All I Want for Christmas are Royalties 💸
Happy Christmas Eve folks 🎅🏻
As 2021 draws to a close, it seems like ‘unprecedented’ looks like the relevant tag for another year in a row 😴
For the Sci-Fi nerds, if you thought 2020 was just a glitch in the simulation, was 2021 any different?
The bug of the new Matrix film might be talking here, but the distinction between the real and virtual world seems to be diminishing by every single day, especially with all the hype around the ‘Metaverse’ this past year
https://twitter.com/clubincentify/status/1473936327930376193?s=20
Peter Thiel, the Silicon-Valley legend, writes about the 4 gradients in which nation-states can be split up, based on their outlook towards the future.
While Thiel wrote this in his 2014 book ‘Zero to One’, it was still back when Social Media wasn’t as big as it is today, and CEOs of Big Tech companies weren’t summoned by members of Congress, trying to defend why they weren’t responsible for rigging US elections 🇺🇸
Cut back to today, does this even hold up?
Try logging into Twitter, and you could pull up 4 different tweets which would seem as if the user falls under each of these quadrants.
The emergence of the ‘Internet Culture’, and mini-factions subscribing to their own ideologies has resulted in falling relevance of a nation-state’s ideologies as a whole.
The probability of you reading Das Kapital or The Intelligent Investor can be attributed to which sub-reddit you’re a part of, and much less to where you actually live.
At this point, you’re thinking what has all of this got to do with Christmas and Music Royalties?
Honestly, so am I. So let’s get into 🔽
Why 25th Dec is like winning the lottery for some Artists
Except it just happens every year 📅
What do Mariah Carey, Wham! and Michael Buble’ have in common?
All three of them are Mega Stars in their own right, but come the holiday season, their numbers enter another stratosphere 👇🏻
With the holiday season music industry estimated at an insane $170 Million, it’s a well-running joke that a single that becomes a big Christmas hit, can sort out an artist financially, for the rest of their life ✅
That truth was the basis of Nick Hornby’s novel About A Boy, and its 2002 film adaptation, where Hugh Grant’s character Will Freeman lives a life of comfort and idleness bankrolled by never-ending royalties from a Christmas hit his father wrote in the 1950s.
While Hollywood might have fictionalised this tale, the money from producing a classic Christmas banger is very much the reality for a lucky bunch of artists.
In fact, the Top 5 highest earning artists have made a combined dough of roughly $200M plus in royalties 🤯
🎄 Irving Berlin: White Christmas -€57 million
🎄Mariah Carey: All I Want For Christmas Is You- €53 million
🎄Haven Gillespie & Fred J Coots: Santa Claus is Coming to Town- €44 million
🎄Mel Torme: The Christmas Song — €40 million
🎄Paul McCartney: Wonderful Christmastime- €35 million
Not bad right?
Maybe it’s time for Mariah Carey to clarify what she really wants for Christmas 😉
Have a good one guys, and talk to you next week (year?) 👋🏻
Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com on December 24, 2021.
