rolling Stone magazine last August that he wanted to make the sale not so much for financial reasons as to free himself from the decision-making process.
Interested record companies formerly included Warner Music and BMG, but Roger Waters’ controversial statements on Ukraine, Russia and Israel appear to have prevented the project from coming to fruition. Waters said some Jews in the US and UK bear responsibility for Israel’s actions “because they pay for everything.”
