How Much Is A Song Worth?
As the Internet destroys old world economies and forces people to rethink their old systems of distributions, Portfolio.com put together an interesting article on how much music can be worth. The song picked is perhaps the most popular rock and roll song of all time, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. Despite its wild success, the song has not been used by the band to get all the money that they can. This careful management of the song and its image has helped to keep it fresh and not overexposed. (At least not as overexposed as it could have been.)
The numbers are surprising. The best that the band could make from the song from the traditional distribution and royalty methods is on the order of $12 or so million. For an ad campaign, they could net $8 million. For use in several different ad campaigns, they might be able to get $12 million or so, depending on how well they negotiate. All in all, $24 million or so.
Certainly $24 million is nothing to be ashamed of, but it is nothing compared to the album sales. Since the song was never released as a single, fans had to buy the whole album. The song was so popular that it appeared on 4 different albums and DVDs. Adding together all of these sales brings in a theoretical amount of $550 million. The new distribution methods made possible by the Internet and mobile web cannot even begin to cover this. Portfolio.com guesses that ringtones might net $2 million or so.
It is no wonder why the record companies are in a panic. Today’s possible revenue of a few million with the Internet as the distribution model vs the old method of album and DVD sales which brought in half a billion dollars for the most popular songs and bands will cause pain. Ouch!
Tags: DVD, Internet, Led Zeppelin, royalties