When Your Mom Calls to Ask If You Knew Springsteen Sold His Music Catalogue for $500M, Are You Too Much of a Fan?

An interesting question

Bruce on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, 1975. (Photo by Terry O’Neill)

There has been chatter for the past several weeks that Bruce Springsteen was in talks with Sony to sell his music catalogue but it became official today, with a reported price tag of a whopping $500 million (though I think the Born to Run album alone is worth twice that). The deal is worth roughly $200 million more than Bob Dylan recently sold his catalogue for, which is a bit surprising, but then the price of everything is skyrocketing these days.

In reporting the deal, the New York Times pointed out that several musicians have made similar deals, including Dylan, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, and Shakira. The thing to note here is that with the exception of Shakira, all of these artists are past the age of 70. The Times doesn’t bring this up, but I read in some of the earlier articles that this has become a common part of estate planning for artists with large music catalogues. Managing the publishing rights of five decades worth of music is a full-time job, and one that the artists’ children may be neither willing nor capable of taking on, so they make it easy for their heirs.

There is no word on whether this is part of Bruce’s thinking in making this…