Sting, The Beatles & Music Royalties

Somewhere in a humid Paris hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie teacher named Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, looked at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out the window to watch the working girls below, and crooned a little reggae favorite number that had never met a whore.

He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on something. Maybe a long lunch. I really don’t have much time to spend writing this column.

That song, in February 2022, helped Sting offer his entire songwriting catalog, six hundred songs, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. About £240 million in real money. For songs written in notebooks in hotels, on the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bathtub. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreat, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweat equity” I’ve ever encountered in business.

Think about early economics. The pop song of 1977 was indestructible: three minutes of groove stuck on a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by teenagers and replaced by next week’s donation. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his boss was honest, usually didn’t have one, he got a few cents per copy. And yet here we are, a century later, and Roxanne is still leading. Every car ad. All karaoke license. Every Spotify spins in Bangkok’s cocktail scene at two in the morning. All of Boomer’s silly thumbs up in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.

Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan sold his songwriting catalog to Universal in late 2020 for an estimated $300 million, then sold his record works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, a working-class hero from Asbury Park, raised between $500 and $600 million for Sony over his lifetime career. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are obscene, and rising.

Why? Because, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion worldwide last year. Broadcasting alone topped $20 billion, a full 69 percent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten years of consecutive growth. The very technology that everyone said would kill the music industry, Napster, file sharing, the iPod, the Internet itself, has instead resurrected it as a revenue stream. Music doesn’t sell anymore. It is sold forever, for fractions of a cent, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.

Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who installed my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The lawyer who wrote our new sponsorship contracts was billed by the hour and that was it. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all the time in sales, they are all watching the clock, they are all running until the day of retirement and the checks stop. I mean the great industrial wealth of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, the necessary factories, the foundations, the trucks, the lawyers, the picnic lines and the occasional brutal takeover. Although Paul McCartney dreamed up yesterday’s song in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, with “scrambled eggs, oh baby how I love your legs” as the lyrics, and has since grossed $19.5 million for one song—the most covered song in human history, with more than three thousand copies. The Beatles catalog is now worth a comfortable north of £1.2 billion and is reported to throw in £70 to £90 million a year to owners, who, brilliantly, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.

This is a lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It’s not what you do. It’s what you do that goes on. The entire economy of intellectual property, software, products, copyrights, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and charges you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people over him. Coca-Cola wrote the formula on paper in 1886 and it has paid out dividend checks for four generations. But none of them, not a single one, have the idiosyncratic, drug-addled wit of a songwriter who spent an afternoon singing and is still churning out seven-figure royal statements at his advanced age.

We business owners should be angry. And inspired. In November 2023, the Beatles even released Now and Then, John Lennon’s demo from the late seventies, which was combined with the artificial intelligence and wizardry of Peter Jackson’s studio, and went to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart. The material, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and is now being sweated by a fourth generation of listeners who were not born when their grandparents bought the first LP.

So the next time some independent entrepreneur hits the boardroom table looking for “efficiency” and “sustainable income streams”, gently remind him that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a poor Geordie with a guitar singing nonsense about a Paris prostitute in 1977 and banking nine people’s checks in his nine-year-old life. We should all be lucky. Or, more practically, you’re very smart.