+ A
A -
NYT Syndicate
When Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, first met a journeyman musician named Bob Marley in 1972, he had a feeling that the young man might find success.
"He had a kind of aura about him," Blackwell, 80, recalled in a recent interview."I had an idea that he could have an impact."
But Blackwell said he did not imagine the kind of pop-culture sainthood that Marley would ultimately achieve: tens of millions of albums sold, instant name-and-dreadlock recognition around the world, and an estate that, in Forbes's estimate, earned $23 million last year, partly from the sale of family-branded products like speakers and coffee.
While the family of Marley, who died in 1981 at 36, handles most aspects of his estate, Blackwell controls the rights to Marley's music publishing catalogue, including the copyrights to classic reggae songs like One Love and Three Little Birds. Recently, Blackwell signed a $50 million deal with Primary Wave Music Publishing, a boutique New York music company, the latest in a string of high-profile transactions reflecting how streaming has boosted the value of music catalogues.
"Basic publishing is absolutely important, but it's not very exciting," said Blackwell, who speaks in a slow, soft British accent but carries two cellphones that chirp constantly."But now it is the music business. Record companies used to manufacture, and that was the difference between a record company and a publishing company. All that is really gone now."
Under the deal, Primary Wave will control 80 percent of Blackwell's share of two catalogues: Marley's songs and Blue Mountain Music, a publisher that Blackwell set up in 1962, which has reggae hits by Toots & the Maytals and rock classics by Free (All Right Now) and Marianne Faithfull. Blue Mountain also has rights to U2 songs, but those are excluded from the deal, Blackwell said.
Primary Wave has carved out a lucrative niche in music publishing by focusing on aggressive branding and marketing campaigns for what its founder, Larry Mestel, calls"the icons and legends business." The company has a relatively small catalogue of about 12,000 songs ” its roster includes Smokey Robinson, Def Leppard and Steve Cropper, who wrote (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay with Otis Redding ” that it promotes heavily through commercial tie-ins, movies and TV shows.
Thwe Marley catalogue is unusual. During his lifetime, he had few chart hits, but his music has achieved steady, far-reaching popularity that has lasted for decades. According to Nielsen, Marley's songs have been streamed more than 1.7 billion times in the United States alone, and his fame permeates deep into emerging markets like Africa and India.
"There isn't a crevice of the world," Mestel said,"where Bob Marley isn't a god." Unlike most publishers, Primary Wave sees itself as a branding house and an asset manager, exploiting song catalogues on behalf of investors that have contributed to an acquisition fund. The company, Mestel said, has about $400 million to invest in music on behalf of those investors, a group that includes BlackRock, the world's largest money manager.
In a competitive market, Primary Wave's pitch to songwriters is that it can find new ways to market old material. For Robinson, who signed a $22 million deal with Primary Wave in 2016, the company did a deal with American Greetings to promote a new holiday, Father-Daughter Day, using Robinson's song My Girl. When he was looking for a new home for his songs, Robinson said in an interview, those ideas sold him.
"When I got to Primary Wave, they had made up a brochure with all kinds of things to show me how they operate," Robinson said."It had my picture on the cover and my songs listed and everything. It was just so attractive to me, I signed with them."
Mestel said that he seeks only tasteful deals. But the Marley family controls the use of their patriarch's name and likeness, and Blackwell said that the family, which earns the majority of the songwriting royalties, has the final right to refuse any use.
