Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold It for 240 Million

"He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column. That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath."

"Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week's offering. The label took the lion's share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn't, got a few pence per copy."

"And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village."

"Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life's work."

A young Geordie schoolteacher wrote a reggae-flavoured song about a prostitute he had never met, naming her Roxanne. The song later helped Sting sell his entire songwriting catalogue of roughly six hundred tunes to Universal Music Publishing for about $300 million. The piece highlights how pop economics in 1977 were perishable, with labels taking most revenue and writers receiving only small amounts per copy. Despite that, Roxanne continued generating income through ads, karaoke, streaming, and repeated listening over decades. Similar catalogue sales followed for Bob Dylan and large recorded-work deals for Bruce Springsteen, showing enduring value in songwriting and recordings.

Read at Business Matters