Legendary rock band Queen have reportedly sold their iconic back catalogue of hits for a whipping £1Billion pounds following a bidding war. 

According to The Sun the surviving band members and Freddie Mercury’s estate have agreed to the sale with Sony Music, more than doubling the record set by Bruce Springsteen, who sold the rights to his music for £393M in 2021.

The publication reports that Sony will now own all the band’s hits including Bohemian Rhapsody, Don’t Stop Me Now and I Want To Break Free. 

But unlike Springsteen and Bob Dylan who sold his own back catalogue for £315M, the band will retain the rights to perform their music live.

Founding members Brian May, 75, and Roger Taylor, 74, continue to tour live with Adam Lambert, 42, as their new front man following Freddie’s death in 1991. 

The deal In is also said to include revenue from merchandise, cash generated by the 2018 biographic movie Bohemian Rhapsody and any other future projects and licensing deals. 

MailOnline have contacted the band’s reps for comment. 

Springsteen’s deal  was inked before a string of other artists including Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Justin Bieber, also bagged hundreds of millions of dollars for their own collections. But the market has cooled since and some major investors have devalued their song collections by as much as 14 percent.

Disney Music Group owns the North America rights to Queen’s music. But the band retains ownership of the global rights through the UK-based Queen Productions Ltd, which earned £39 million in royalties in 2021.

Investors view music catalogs much like owning shares in companies which pay dividends. The £1 billion valuation for Queen’s catalog is based on the annual returns an investor can expect throughout the next several decades.

Ahead of the reports Guy Blake, a leading music industry attorney who has worked on catalog acquisitions, told DailyMail.com earlier this year that the Queen deal would be ‘seismic’.

‘In general, I don’t see a problem with this [$1.2 billion] number being accurate, I think there’s probably some degree of truth to it,’ said Blake, a managing partner at Granderson Des Rochers.

‘There aren’t a whole lot of catalogs out there like Queen,’ he said.’

In the streaming age, catalog valuations also rely heavily on a metric called ‘album consumption units’, which combine streams and downloads to estimate what the equivalent number of album sales would be. One album sale is equivalent to about 1,500 song streams, according to industry standards.

Queen’s album consumption units in the US were 25.9 million between 1991 and 2017 then surged to 3.58 million in 2019 following the release of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, according to Luminate figures reported by Billboard.

The popularity of the movie and continued airplay of Queen’s hits decades after they were released has helped the band earn a legion of young fans - something that’s also boosted the value of their catalog.

‘Queen has found a much younger audience. And that’s unique to a legacy catalog, Blake said.

‘I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of rock bands out there that could say that they had the popularity with people under 30 that Queen has right now. There’s just some uniqueness to so many of their songs that they just keep coming back, generation after generation.’

Source: Daily Mail
--Agencies