Bowie worked with the music investor David Pullman to create “Bowie bonds” in 1997, which securitised the artist’s American royalties into a financial asset.
The bonds offered a fixed annual return of 7.9pc over a 10-year period and raised $55m (£40m).
Rather, he borrowed the money in order to secure those rights.
It all becomes a horrible tangle with mechanical and songwriter rights etc. But certainly the way I recall it – and do correct me if wrong – those rights were up in the air at that time. So, he borrowed to secure them, the royalty flow from them once owned being the security for the bonds.
The quotes in this article seemed contradictory to me. On the one hand you have David Crosby saying, in effect, “We must sell because we can’t make any money out of it”. In the other hand investment funds are buying them up and expecting their value to rise exponentially. And the artists are benghazi accused of “selling their pension”.
Is David Crosby just a knob?
Ironman,
I wouldn’t go near any of these artists. Bowie, Dylan. Their audiences are pensioners or dying. Most acts have their big fandom from people under 30 when they started.
Same as this stupid Beatles museum idea. Most people under 60 just aren’t that bothered about going to a museum about the Beatles.
@Bloke on M4
You’re ignoring the “it’s forever now” nature of this here interweb. Friend of mine’s son became a huge Hawkwind fan, a few years back. Collected everything they’d ever done, wore the T-shirts, got together with couple mates to play the music. Amiga, here, “discovered” Steely Dan. Can’t get enough of them. To her, Can’t Buy a Thrill is contemporary to Everything Must Go. Me giving her a download of Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat was “new” music because it’s new to her.
I just took a look at the Spotify account visitors to my place can access. (because the account I use is separate, so it doesn’t get f**ked up with other people’s tastes). The range of stuff’s been played recently is around 70 years. That’s from ages from early 20s spanning nearly a dozen nationalities. Frank Sinatra’s there for some reason. Somebody must have chosen it.