The band hasn't released new music since frontman Freddie Mercury died in 1991. Photo / Getty Images
The band hasn't released new music since frontman Freddie Mercury died in 1991. Photo / Getty Images
The rock band sold its catalogue for a record-breaking $2 billion. Decades after they last performed, how can they still command such sums?
When pharmaceutical giant Pfizer decided, for the first time, to spend tens of millions of dollars on an advert during this year’s Super Bowl, there was only one song that provided a fitting soundtrack: Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. Galileo, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein featured in the romp through the history of science and medicine. And to really ramp home the point, Copernicus popped up, singing “I’m a shooting star leaping through the sky”.
Copernicus famously formulated the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than vice-versa. In music, however, Queen may as well be at the centre of the universe. The band’s decision to sell its back catalogue earlier this month in a kind of magic deal has broken all records.
The band - Brian May and Roger Taylor as well as the estates of Freddie Mercury and John Deacon - has agreed to sell its rights to Sony Music and the private equity giant Apollo for £1 billion ($2b). The fee dwarfs the US$500m (£395m or $819m) that Sony paid Bruce Springsteen for the Boss’ corpus in December 2021 and the US$600m ($98m that the label was reported to have spent on half of Michael Jackson’s catalogue in February.
It is not hard to see why such value has been placed on a band that has released no new music of note since frontman Mercury died in 1991: the numbers are almost enough to make you go radio gaga. Some 53 million users of Spotify, the world’s most popular music streaming platform, listen to Queen every month – by far the most of a historic, non-contemporary artist – and their songs have been listened to almost 23 billion times in total. By contrast, The Beatles have 36 million monthly listeners and have had 19 billion streams. “Queen have greater trans-generational appeal,” says Tony Rigg, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and expert on the band.
Though perhaps not as celebrated intellectually as genre-defining artists like The Beatles or Bob Dylan, people still love listening to Queen. The band’s GreatestHits record, which was initially released in 1981, is the most sold in British history, with more than 7 million sales in the UK alone. It has clocked up a record-breaking 1107 weeks in the album charts, and today is at 25 – up four places from last week. Only AbbaGold, the Swedish band’s own compilation record, has had more weeks in the top 100 (at 1155).
The band's hit song, Bohemian Rhapsody, is said to be played on the radio somewhere in the world at least once an hour. Photo / Getty Images
Queen may well have the most pound-for-pound bangers of any band in history. It’s said that Bohemian Rhapsody, Mercury’s operatic six-minute epic, is played on the radio somewhere in the world at least once an hour and, with 2.5 billion streams, is the most listened-to song from the 20th century. The ground-breaking music video for the song has been viewed 1.7 billion times. It is just one song, of course: one that label executives at EMI did not initially want to release in 1975 and that critics savaged when it eventually was.
And there are many more songs. We Will Rock You has perhaps the most recognisable percussion sequence in all of recorded music and, along with We Are The Champions, is so often heard at sports stadiums that it has become a cliche. Imagine having tunes as good as I Want To Break Free, Fat Bottomed Girls, Bicycle Race and Under Pressure (with David Bowie) in your back catalogue - and knowing that they are nowhere near your top 10.
“Their songs are singable and anthemic. The fact that they are singable is so significant,” says Rigg, who has co-edited The Artistry and Legacy of Queen, which will be published in December. “We listen to music and dance to music, but if you are singing along to the music you are engaging with it much more.”
They are money-makers in another way. As well as the Pfizer advert this year, Queen’s songs have been used to advertise everything from Amazon (also Don’t Stop Me Now), Dodge trucks (We Will Rock You), Somebody to Love (Honda) and Hyundai (Another One Bites the Dust).
And those are just the songs that have been used in Super Bowl adverts in the past decade. Advertisers realised a while ago that using 1980s bangers was a good way to flog their wares to people who grew up in that decade but have more money now. Queen’s music has also popped up in adverts for the Google Pixel smartphone, John Lewis and Amazon Music. The most-used song in adverts is I Want It All, followed by Crazy Little Thing Called Love and We Will Rock You.
Intriguingly, Queen’s music should be a tough sell for music supervisors, the personnel who choose the soundtrack to adverts. Typically, “they don’t want anything too polarising,” said supervisor Sarah Gavigan. “Ads are all about telling a story in 30 seconds; very rarely is that time not quirky, funny or heart-tugging.” Queen’s music, of course, is often all three. Yet Mercury’s lyricism is trumped by the recognition factor: Queen’s music is a good choice for advertisers not because it’s unique, but because it’s so familiar. It sells itself as it sells products - and, in doing so, sells itself. And so the cycle continues.
While May and Taylor have been accused of “selling out”, especially since Mercury died, by allowing their songs to become used by all manner of corporations, they are a valuable source of income and keep the tracks in the public consciousness.
Queen mania has, if anything, intensified in recent years. The Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was a monster smash, taking more than US$1b ($1.6b) at the box office after it was released in 2018, on a budget of just US$55m ($90m). It was the most lucrative biographical film ever until Oppenheimer came along last year, and Rami Malek won the Best Actor Oscar for his turn as the flamboyant frontman.
Thousands of Mercury’s possessions were auctioned at Sotheby's. Photo / AP
Fans of the band are intensely devoted, in a way that is perhaps best proven last September when thousands of Mercury’s possessions were auctioned at Sotheby’s for £12.2m ($25.3m) – almost triple what the auction house had estimated. Some 140,000 people, many of whom queued around the block, visited Sotheby’s on Bond St just to catch a glimpse of the Mercury artefacts. The top lot was his Yamaha baby grand piano, which sold for £1.7m ($3.5m), and a silver snake bangle he wore in the Bohemian Rhapsody video that went for almost £700,000 ($1.5m). It was only expected to fetch £9000 ($17,000).
In exchange for their £1b ($2b), Sony and Apollo will control the rights to all of Queen’s songs – from 15 studio albums, 10 live albums, 16 compilation records and 73 singles - as well as all image rights. The only Queen income that is not included in the deal is money from the band’s live performances, currently fronted by Adam Lambert.
For Sony and Apollo, Queen is not just a band but a brand. Sources close to the transaction insist that the value is not in the recordings alone, but the prospect of being able to exploit Queen’s intellectual property (IP). “It is the IP that we are buying,” says one source. “Think about things like AbbaVoyage, you could do the same thing. It’s documentaries, it’s films, it’s merchandising.” There is already a stage musical, in the form of the Ben Elton-written jukebox show We Will Rock You, which has been running on the West End since 2002 and has been exported around the world.
Now that the deal is complete, almost three decades after the release of their final album, there is going to be much more Queen to come.
