Pink Floyd will be $400 million richer now that the band has agreed to sell their recorded music and name-and-likeness rights to Sony Music.
The British band comprised of members Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, the late Richard Wright and Roger “Syd” Barrett are known for their pioneering genre-bending as progressive and psychedelic rock musicians.
Beloved for their albums "Wish You Were Here," "The Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall," Pink Floyd's music has become ingrained in the rock genre. This deal with Sony will include the lion's share of their material, amounting to one of the largest sign-overs in recent years.
As confirmed to Variety, the band took a while to reach a middle ground in the deal, which comes after decades of feuding between Waters and Gilmour.
For years, Pink Floyd's catalog had been under consideration with a whopping asking price of $500 million. The band was reportedly close to nailing down a deal but infighting stalled negotiations. Variety also reported that the band's main tension centered on Waters' controversial statements on Israel and Ukraine in the recent past, which have scared off buyers and held off the official closing of the deal.
As The Guardian points out, Waters fueled controversy after being complimentary towards Vladimir Putin during an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, in which he said, “The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms.”
This led Waters to lose out on a solo record deal and devalued the band's catalog by about $100 million.
Last year, Gilmour's wife, novelist Polly Samson, told Waters on X, "You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core."
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Waters has denied any claims that he is antisemitic and called the comments “incendiary and wildly inaccurate.”
Gilmour himself told Rolling Stone that the catalog sale no longer was rooted in financial reasons and hoped “to be rid of the decision making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going,” which he described as “my dream.”
Sony Music has dropped large sums of money on securing some of rock music's largest stars from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Queen. Earlier this year, Queen snagged the title for largest in history at $1.2 billion. Springsteen's sale was listed for $550 million and Dylan's for $300 million — Pink Floyd's sale sits right in the middle of the two rockers.
Selling off music catalogs is what The Associated Press calls "big business." It is reported that about two-thirds of all music streamed is a part of a music catalog and streaming accounts for 84% of the revenue in the music industry.
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