Legendary rock band Queen have reportedly sold their iconic catalog of hits for £1bn after a bidding war.
According Sun The surviving band members and Freddie Mercury’s estate agreed the sale with Sony Music, more than doubling the record set by Bruce Springsteen, who sold the rights to his music for £393 million in 2021.
The publication reports that Sony will now own all of the band’s hits, including Bohemian Rhapsody, Don’t Stop Me Now and I Want To Break Free.
But unlike Springsteen and Bob Dylan, who sold their own catalog for £315m, the band will retain the rights to perform their music live.
Founding members Brian May, 75, and Roger Taylor, 74, continue to tour live with Adam Lambert, 42, as their new frontman following Freddie’s death in 1991.
Legendary rock band Queen reportedly sold their iconic catalog of hits for £1 billion after a bidding war (LR) to Roger Taylor, John Deacon, Freddie Mercury and Brian May in 1980.
The surviving members of the band and Freddie Mercury’s estate have reportedly agreed the sale with Sony Music, more than doubling the record set by Bruce Springsteen, who sold the rights to his music for £393 million in 2021 (Freddie in 1979 ).
While bassist John Deacon, 72, retired from music in 1997.
The deal is also said to include merchandise revenue, cash generated from the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and any other future projects and licensing deals.
MailOnline has contacted the band’s representatives for comment.
Springsteen’s contract was signed before a host of other artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Justin Bieber, also pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars for their own collections. But the market has cooled since then and some major investors have devalued his song collections by as much as 14 percent.
Disney Music Group owns the rights to Queen’s music in North America. But the band retains ownership of global rights through UK-based Queen Productions Ltd, which earned £39m in royalties in 2021.
Investors view music catalogs as holding shares in companies that pay dividends. The £1bn valuation of Queen’s catalog is based on the annual returns an investor can expect over the next few decades.
Prior to the reports, Guy Blake, a leading music industry lawyer who has worked on catalog acquisitions, told DailyMail.com earlier this year that the deal with Queen would be “seismic”.
“Overall, I don’t see any problem with this figure ($1.2 billion) being accurate; I think there’s probably some degree of truth to it,” said Blake, managing partner at Granderson Des Rochers.
Sony is said to now own all of the band’s hits, including Bohemian Rhapsody, Don’t Stop Me Now and I Want To Break Free (pictured in 1984).
Springsteen’s 2021 deal was signed before a host of other artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Justin Bieber, also pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars for their own collections.
But unlike Springsteen and Bob Dylan (pictured), who sold their own catalog for £315 million, the band will retain the rights to perform their music live.
Founding members Brian May, 75, and Roger Taylor, 74, continue to tour live with Adam Lambert, 42, as their new frontman (pictured) following Freddie’s death in 1991.
“There aren’t many catalogs like Queen,” he said.
In the streaming era, catalog valuations also rely heavily on a metric called “album consumption units,” which combines streams and downloads to estimate what the equivalent number of album sales would be. An album sale is equivalent to approximately 1,500 song streams, according to industry standards.
Queen album consumer units in the US were 25.9 million between 1991 and 2017 and then increased to 3.58 million in 2019 following the release of the film Bohemian Rhapsody, according to Luminate figures reported by Billboard.
The popularity of the film and the continued release of Queen’s hits decades after their release have helped the band gain a legion of young fans, something that has also increased the value of their catalogue.
‘Queen has found a much younger audience. And that’s unique to a legacy catalog, Blake said.
“I don’t know if there are many rock bands that can say they have the popularity among people under 30 that Queen has right now. There’s something unique about a lot of their songs that keep coming back, generation after generation.”