Morrissey, Mazzy Star, and, erm, Bonnie Tyler: selling The Smiths’ songs, and the truth on music streaming royalties – do artists REALLY get such a bad deal?

0:07Steve:Hello and welcome to the Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and games and finances of the music world as explained each week by me, Steve Lemack and him, Stuart Dredge. If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music biz and how it all works and one or two revealing stats along the way, then here we are this week as promised we will be spending a bit of time on one of our listeners questions which well it begs the question whether against the sometimes overriding narrative whether some artists are actually much better off in the streaming era than they would have been in the heyday of vinyl and cd sales we'll also be asking how much it would cost to buy a bit of the smiths but first as always we'll start with the big figure well a big figure and a much smaller but still significant stat both of which are to be found in a new report published last week the big figure and i'm not going to inject any fake suspense here because stewart already knows this one i'll just tell you the big figure is 6.68 billion pounds which is the total consumer spend on live music across the UK in 2024.

1:25Steve:This according to the annual report from Live, which is of course the live music industry trade body, £6.68 billion, which is a new record for spending on live music. And it's been helped along the way by the pop music market. Of all, there's a breakdown of genres and of all the genres of music, pop music was the biggest hitter in 2024 driven by the likes of well taylor swift obviously but also charlie xcx and dua lipa so pop music accounted for 32.1 percent of the live spend total that's the big figure uh the smaller one and we actually alluded to this in one of our patreon only pilots which we did a little while ago but the smaller number is 137 which is I can ask you this one Stuart 137 refers to uh one gig being held every 137 seconds in the UK last year yeah one gig every 137 seven seconds I mean you have to go on most of them yeah not not even I'm that prolific uh but yeah what a year I mean that the report in general I mean the top line obviously much like last year is the appetite for live music especially at stadium and arena level is you know that's more healthy than ever i mean certainly the turnover is up but set against this if you dig into the report it does also go on to reiterate that you know these are still very challenging times for the grassroots live music scene for venues and promoters, artists at that level, and independent festivals as well, for all the reasons which we have touched on previously on this show.

3:16Steve:Just one other thing for now, in terms of geographical spread, London is still the leading city for live music spend. I think it's lost some of its percentage lead, though. But London's still the major place for live music, followed by the rest of the top five. Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and Cardiff are the top five places where people spend money on live music and that's your numbers for this week. We picked just one new story this week before we go to any other business because we couldn't not mention this. Morrissey is, you may have seen this story, Morrissey is putting his business interests in the Smiths up for sale.

3:59Steve:uh so what what what's actually on offer and how much is a piece of the smith's worth morrissey's piece of the smith's what do we think that will eventually fetch yeah well i suppose to say what

4:13Stu:happened in case anyone hasn't followed this it was a blog post wasn't it on his website uh i think he's got this this section messages from morrissey so from the horse's mouth not that he would thank me for that um and yeah he said morrissey has no choice but to offer for sale all of his business interests in the smiths and it listed them so it's the name all the artwork which obviously he created merchandising rights songs synchronization rights recordings and contractual rights so basically what he's saying is he's going to sell all his share because obviously johnny marr has his share of the smiths and all the songs and recordings um but yeah and he's basically saying to any interested bidders.

4:53Stu:And at the end of this blog post, there's a Gmail address to contact. Any serious investors should make contact. And a lot of the coverage of this announcement was pointing out that it's not the most serious way to sell a catalogue is to say, email this Gmail address. But that's happened. And there's some stuff in there about how he's burnt out by his connections to the rest of the band. I've had enough of malicious associations. It's a little bit teenager-y, dare I say.

5:20Steve:and i guess this all this all comes as a package uh i imagine do you have to buy the whole job

5:26Stu:lot would you it sounds like yeah he wants to sell them all i mean in theory maybe you could go in and say i want to make an offer but but yeah so it made it what maybe but it's both thinking how much might he get because we've spent the last year and a half covering these news stories about queen big floyd dary barry like how much those big rock catalogs are worth so so i've i've been thinking about it and digging into it and it's it's really fascinating like the things you do when you try and estimate the value of music catalog it's quite a set a set formula in a way or a set process so you look at past performance you look at how many sales how many streams what kind of radio play you look at the money it's been making until now but you also model forward you model its future performance and that's something that streaming has had quite a big impact on because you can model streaming like unless you do something so terrible that you get immediately cancelled by everyone streaming is quite stable like if you're doing i don't know 500 million streams a year now you'll probably do that next year it might go up a bit it's not going to suddenly drop off a cliff so you can look forward and say right i think in the next three to five years this is how many streams it will get how much money it will make yeah so you do that um you compare it so you sort of say what did queen do their catalog for what did rod stewart sell his for you try and look for comparable bands or comparable artists and say right what did they go for because then you can go out and say well we want that kind of multiples of work we want that kind of that much times how much money we're making and look this very similar thing sold for this much so we're asking for this um and then you look at things like can you can you do more with it so look at an artist's catalog and go is it being underexploited they're not getting any good sync deals in tv ads or films or is it not being promoted on streaming service as well can i do you think you can do more with it so that's the kind of the unrealized potential um and then you look at other factors or problems or barriers which with the smiths there's one obvious one which is that ma and morrissey don't get on at all and so a lot of these things about what more could we do the catalog until now you've been like well do we need to get both of them to agree in which case it's a problem so you look at all these things and that's how you you kind of come to some kind of figure so i was looking at stats i mean it's a bit hard to get but the band sold somewhere between four and five million albums in their career i think a couple of sources saying that they've got nearly 21 million monthly listens on spotify which was quite i was quite surprised at that like that's that's a big not that you know not because i don't like the smiths as we discussed last week but that's kind of you know a decent amount for a pound of that ilk um and like with a back of the napkin mass maybe they'll make their catalogs making somewhere between five million dollars and ten million dollars a year now perhaps um and then maybe you look at the multiple okay so what times that is the value of it if you got 10 times that it might be worth between 50 million dollars and 100 million dollars if you got 15 times that it's 75 million times 50 million but that's the whole catalog not just morris's share yeah so you're at his chair.

8:28Stu:So, I mean, I was looking at some of the figures for like Queen, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, the big hitters. It basically boils down to, I don't know, if you're Morrissey, you might be able to get like$20 million, even$30 million for your share of the Smiths. And

8:42Steve:we're not even talking about the other stuff, the naming rights, the artwork, the merchandise.

8:47Stu:So it's tens of millions of dollars that he could get in a sale. The other thing is unpredictables and i was thinking actually i was watching the the radio 2 concert at the weekend they had the big concert in chelmsford and sophie ellis bexter was playing and she was doing murder

9:03Steve:on the dance floor you know to a whole crowd singing along and i suddenly thought it could

9:06Stu:if she'd been selling her catalogue in the summer of 2023 it would have had a certain value based on the stream that but then that november saltburn came out and murder on the dance floor went viral and her whole her career had streams set up a notch and if she was selling a catalogue now it would be worth a lot more. And no one would have predicted that. So that's the other thing, is something could happen with the Smiths. They could be, I don't know, you basically need a film with someone dancing around naked in the closing scene and profit ensues. And then the problems. I think the other thing that could happen is a band who aren't together can reunite.

9:41Stu:So Oasis is the obvious example. Their streams went up a lot

9:44Steve:when they reunited.

9:45Stu:There's a big spike in that. And that's made their catalogue more valuable. um are the smiths going to reunite i mean we could probably i don't know let's make a face on whether

9:54Steve:we think we're going to reunite ever if i mean if anything surely this is the final nail in the coffin isn't it in the relationship between morrissey and mar let me uh as a little well shall you remember i mean this was around the time we first started this podcast wasn't there a massive falling out between hall and oates when one of them sold part their share of hall and oates because all of a sudden when this goes through, now we've got no idea who's going to buy Morrissey's share of the Smiths, but whoever it is, and it might be a record label, it could be a hedge fund, couldn't it? And so Johnny Marr will own half the Smiths and somebody unrelated to the Smiths will own the other half of the Smiths, which I think is quite uncomfortable for some musicians.

10:44Stu:Although if you're Johnny Marr, maybe it's more comfortable than Morris here. Because I'm interested to think like, like everything you want to do with a catalog now, apart from people just listen to it regularly, you need the people who own it to agree. And, and it's sounding, do you remember we covered that story? I think when Morris, he said that Johnny Marr was going to tour without him with someone else and the ridges to the trademarks. And I think Mark said, no, I did that because people were abusing them. And I tried to get in touch with Morris to say, let's sort this out. And he didn't reply.

11:11Stu:So that gave me an example of how hard it's been for them to work together. So in a way, The other thing I was thinking was, and I don't know if Johnny Ma has any interest in doing this, but Johnny Ma could go to some investors and say, look, will you help me raise the cash to buy Morrissey out, if Morrissey would sell to Ma, and bring it all under one person who is the co -founder of the Smiths. So in a way that might be the most positive outcome of this. If Johnny Marr was somehow able to own it all and then he can do stuff and he can kind of keep the legacy going and not have to worry about some hedge fund coming in with ideas.

11:47Stu:So there's been no report of him saying he's going to do that, but it's certainly like in the same way that Taylor Swift brought back her master recordings, artists can be the bidders. It doesn't have to just be investors. but I mean I want to come back to the kind of the way it was presented because if you want to sell your catalog you get some advisors in who know their onions and you get them to shop it around and you get them to start bidding more ideally you want a couple of people competing to drive the price up what you putting a putting a blog post out saying I am so sad here's a gmail address that's not the traditional way of selling a catalog and so that is the question I think investors will be might be asking so is that how serious is he about this?

12:30Stu:Is this something I should spend time and diligence on investigating? But it could be tens of millions of dollars and yeah, I kind of would love to see it end up in the hands of Johnny Marr or his partners so that it's you know, so that that legacy carries on rather than like you say, it could be anyone owning it and then you have worries.

12:50Steve:Yeah, okay. That's the price of the Smiths. Right, we will have obviously more news next We'll have lots of it, I suspect, by then. But for the rest of this episode, as promised a few weeks ago, now we had an inquiry come in from listener Simon Hemelrich, which I mean, we thought was worth a chunk of time because it is an interesting point, which we wanted to analyse properly. and it was this simon's observation thank you simon for your email which said uh hi there i love the pod thank you very much uh i listen to it in the gym as it's much more interesting than

13:27Stu:high energy house music right stop right there let's discuss this for 10 minutes because i think

13:31Steve:this is a good endorsement yeah i mean we are well we're we're much more interesting on a treadmill than high energy house music running to try and get away from us uh i have a question says simon that I hope you can help me with. Artists claim that music doesn't play as well as it used to because of streaming. But for many artists, surely the opposite is true. Bonnie Tyler, for instance, has 15 million listens per month on Spotify, and I guess that means about 60 million, say, across all streaming platforms. If she gets£800 per million plays, that's£48 ,000 a month. to get that amount from actual album sales she would have had to sold about he'd have to sell 50 ,000 albums a month or 600 ,000 a year now there's no way says Simon that Bonnie would be selling that many copies in 2025 whether streaming existed or not her career peaked 45 years ago he adds similarly Mazzy Star the band Mazzy Star have 12 million monthly Spotify listens that must be earning them more in a year than they ever got from their albums which barely made the top 40 in the mid 90s so he concludes is it not the case that some artists are earning a far better living from their music because of streaming Stuart where would you like to start because there's quite a lot to this and varying opinions, which I think you've been canvassing.

15:08Stu:That's it, yeah. So basically I pulled a leaf out of your book and talked to my secret sources. So one of whom knows a lot about the artist side of streaming and label contracts, and then one from the label side who knows about it from that point of view. And they're both of you. They both gave me quite full responses to Simon's question. I guess the short answer is yes. Some artists are doing much better thanks to streaming. And part of that is because, yeah, you get paid when people listen to music now, not just when they buy it. So in the old times, you would make a lot of money from sales of your CD album when it came out and they drop off because everyone had it.

15:45Stu:So that's the change. And it's correct. And both my sources agree with that, saying, yes, some people are doing better. But then you get into the real number of this question, which is what you get paid and what you get paid depends on your deal, your deals with your label, with your publisher. and that's where none of us know what bonnie tyler's deal is none of us know what mazzy star still is so it's all speculation from the outside unless they talk about it um but both my sources actually they politely took issue with someone simon's calculations and i think to go back to it this idea of bonnie tyler getting 800 pounds per million streams they both said they both had a uh disagreed with that so what they said was um the label source said yeah this is based on the artist getting a modern digital master royalty rate of 25 roughly so getting 25 of all the streaming revenue and being the songwriter and then for all the money to flow through accurately and fully and there being no unrecruit balances or other costs be deducted and they added what could possibly go wrong yeah so and then my my artist contacts are the same thing said simon is assuming bonnie is getting around 24 on a deal 24 of the streaming royalties and they said as her deal was signed in the late 1970s at the point of signing it was probably closer to five percent right and whether or not it's gotten higher now is down to how our career has been managed and that is something both both said this idea of a deal with an artist from that era will have been much lower than 24 percent royalties and they may have renegotiated it since but that that depends on a whole range of factors um and actually my label contest is the same thing a lot of artists in the 70s and 80s were on single digit royalty deals.

17:29Stu:So you would get less than 10%. And then we've got this whole area of recruitment of depending how much advances your label paid you, whether you've paid them back, you might not be seeing any money from streaming. So yeah, so that's the thing. That's why we don't know what either in the making in this case. But this holds out the thought that some artists are still on those deals with single digit royalties and are maybe not recouped and are doing terribly from streaming. and some artists have renegotiated they're on good modern royalty rates and they're doing well because they meet Scott and then my label contact summarized it saying look there are artists who make a better living from streaming than from sales back in the day here's the caveat if they're continually played so if people are playing the music if they have good partners paying fully and accurately under decent deal terms and that's what it comes down to and then my artist contact added that catalogues generates the vast amount of income in streaming, but whether or not artists benefit is always the question.

18:27Stu:So again, separating this idea of lots of money being paid out with whether that's going through to those artists.

18:34Steve:That's the start. Yeah, so that's interesting. Just before we move on to the next part of the answer, that means it sort of adds weight maybe to the fact that artists, any artist who's renegotiated their deal and is on a better percentage now that surely means that back in the day that undermines the argument as well well it doesn't undermine it actually enforces simon's argument that you know they're making more money now because if they were only on you know eight percent nine percent royalty even if they were selling millions of albums they were still they weren't getting as much money as i'd imagined because that single figure royalty rate which you say from the 70s and 80s that means they weren't they weren't possibly making the money that i thought some of the big artists may have been making well that's it and

19:23Stu:you know obviously some artists were selling huge amounts of albums it's weird me talking about bonnie tyler because when i was a kid when i was in my dad played he had the bonnie and meatloaf album i don't know if that ever came onto your cd player never on my radar but like he played that a lot in the car and a lot of people bought a lot of dads bought that album you know that i were of it was that peak cd was dire straits meatloaf those they were selling so much um but also i mean the other thing that my artist source pointed out was radio is a factor in this so someone like bonnie tyler was huge on commercial radio in her heyday yeah but she's still there's all these classic radio and these hit stations now that would still she still played a lot um and there where that gets complicated is okay how much were they making from radio back in the day how much I'm making now and if streaming is taking over from radio which is a whole other show to discuss yeah but if as streaming gets bigger if radio gets smaller the way you get paid for those two things is different we talked about this before an artist gets a bigger share of their radio royalties than they do with the streaming royalties so if you're an artist who was big on radio the rise of streaming may be good for you in terms of your royalties from that but it may also be cannibalizing some of your radio royalties and that has to be factored in okay um and yeah the other thing i had actually my label contact had some feedback on simon's massey star question because he pointed out actually um he was saying well they only barely cracked the top 40 but in the us in the 1990s barely cracking the top 40 was a few million album sales right so some of the bands that didn't have big chart positions still did sell millions of albums back then um i should i was thinking i should ask my boss paul about this because he was in the sundays and there i think of them as a similar band to massey star in terms of their US profile.

21:09Stu:I looked at their Wikipedia, which I like to do often, and I think they had a couple of just about top 40 albums in the States, but they both went gold. So, you know, again, there's often nuances to this of bands you don't think sold a lot actually sold more than you think. Yeah, okay. But the other thing I got, so actually I went to Spotify as well about this because they have been talking recently more about artists' payouts. We talked about Kate Nash, didn't we, a few months ago, and Spotify put out a figure of how much they paid out. And they actually shared their payouts last year for both Bonnie Tyler and Mazzy Starr.

21:43Steve:Oh, really? You asked them, can you tell me how much these artists have made from your streaming service? And I said, yeah, we don't mind.

21:51Stu:Well, they are doing that more now. And to be clear, they're not telling me how much these artists earn, not giving away any secret kind of figures for them. It's just payouts. And I could calculate it if I went in and really crunched the data and said, how many streams? What's the average payment? um but they short so basically spotify paid out uh 1.3 million dollars for body tyler's music last year and 1.8 million dollars for mazzy star and that is again the huge caveat that is payments to their rights holders to the labels publishers and we don't know how much they got but that's that's it seems to me because i think that's the sign like mazzy star for example they have as simon said they have 12.8 million monthly listeners on spotify yeah and that equals payouts of 1.8 million dollars a year and as i was saying earlier that's quite stable like everyone's not going to stop listening to mazzy star suddenly um next year so for a band like that it's it's that last year it won't be so different this year it carries on and it's it's kind of a sort of

22:49Steve:predictable income i guess you'd say i guess so i guess the change here and this is sort of not Not the point that Simon was exactly making, but the conclusion from this is that streaming has, if it's not done anything else, it has helped prolong an artist's ability to make money. I mean, if nothing else, they've made their music still available. because you go back to the physical era and unless you were a very top artist, your records would have vanished from the shops within six months, your latest album. You wouldn't find it anywhere. Whereas these days, obviously, all the music's still available on streaming platforms because, which means you are still in the game.

23:36Steve:I mean, I guess some of the big artists, their records would always have been in WH Smith and your major high street chains like, I don't know, Virgin or HMB or something.

23:48Stu:Very few.

23:49Steve:But yeah, but certainly if you were a Mazzy star, there'd be one copy of your album in HMB, wouldn't there, for a while? And sometimes that wouldn't be restocked. And then we also have to take into account, I mean, obviously albums were from time to time reissued, but I remember when, and this goes back to around the 90s, noughties when a lot of record labels decided started repackaging um albums by bands had been successful maybe five to ten years earlier um and and they came out at mid price uh so you do a range of mid price free issues but obviously every record that was mid price for any artists who found their album had been mid-priced they would also find their royalties had been mid-priced as well i remember one one musician saying they've just reissued my album without telling me put it in the mid price range and so i earned less from it and no one had consulted no one had consulted him about it um but yes it does it has prolonged the life of a band like mazzy star whose records wouldn't necessarily be in the record shops now you see what i mean yeah i was looking at their

24:59Stu:biggest song is fade into you it's got 913 million streams on spotify alone and something has happened there because it's a long way ahead of their other songs and that's the other thing i think you'd like to say you're there and you can so we've talked haven't we recently about radio heads let down becoming a hit because of tiktok we talked about um okay what was the other one recently um what's connie francis wasn't it her 1960s hit became big because of tiktok so when you're on streaming you can benefit from these things now where suddenly everyone on tiktok besides your song is great to soundtrack videos with and you're you suddenly get loads of streams and money um and the other thing i think is um so uh i think you get that that people can discover anything now like i think when i was when i was young god i'm turning into that guy aren't i when i was young but like the barrier was having to buy cd buy records buy cds um i couldn't just go and listen to anything i wanted because i've seen the recommendation whereas now young people can discover Mazzy Star because an artist they like has mentioned them as an influence or because they're put into a playlist by the algorithm um I was listening this morning actually um you know um St Etienne have got their it's their final album I think it's just come out hasn't it yes and they've got a collaboration with Confidence Man on there who obviously really popular at the moment they're kind of surging and now people who love Confidence Man are going to discover St Etienne yeah uh through that and now St Etienne's catalogue could get a bump from that so that there's when you're on streaming, all these things can suddenly happen.

26:28Stu:Or you can have the Sophie Alex Bexler thing where I sink, or the Kate Bush thing where I sink in a TV show or film. So like you say, I think all of this, it could happen in the past in different ways. Like you could have a song in a film and it would be on the soundtrack and you might reissue it as a result. But now, yeah. So you can have your catalog. It can be discovered by people for the first time who weren't born when you made the album and you can benefit from all this difference so yeah it's all it's it's it's it's weird because i think this is something that came into my head really strongly when i was covering the uk's big streaming inquiry a lot of the noise has been streaming services don't pay out enough they're they're keep they're they're making loads of money from themselves they're not paying out enough and there is still arguments about that and you can argue about how much money companies pay themselves in dividends and so on but often what an artist takes home it comes down to the deals it comes down to their right selves and that's where you know i mean beggars group is a good example a label that talked years ago about how it's put everyone onto a modern royalty rate and it's it's wiped its unrecouped balances a lot of them is doing that now the majors are starting to do things where they pay royalties right even if you're unrecouped this stuff is all improving so I think again maybe next year the outlook for an artist from the 70s or 80s or 90s will be better than it was five years ago because of some of these changes so it is changing all the time but yeah I mean we should boil it down I think Simon is correct there are artists who are doing better from streaming doesn't invalidate the complaints doesn't invalidate some of the criticism of streaming but yeah nobody really talks about doing well is the other thing that people there's something i think that companies like spotify get frustrated by is that artists who are doing better from streaming than they were from sales don't tend to talk about it artists who are across because they feel like they've lost income talk about it loudly uh and all those views are valid but we don't tend to hear as much from the artists who are doing well i guess so so

28:29Steve:simon in conclusion then simon's simon's basically right in some circumstances um but not but the The figures are possibly not the ones that were originally put for. You'd have to dig into the figures and it presumes, as you say, certain royalty rates and stuff. So the figures might not be right, but Simon, in some cases, you're right. But this is heritage artists who these days have a position where a loyal fan base or people listen to their music or they are attracting in some way new listeners to their streaming sites where in the past they wouldn't have been able to buy the record.