American singer Bruce Springsteen sold the original recordings and publishing rights to all of his work to Sony for about $500 million.
The deal gives Sony ownership of his 20 studio albums, including such classics as Born To Run , The River and Born In The USA , according to multiple US reports.
Winner of 20 Grammy Awards, Springsteen and his music generated about $15 million in revenue last year .
The deal follows similar deals for the works of other legendary artists such as Bob Dylan, Blondie and David Bowie.
Warner Music bought the worldwide rights to Bowie’s music in September, and Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 songs in December last year to Universal Music Group for a purchase price of $300 million.
The deals provide immediate financial security for the artists and their properties, while those who own the rights hope to profit from creating new revenue streams with such music, through licensing of film and television productions, merchandise, cover versions and performance royalties.
Investments
At a meeting with investors in May, Sony Music CEO Rob Stringer said the company had spent $1.4 billion on acquisitions over the previous six months.
That included a multi-million dollar deal to get the rights to Paul Simon’s catalogue.
The deal they struck with Springsteen would be their most expensive yet, if the numbers reported by what is known as the bible of the music industry, Billboard, are correct.
No public announcement of the sale has been made and neither Sony nor Springsteen representatives immediately responded to a BBC request for comment.
Springsteen is one of the most successful rock musicians of all time and has recorded for Sony’s Columbia Records label for his entire career.
“MTV Generation”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Springsteen once said he tried to make an album with words like Bob Dylan, sound like Phil Spector and sing like Roy Orbison.
That remains a clear synthesis of his style and a key to understanding his broad appeal, though he has frequently and successfully experimented outside those borders.
His reputation was cemented in 1974, when music critic Jon Landau reviewed one of his shows with The E Street Band in Boston.
“Last Thursday at the Harvard Square Theater I saw rock and roll’s past flash before my eyes,” Landau wrote.
“And I saw something else: I saw the future of rock and roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen. And one night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was listening to music for the first time.”
Springsteen’s commercial breakthrough came the following year, with the successful album Born To Run .
Received by rave reviews, it sold nine million copies and saw Springsteen achieve the rare feat of appearing on the covers of Time magazine and Newsweek in the same week.
As one of the hardest-working artists in show business, he earned a reputation for his hours -long, sweat-soaked concerts and, somewhat unexpectedly, became one of the rising stars of the MTV generation , with iconic videos. of songs like Hungry Heart and Dancing In The Dark , while rotating with hits by Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince.
His biggest hit was 1985’s Born In The USA , which sold 15 million copies in the US and 30 million worldwide.
In the 1990s, he won an Oscar for the theme song for the AIDS epidemic drama starring Tom Hanks, Philadelphia.
A 1995 greatest hits album topped the charts, selling four million copies.
The 72-year-old recently published his autobiography, also titled Born To Run , and hosted a number of Broadway shows.
His latest album, Letter To You , was released in 2020.
