Posted on Greasy Lake:

From a good mate who is in the music business as an A&R man, am hearing of an official announcement of the 2022 tour being made on Thursday this week.

[www.greasylake.org]

Two of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen were Springsteen in Berlin and Circus Maximus in Rome.It will be fantastic to see Springsteen on tour again.

Nate

Yes, but how can one commit to Springsteen tickets without knowing the Stones' 2022 dates first?

First world problems.

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Topi
Yes, but how can one commit to Springsteen tickets without knowing the Stones' 2022 dates first?

First world problems.

After the last two years it’s a problem I don’t mind having.

Nate

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Topi
Yes, but how can one commit to Springsteen tickets without knowing the Stones' 2022 dates first?

First world problems.

I'll have had four years to amass the funds (six for Bruce) and havent been on holiday since 2019, so I think I'll cope!

For what its worth, I'd be amazed if that tour announcement rumour is true.

Yeah, it has been all too quiet on that front, you'd think there would be more leaks/clues by now.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-10-26 21:08 by Topi.

Bruce Springsteen Sells Music Catalog in Massive Deal


[www.nytimes.com]

Bruce, you certainly have come a long way from your humble,working class roots, haven't you now (LOL)?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2021-12-16 18:16 by Sighunt.

Last years Letter to you is still one of his best albums ever. If you ask me.

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Bjorn
Last years Letter to you is still one of his best albums ever. If you ask me.

it's a fabulous piece of work
Fingers crossed for a tour announcement

Bruce guested with Steve Earle & The Dukes at Earle's "John Henry’s Friends Benefit" at Town Hall in New York On 12/13.

Good Ole Bruce . I have such awesome memories to last a lifetime and so enriching in the folks that shared so graciously with me that made it all possible . I mean talk about the Salt of the Earth can not possibly even express my most sincere gratitude for whom none of this would be possible . Deep enriching lifetime bonds and connections ! My most sincere gratitude and then some !

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bye bye johnny
Bruce guested with Steve Earle & The Dukes at Earle's "John Henry’s Friends Benefit" at Town Hall in New York On 12/13.

Hoping he show's up at the Lenny Kaye 75th birthday bash with Patti Smith. One can always hope.

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Sighunt
Bruce Springsteen Sells Music Catalog in Massive Deal


[www.nytimes.com]

Bruce, you certainly have come a long way from your humble,working class roots, haven't you now (LOL)?

Follow-up Times article today.

$550 Million Springsteen Deal?
It’s Glory Days for Catalog Sales.

Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices. Here’s why.

Dec. 20, 2021 by Ben Sisario. Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998.

[www.nytimes.com]

In 1972, a struggling New Jersey musician hustled into Manhattan for an audition at Columbia Records, using an acoustic guitar borrowed from his former drummer.

“I had to haul it ‘Midnight Cowboy’-style over my shoulder on the bus and through the streets of the city,” the rocker, Bruce Springsteen, later recalled in his memoirs.

Half a century later, he can afford plenty of guitars. Last week Sony, which now owns Columbia, announced that it acquired Springsteen’s entire body of work — his recordings and his songwriting catalog — for what two people briefed on the deal said was about $550 million.

The price, which may be the richest ever paid for the work of a single musician, caused jaws to drop throughout the music industry. But it was only the latest mega-transaction in a year in which many prominent artists’ catalogs have been sold, fetching eye-popping prices.

The catalog market was already bubbling a year ago when Bob Dylan sold his songwriting rights for more than $300 million, but since then it has maintained a steady boil. The list of major artists who have recently sold their work, in full or in part, includes Paul Simon, Neil Young, Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner, Mötley Crüe, Shakira and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, many for eight-figure payouts or more. The industry is abuzz about impending deals for Sting and the songwriting catalog of David Bowie.

“Almost everything now is transacting,” said Barry M. Massarsky, an economist who specializes in calculating the value of music catalogs on behalf of investors. “In the last year alone, we did 300 valuations worth over $6.5 billion,” he added.

Not long ago, music was seen as a collapsing business, with rampant piracy and declining sales. No longer.

Streaming and the global growth of subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube have turned the industry’s fortunes around. One result is a spike in the pricing of catalogs of music rights to both recordings and to the songs themselves.

New investors, including private equity firms, have poured billions of dollars into the market, viewing music royalties as a kind of safe commodity — an investment, somewhat like real estate, with predictable rates of return and relatively low risk.

For major music conglomerates like Sony and Universal, which bought Dylan’s songs, such deals help them consolidate power and gain negotiating leverage with streaming services and other tech companies, like social-media, exercise services or gaming platforms, that often make blanket deals to use music.

Despite the popularity of young acts like Drake and Dua Lipa, older material dominates online. According to MRC Data, a tracking service that powers the Billboard charts, about 66 percent of all music consumption — of which streaming is by far the largest part — is for material that is older than 18 months, and that number has been growing rapidly.

And for artists, the sale can bring tax advantages. Royalties are typically taxed as ordinary income, while a catalog sale can qualify as capital gains, which typically have lower rates.

Artists like Springsteen, 72, are part of the generation of music stars that, starting in the 1970s, first came to gain control of their work in large numbers, in ways that preceding generations did not.

“A lot of artists were taken advantage of in the ’50s and ’60s,” said John Branca, Michael Jackson’s longtime lawyer, who is now one of the executors of Jackson’s estate. “With the emergence of better legal and management representation in the ’70s and ’80s, there was a push for the artists to obtain more power, more leverage, and ultimately to own their own work.”

Many of those stars are now pulling the last lever of that control by deciding to sell, in numbers that were unthinkable even a decade ago, many executives and artists’ advisers say.

The desire for control is now reflected in younger stars like Taylor Swift, who has campaigned in public about the importance of artists owning their work and criticized the marketplace in which catalogs of songs are bought and sold without the creators’ participation or approval. In Swift’s case, she has gone so far as to rerecord her own songs, in part to control the earnings from those tracks.

“Part of the power of being an owner of your assets is that you get to decide when to cash out and how to cash out,” said Bill Werde, the director of Syracuse University’s Bandier Program on the music industry and a former editor of Billboard, the music trade publication.

In general, selling out means giving up control, and buyers typically want to exploit assets fully to earn back their investment.

In Springsteen’s case, the negotiations for the Sony sale included discussions about limiting how his work could be used in the future, with particular concern about any ads featuring two of Springsteen’s most iconic songs, “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Born to Run,” according to three people briefed on the deal who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Throughout his career, Springsteen consistently refused to license his music for ads, though in February he made his first-ever commercial appearance in a Jeep ad for the Super Bowl, delivering a message about the need for a “common ground” in the United States. (The soundtrack was not one of Springsteen’s hit songs but an atmospheric score composed by Springsteen and Ron Aniello.)

Representatives for Sony and Springsteen declined to comment on the terms of the deal.

Springsteen, one of the most successful singer-songwriters in pop history, essentially made two deals with Sony. One was for his so-called master recordings, the sounds of his music as captured on albums and single tracks. The other, sometimes described as music publishing, is for his songwriting rights — the words, melodies and musical structure of the hundreds of songs he wrote. With both sets of rights, Sony will have full control over the future use and earnings of Springsteen’s music and lyrics, except for any restrictions that were part of the deal.

According to an estimate by Billboard, Springsteen’s two catalogs of music — his recordings and songwriting — earn about $17 million a year, after costs.

Many older artists see this as a good time to sell — while their music remains popular, and market conditions are favorable.

But behind the scenes, there has often been vigorous debate among artists and their advisers about whether to sell. For many of the most astute players, a key question is not so much the price but who is offering it, as private equity players and other financial specialists — which sometimes buy catalogs outright and sometimes merely provide the financing for specialist companies — wade into the tricky waters of protecting artists’ legacies in a world of commerce.

“What does an artist mean over half-century career,” said Jeff Jampol, who manages the estates of the Doors, Janis Joplin and other stars, “if all of a sudden those assets just disappear into the maw of some huge hedge fund that has no connection to art, music or legacy?”

While headlines highlight those who have decided to sell, there have been some dissenters.

Diane Warren, the songwriter of hits like Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” told Rolling Stone that selling her catalog “would be like selling my soul.” When asked whether the Michael Jackson estate would consider selling Jackson’s rights, which may be worth well over $1 billion, Branca said, “I don’t think I would ever sell.”

But as the prices rise, it may become harder for holdouts to resist.

___________

In the article's reader comments:

Andrew Alexis
Sacramento CA
Dec. 20, 2021

I am 65; I am at the end of the baby boomer surge, and in 20 years most of us boomers are going to be gone, and I should think that in that time the market for most of this music will be completely gone. Much of this music is over 30 years old; some 50-60 years old. Who is going to want to listen to 50 to 80 year old music in 2041? When I was in college in the 1970s it would be like listening to Scott Joplin rags and heartfelt sentimental songs from 1910.


[ in NYT comments I am: ]

Link Wray's Busted Speaker
Virginia
Dec. 20, 2021

@Andrew Alexis

Rock n roll has been more durable, albeit at a lower level going on 7 decades out, because of what it came from.

White and black Americans' popular musical styles were fairly effectively walled off from each other for a long time. Not totally, of course. In cities ragtime, jazz, big band, swing, and so forth, crossed race lines. Some gospel did. But blues and country, much less so. Played and enjoyed on neighboring cotton farms in some of the same counties, they didn't mix remotely commensurate with their proximity. One was considered "race music," and the other race wasn't inclined to that much mixing yet.

But such walls couldn't hold up forever. The levees leaked. In the mid 1950s, they broke outright.

The result was unlike anything popular music had seen before, or has since. To change my fluid metaphors here: It was rocket fuel meeting its oxidizer and igniting. The raw materials were so interesting and distinctive, and the ways of mixing them creatively were so far-ranging, far-reaching, and exciting, that the combustion kept rolling, and rolling, for decades.

Eventually, though, musicians did use up most of the best possibilities for even that astonishing cultural chemistry. Early 1980s or so, rock n roll finally did start to sputter.

But oh my, what a ride the late 1950s thru the 1970s had been.

I don't see something like it happening again.

But show me where the silos are now, holding such great musical genres apart, and I may change my mind.

****
I'm down in Virginia
with your Cousin Lou

With the sale of his catalog, I am looking at new business ventures for Bruce: Glory Days Tequila and maybe some Mescal as, if I remember right, Springsteen likes Tequila. I also see Jessica getting some new ponies for Christmas for her dressage endeavors. All the cashing in by rock/pop performers makes me think of a song by David and David - Welcome To The Boomtown - from their album Boomtown (which is fantastic).

[www.youtube.com]

Bruce is 72 and a millionaire many times over. He's already long been able to do anything he wants.

What is he going do now with an additional half a billion dollars suddenly plopped in his lap?

Is he going to set up his heirs as part of America's aristocracy of the wealthy for generations to come?

Because that always turns out so well.

**sarcasm**

That would likely result in some of his very wealthy descendants turning out to be irresolute and feckless wastes of space, like has tended to happen with many people who have received fortunes that they themselves did nothing to earn. Ours is a nation heavy on materialism, conspicuous consumption, attention-seeking or other immediate ego gratification, and, well... greed leading usually to just more greed. IMHO, all of that argues for fewer intergenerational family dynasties and less inherited wealth, not more.

Actually, mere wastes of space would be good outcomes compared to some. Lots of people with great wealth who never earned a penny themselves settle on their goal in life as trying to wipe out the taxes that the wealthy pay. Create an ideal, for them, world, in which everybody rich keeps every dollar in their Scrooge McDuck pile, tax-free, forever. Such Walton, Koch, and Mercer Family-like heirs figure the way to do that is to throw money at efforts to manipulate political outcomes from safety behind the scenes, hiding in anonymity behind walls of LLCs and black-box political action committees.

Inherited wealth has burdened our nation with RFK Jrs, Kardashians, DJTJs & Ivankas & Jareds... on and on.

Of course, one's undeservedly wealthy heirs might also turn out to be actual philanthropists. It could happen.

But there's no way to know what your lineage is going to spew out in a generation or two. What the quality of those individuals will be. Who, exactly, your fortune will be enriching... and empowering.

Vast wealth arriving late in the life of the already very well-off looks, to me, like mostly just quite a bit of additional and unnecessary worry.

Same could be said of our heroes Mick and Keith.

Regarding the comment about the offspring of the well to do, I've no idea how many Springsteen and Patti have. I do know that one of them went to firefighters school and is a fireman with the City of New York. As for the others, ???

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dmay
Regarding the comment about the offspring of the well to do, I've no idea how many Springsteen and Patti have. I do know that one of them went to firefighters school and is a fireman with the City of New York. As for the others, ???

One is in the equestrian world I think.

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Paddy

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dmay
Regarding the comment about the offspring of the well to do, I've no idea how many Springsteen and Patti have. I do know that one of them went to firefighters school and is a fireman with the City of New York. As for the others, ???

One is in the equestrian world I think.

Yes, she is/was an Olympian.

"No Anchovies, Please"

Thursday, January 6, 2022

BOSS MOVING BIG TOUR TO '23?

Word has it that Bruce Springsteen intends to move his planned tour with the E Street Band—including a rumored Desert Trip headlining spot—from 2022 to 2023. Nothing official had been announced or put on sale for the rock icon, who recently inked a historic recordings-and-pub sale with longtime partner Sony. But the plan to go out big this year has been pushed to the following year.

The organizers of classic-rock fest Desert Trip—led by Paul Tollett, who is also wheeling and dealing for the Coachella lineup—are said to be working hard to secure Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, but that booking appears shaky at best. The rest of the bill, insiders say, looks like a home run.

[hitsdailydouble.com]-

[twitter.com]

You gotta love Bruce's fans. They plan things before the band even does.

Bruce is featured on three tracks on John Mellencamp's latest, "Strictly A One-Eyed Jack"

Wasted Days




Did You Say Such A Thing




A Life Full of Rain

Audio in article.

[faroutmagazine.co.uk]

Nothing new.

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wiredallnight
Nothing new.

But cool.

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dead.flowers

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wiredallnight
Nothing new.

But cool.

Cool indeed
and I like the subtle modification going from "sleepy London Town" to "sleepy Jersey Town". When there on holidays I spoke to a former nanny of the Springsteen family. She said she really enjoyed that job and they were down to earth nice people.



I'm a GHOST living in a ghost town

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dead.flowers

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wiredallnight
Nothing new.

But cool.

eh

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georgie48

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dead.flowers

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wiredallnight
Nothing new.

But cool.

Cool indeed
and I like the subtle modification going from "sleepy London Town" to "sleepy Jersey Town".

Thats almost necessary for him to do at this point. I'd be more surprised if he DIDN'T wrangle in Jersey in some fashion lol.

It would come over a whee bit funny if he sang "sleepy London town", wouldn't it?

EDIT: italics



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-01-20 17:26 by dead.flowers.