Entertainment For Lively Minds
Carly Simon sues Starbucks, decides she can't afford retirement and goes back to work
I've written a piece in the current issue about the likelihood that some of the superstars of the 60s and 70s may retire very soon. There's a revealing interview with Carly Simon in The New York Times which throws an interesting light on how artists of that generation are contemplating the future. Carly, who's had huge hits such as "You're So Vain" and "The Right Thing To Do" in the course of a nearly forty year career, is suing Starbucks for closing down their record label just when she was planning her retirement around the release of "This Kind Of Love" on the coffee chain's Hear Music imprint. This, combined with the property market, has left her in difficult financial straits which means she can't afford to retire. She's just announced a tour of the UK, the first in her 38-year career, and she's about to release an album of re-recordings of her classic repertoire, this time on her son's little label. She admits in the interview that she's had difficulty finding and paying producers. "All of a sudden you're the ugliest girl at the prom, and you're not picked," she says. I think there may be more stories like this to come.
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Blimey
wasn't she a millionaire heiress too? Where's it all gone?
If you read the feature...
...you'll see that she inherited $60,000 dollars.
I have no idea when she got the money...
...but assuming she got it after his death in 1960, that would have been close to $500,000 today
Nobody Does it better has been on US radio over 3,000,000 times
How can this be? Hasn't she written You're so Vain and Nobody Does It Better? Doesn't that provide a nice six-monthly check good enough for any human to live on?
How much money do people need?
I don't know any of her personal circumstances but how much money do people actually need to retire? She can't have blown it all / been ripped off completely can she?
Call me cynical
but if Starbucks choose to make a bona fide, perfectly legal business decision, her respondent retaliation may just produce far more revenue than an existent poorly selling album. She even admits that her sales are modest in the article. Stroke of luck if she's successful in her law suit, wouldn't you say ?
The Carly Simon album cover calendar should do it.
It'd certainly get better sales than a new album would within a certain demographic.
Do you mean
Apple and Tennis Racket enthusiasts ?
Not read your piece in the current issue yet but...
Blimey. I always assumed that a carefully nurtured global hit record (such as you're so vain) would be enough to sustain a modest retirement. But thinking it through, if nobody is making money out of new recorded music sales then presumably, royalties from older recordings have all but dried up too?
A bums on seats tour seems to be the way to feather the nest these days but I wouldn't imagine Carley Simon to be in the same league as (for example) Leonard Cohen.
If the artists who were selling records by the shed load back in the day are struggling, what plans should the artists of today be making to top up their state pension?
Carley Simon's House
The satellite photos suggest that she has a pretty sizeable house. Perhaps she needs the money to keep her in the style to which she's become accustomed.
She's so vain?
Grass needs cutting
The gardener clearly had to go
She's obviously
got clouds in her Starbucks.
I wouldn't rush to the conclusion...
...that she's been a spendthrift. Michael Jackson. *He* was a spendthrift. She doesn't tour because she's always had trouble with stage fright, unlike her former husband James, who tours every year. And he has some huge song copyrights so if anyone could live off the fat of the land it's him. She puts out records, some of which sell OK and some of which don't. And then you've got the recent dramatic decline in what sales there were. Back catalogue record sales don't keep many people apart from Abba. Radio play *can* do in some territories but in the US you don't get paid for having your record played on the radio. And then they make investments, some of which don't pay off. It's never simple.
Celebs
They're just like us.
I wasn't aware
you don't get paid if you are played on the radio in the US !!. Why is it different in the U.K then i need to know.
To be honest
I'm not sure Mr H is right on that one. ASCAP certainly appear to do a radio play royalty calculation, but this area is a minefield, and literally anything could be true. I wouldn't claim to know for certain, even if I did. And I don't.
The composer gets paid...
...but they're still trying to impose a payment for use of sound recordings on the radio. This was one of the huge issues around MTV. In the US all video play was counted as promotion. In the UK and Europe the broadcaster has to pay for the right.
My Understanding is
that there is no equivalent of PRS or collection of royalties for live performance in the US. So if bands play covers of your material etc., you do not receive a cent in royalties.
I'm sure I'll be corrected promptly if this is incorrect.
Thanks for
clearing that up Fraser i'll sleep now.
UK Royalties
All commercial radio stations have to pay a percentage of their revenue to an assortment of royalty companies, including PRS and MCPS.
I think the total is around 10% of income, which in some cases is a lot of dosh. This money is then divvied up by the royalty companies to their members.
They do this because they are over a barrel, coopered by their main competitor(The jolly old BBC)happily handing over a huge lump sum of your money. This explains why the UK and the USA are so different.
The negotiations between the commercial radio companies and the royalty companies are always long and protracted.
Next time could be worse than ever.
Percentage of revenue is great for the artists when revenues are rising. Not quite so good in the current climate.
Plus we now have a commercial radio industry dominated by one company, Global Radio, who have already stated that they feel they are paying too much, especially compared to the world of new media, where all the royalty revenue from the interweb doesn't seem to match up to it's usage.
Boo hoo...
...Maybe she'll have to sell her big house with pool and tennis court. I have a real issue with the "world owes me a living" types, especially when they've "...lost money on the stock market..." or are in "...financial straits from other business problems..."
Heavens! She can't even sell one of her other houses!
Who said...
...the world owed anybody a living? The woman is working because she can't afford to retire and feels she has a case against her previous record company. If she hasn't she won't win.
And she's seeking
$5-10 million
How many actual sales would that represent?
Starbucks paid $575.000 advance for this?
No wonder their coffee is so expensive.
Heard a lot worse
But blimey those lips. Looks like she’s had more work done than Smokey Robinson.
Scrabbling about for a pension is fair enough. But the desperate attempt to disguise the ageing process is a bit undignified.
"The woman is working.."
Heavens, yes. Slaving her fingers to the bone for the past thirty years. Those guitars don't play themselves, you know. Day in, day out, performing music, sometimes for up to two hours at a time. Have you seen how much pool-cleaners charge now?
Carly Simon has not exactly been a maelstrom of feverish creativity for some time and has lived a life of great luxury. Her concept of retirement is somewhat different to ours. As is Mr Hepworth's concept of her working.
It might also be noted that...
...planning your retirement, aged 64, against a speculative activity (ie how many people buy the album) is a little ...shortsighted...
perhaps she should have bought something a little more substantial along the way.
Of course, the 20 year old me put lots of money into Equitable Life, so whaty do I know. Bastards.
On the broader subject....
...of '60s and '70s superstars retiring: hasn't Bill Bruford already announced his retirement? And he's a superstar....I nearly wrote that he fits the bill (just stopped myself in time).
Bill Bruford? A superstar?!
Mention the name 'Bill Bruford' to the man in the street and he'll think you're talking about the bloke that comes round to do his drains.
Depends on the street, I suppose...
...down our way, we're just awash with proggers and jazzers.
i read that
as prozzers and Jaggers...
You obviously know our street...
!
Re that piece about retirement, again with the Bowie bonds ... ?
David, I thought we cleared up the Bowie Bonds thing back in January?
The bonds - linked to his back catalogue, not future releases by the way - were issued in January 1997, ran for 10 years, and nobody is "now holding a bunch of paper rated just above junk bond status". They reverted back to the Dame in 2007.
They were all bought by the Prudential in 1997. They did not sell them on or make any available to the public, so they must have been happy. At somewhere around 7-10% return it was a fairly good investment.
So ... nothing to see here. Move along.
Well, I dunno
If they can make this deal work then they must surely be financial magicians.
Well ...
It seems that they did. You have to bear in mind that the BBC article you quote dates from 2004 when the bonds only had 3 years left to run. If the yield fell in the final few years the average over 10 years still hit 7.9%. They were based on the future royalty payments from 25 David Bowie albums recorded before 1990, which I suspect are fairly consistent sellers.
As recently as July this year this type of intellectual property bond was being touted as an area to watch http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/financial-markets-investing-s...
Isn't this a dull conversation for a Wednesday morning? Sorry. I'm waiting for someone to come and tell me how little my house is now worth!
Maths
Maths was never my strong point, but doesn't an average 7.9% return on investment over ten years equate to a loss? Please bear in mind when answering that I know nothing about this sort of thing.
Not mine either
but surely a loss would be -0000000000001% (or more, or less)return ? Anything above that would be a gain. Surely. No?
I don't know either
But if I can chip in: if I invest £100 with you, and the first year you you pay me back £7.90 as a dividend, and this average return plays out over ten years, am I not still down overall at the end of the decade? Or am I also getting this process completely wrong?
Not quite...
Over ten years you'd get (say) £79.00 in dividends but you'd still own a bond/share with a notional value of £100 that you could sell on at any time.
The actual market price of that bond/share does, of course, vary depending on the market conditions so when you decide to sell, you may gain or lose.
Ah
That makes sense. Thanks. It would appear that the Pru made a loss on the bonds then, as they never sold them on.
But then again , no ...
A bond is essentially a secured loan. So, when Mr Bowie received his $55M in 1997 it was simply a loan that was to be repaid at the end of the 10 year issue period. The 'interest' that the Pru received on that loan was the income Bowie would otherwise himself have received on his pre-1990 catalogue.
The Pru's income over the 10 year period averaged out as a 7.9% per annum reurn on the original capital investment of $55M, which is around $4.35M p.a.
At the 10th anniversary maturity date (2007) Bowie would have got back the rights to his catalogue, and the Pru got back their £55M capital.
The incentive for Bowie was he had $55M to play with for 10 years. As I understand it what he did was use this capital to buy up more copyrights both on certain of his songs that he did not own, and other publishing rights.
Where Bowie probably also scored highly was that his back catalogue reverted to him in 2007 around the time that digital and online sales were picking up, and the boxed anniversary edition was the next big thing.
This is why it is incorrect for DH to say that there are punters out there holding worthless bits of paper. The Bonds matured in 2007 and no longer exist. I did explain this to him in January but you know what he's like Fraser ... never listens!
125,000
According to a piece about this on the Rolling Stone site the album sold 125000 copies. That's quite a lot for something that wasn't promoted properly or not stocked. Not enough to retire on sure, but still...
If that figure is true - then it kind of makes her lawsuit seem a little desperate...
Terrific songwriter, crap businesswoman?
I think it's revealing the interview points to, "financial straits from other business problems" and her signing to Starbucks because their CEO "Howard Schultz seemed to be such an attractive person." Hmmm... sounds like a rational business brain at work?
She also complains that the new album wasn't stocked in every Starbucks. Well, there's thousands of them! I'd bet it wouldn't be stocked in every HMV outlet if it took a traditional distribution model.
I quite like Carly Simon but I have to say this sounded like sour grapes to me. Since she talks about not wanting her self-esteem to suffer, I'd suggest she shuts up pdq becuase this really looks like one of those cases where the only winner is Messrs Sue, Grabitt and Runne.