Thursday, September 04, 2008
Musical tunes up for sale?
Variety: "Word in Gotham has R&H looking into the possibility of selling its library, which includes tuner hits by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II as well as material by other creatives including Irving Berlin and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Catalog is estimated to be worth $150 million-$200 million."
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2 comments:
It seems interesting to me that Rodgers and Hammerstein is looking at selling the rights to their music. I do not know that much about the theatrical and musical leasing industry, but I would think that they stand to continue making a lot of money from leasing the rights to their world famous titles. Maybe I have misunderstood this article, and this is a good buisness deal. Unless, I suppose, they predict that the value of these titles will go down as they get older.
Given that both Rodgers and Hammerstein are long gone, who is this money going to and do they need it? Granted Weber and some of the secondary authors may still be collecting royalties. It makes sense that while they were alive that Rodgers and Hammerstein had to hold exclusive copyright of their work, but it's hard to see the money doing anything especially great now. As artists, would their hope be that their work would become more available to the public or that it would make greater and greater profits for Sony or Warner, both of which are known for extensive copyright trolling. Strikes me as a perfect example for releasing some of the work into the public domain. That, or better copyright law.
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