After months of negotiations,
David Bowie's heirs capitalize on an increasingly hot market by selling the rights to the artist's song catalog to Warner Chappell Music for an estimated $ 250 million by "Variety"
. Included are six decades of tracks including "Heroes", "Changes", "Space Oddity", "Let's Dance", "Golden Years", "Ziggy Stardust" and hundreds of others from 27 albums including the posthumous "Toy": " All extraordinary songs - said the co-president and CEO of Warner Chappell, Guy Moot - that represent milestones and have forever changed the course of modern music ".
The deal marks a new success for Warner Chappell (a subsidiary of Warner Music) which has already got its hands on the editorial catalogs of Bruno Mars, Cardi B, Quincy Jones and the heirs of George Michael. With the new announcement, which deals with the editorial aspect of the "White Duke" production, almost all of Bowie's music enters the Warner universe. Last September the heirs reached a global agreement with Warner Music to bring recordings from 1968 to 2016 under the umbrella of the label, including albums released after 2000 with Sony Music. A month later the 'Financial Times' had learned that it was dealing with the editorial catalog: the negotiations have come to fruition in recent days. Bowie, who died of cancer on January 10, 2016,he was notoriously scrupulous in managing his catalog. A series of singles and a 1967 album are not included in the agreement because the heirs controlled the catalog only from 1968 onwards. Today's announcement coincides with the "Bowie 75" celebrations held for an entire year to coincide with what would have been the singer's 75th birthday on January 8, the sixth anniversary of his death, and half a century since the release of " Ziggy Stardust ", the iconic 1972 album in which Bowie christened his alien alter ego.organized for a full year to coincide with what would have been the singer's 75th birthday on January 8, the sixth anniversary of his death, and half a century after the release of "Ziggy Stardust", the iconic 1972 album in which Bowie baptized his alien alter ego.organized for a full year to coincide with what would have been the singer's 75th birthday on January 8, the sixth anniversary of his death, and half a century after the release of "Ziggy Stardust", the iconic 1972 album in which Bowie baptized his alien alter ego.
The campaign includes the opening of pop-up shops in New York, not far from the singer's Soho home, and in Heddon Street in London where the cover of "Ziggy" was photographed. Later in January, "Variety" learned, a new film could be presented at the Sundance Film Festival based on thousands of hours of extremely rare footage, many of them unreleased.
The film is in the pipeline: Brett Morgen, the director of "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck," "Jane" and "The Kid Stays in the Picture" has been working on it for four years with close collaborator Tony Visconti as musical director.
The deal is the latest in a series that has seen song catalogs break through figures never seen before: Bruce Springsteen sold the music and editorial catalogs to Sony for over half a billion dollars, while Bob Dylan's ones went to Universal for almost 400 million and Sony has also bought the rights to the production of Paul Simon for 250 million.
The trend has become more and more frequent in the months of the pandemic that has blocked concerts and tours, but also as the great rock artists age and begin to simplify the succession by monetizing their artistic production on behalf of the heirs.
