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Bruce sells his publishing: Half Billion Dollars


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Posted

Score! From the Nicks thread.

On 11/2/2021 at 8:26 PM, ztejas said:

Half a bil maybe? He isn't the Beatles but Steve Nicks isn't the Boss. Dylan went for an estimated 300M plus. I feel like Springsteen has sold more records than Dylan though. 

 

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Posted

That's a lot of hay and feed for the horses on his farm.

Gotta think as protective as he's been of his music over the decades that he wrote in some stipulations that certain songs never be used for advertising. On the other hand, a half billion does hold some sway.

Posted
1 minute ago, Bogeywon said:

Money talks 

Yeah, and it's inevitable. At some point either the artist or their estate has to manage it. He's 72. He's not going to earn any more artistic credibility at this point. Selling the publishing back to Sony/Columbia would leave one to believe they're not going to pimp the music out at any opportunity. They've already made a massive amount of money from him. And his catalog reportedly makes about $20mm a year as is. With just licensing more songs for movie soundtracks it won't take long for Sony to recoup their $500mm.

Posted
18 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Yeah, and it's inevitable. At some point either the artist or their estate has to manage it. He's 72. He's not going to earn any more artistic credibility at this point. Selling the publishing back to Sony/Columbia would leave one to believe they're not going to pimp the music out at any opportunity. They've already made a massive amount of money from him. And his catalog reportedly makes about $20mm a year as is. With just licensing more songs for movie soundtracks it won't take long for Sony to recoup their $500mm.

Can’t spend it all but you can have a blast trying! 

Posted
12 hours ago, DougO said:

If I had 10 billion dollars I would have bought his catalog for 501 million and then killed it with fire forever.

Unpopular music opinion:

I don’t understand why people love Bruce.. 

Tom Petty > Bruce Springsteen 

fight me

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bogeywon said:

Unpopular music opinion:

I don’t understand why people love Bruce.. 

Tom Petty > Bruce Springsteen 

fight me

I love Bruce and the E Street Band, but I also love TP and The Heartbreakers.

My Unpopular music opinion:

TP and The Heartbreakers are the greatest American rock and roll band.

Posted
1 hour ago, Bogeywon said:

Unpopular music opinion:

I don’t understand why people love Bruce.. 

Tom Petty > Bruce Springsteen 

fight me

 

7 minutes ago, MAROON said:

I love Bruce and the E Street Band, but I also love TP and The Heartbreakers.

My Unpopular music opinion:

TP and The Heartbreakers are the greatest American rock and roll band.

Why can't you love both?  I do. 

 

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Posted
21 hours ago, Bogeywon said:

Unpopular music opinion:

I don’t understand why people love Bruce.. 

Tom Petty > Bruce Springsteen 

fight me

Not a huge Bruce fan but enjoy his music well enough, his concert performance needs no mention, but I prefer Petty over him. 

Top5 Solo Acts for me: 

Joel

Elton

Seger

Petty

Bruce

 

Posted

I get the fact that everyone has their own tastes and musical preferences. One size never fits all.

But I pity anyone who can't listen to songs like Racing in the Street, The River, Atlantic City or Western Stars and enjoy that level of art.

Posted
16 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

The River could be written as a movie.  There's only a handful of songs that would work as a movie plot.  Maggie May is another. 

Highway Patrolman is another, and Sean Penn did just that with The Indian Runner. Some great performances by David Morse, Viggo Mortensen and Charles Bronson going WAY out of his comfort zone. Penn's ego and lack of directorial chops get in the way, but still worth watching.

Posted
On 12/17/2021 at 9:10 AM, Bogeywon said:

Unpopular music opinion:

I don’t understand why people love Bruce.. 

Tom Petty > Bruce Springsteen 

fight me

I could come up with 100 artists that are > Springsteen. To me he's like Jimmy Fallon......there seem to be plenty of people that swear he's great, but fuck if I can figure out why. 

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Posted

i've had a long running theory that there aren't actually any springsteen fans, at least none that i've ever met. they only exist on the internet. 

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Posted
i've had a long running theory that there aren't actually any springsteen fans, at least none that i've ever met. they only exist on the internet. 
Yeah, that's why his concerts are such an easy ticket. He can barely fill up a 200 seat theater
Posted

bruce is an interesting one.  most popular song being a protest, anti-war song that was co-opted by idiots/t-shit patriots.

honestly, when i think about top 250 songs in my list, "Streets of Philadelphia" is the only one that would make it. maybe, maybe glory days for a touch of childhood nostalgia.  $500 million is insane.  but his top ten on spotify has almost 1.6 billion streams so...

  • 3 years later...
Posted

Sort of related, I heard Crazy Train coming out of the speakers at a shopping center parking lot the other day.

Wonder if the prince of darkness knew he was making Muzak with Randy Rhoads back in the day.

Posted
On 12/19/2021 at 2:49 PM, Gil Bang said:

The River could be written as a movie.  There's only a handful of songs that would work as a movie plot.  Maggie May is another. 

Paul Revere- Beastie Boys

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Posted
On 12/22/2021 at 5:15 PM, sidis said:

. maybe, maybe glory days for a touch of childhood nostalgia.  

Nobody and I mean Nobody that knows a fucking thing about baseball has ever used the term speedball referring to a pitch

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Posted
Nobody and I mean Nobody that knows a fucking thing about baseball has ever used the term speedball referring to a pitch

Dan Patrick rants on this regularly.

Neither of you are wrong.
Posted
On 3/6/2025 at 11:04 AM, Dennis Taylor said:

Nobody and I mean Nobody that knows a fucking thing about baseball has ever used the term speedball referring to a pitch

Make you look like a fool, boy.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

He announced today that Tracks II is coming out in June. Recordings from 1983 - 2018 that are essentially seven unreleased albums.

The original Tracks was pretty remarkable. The Promise had some nice outtakes from the Darkness era with some so-so filler.

Sony's looking to get some return on their half billion dollar investment. I'm probably one of the few who's gonna throw down $350 for nine LPs.

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Posted (edited)

For me it’s the witness he gives in his lyrics and in his raspy soulful voice to intense pain and despair. I might not always like every song, but when I find his witness to my pain that I can’t describe through the stories he tells in his music, I stop and listen. In some cases I not only listen, but I also respond at a visceral level. 

To that point, The Ghost of Tom Joad is probably a top 3 album of all time. Just fantastic story telling on that album. Straight time is so fucking good. Galveston bay, across the border, Sinaloa cowboys (holy shit what a story), Youngstown, ghost of Tom joad, highway 29, dry lightening. I mean all of those for me are absolutely fantastic songs. Hence top 3 all time album in my view.

If I should fall behind might be the greatest love song ever written. 

even routine albums like Devils and Dust have songs with lyrics that blow my mind.  Working on a dream, city of ruins, nothing man, streets of Philadelphia, my hometown, secret garden (I have this on my current play list), stolen car (patty does it better I’ll be honest), and I could go on and on. Those are the ones that immediately come to mind. 

his Seeger sessions tour was a bomb in the US but was wildly popular in Europe and the jam sessions on that tour were like nothing else, just spectacular. And not traditional E street music.

and so his most popular rock songs are not typically what I gravitate to when I need a Springsteen fix. Frankly the sadder and more melancholic or the intense optimistic songs from a place of destruction are the ones that speak to me. And songs like that - the stories that evoke pain and heartache and possibly optimism in those places, there are very few musicians as good as Bruce. 

 

Edited by troph
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Posted

Patty's cover of Stolen Car is incredible. It's kinda funny because when my wife & I were dating, she made me a mix disc of some of her favorite songs for me to take along on a business trip. Very heavy on female artists including Patty, Alanis, the Chick's plus some Radney Foster, etc. Two of the tracks on there were Bruce covers: Stolen Car and Because the Night by 10,000 Maniacs.

I called her from the hotel one night & she asked me if I missed her, was I thinking about her, etc. All the things young lovers do when everything is fresh & new. She asked me if I liked the music & what I thought about the CD, and I told her I liked it & the Bruce songs were a nice extra touch.

She says "huh? I didn't put any Springsteen on there" very defensively. I think for a second she might have thought I had another GF who had sent me some traveling music. I had to tell her to go look at the liner notes & see who wrote them. She was shocked. She knew only the radio hits. When I got back home I made her a disc of deeper cuts & she was stunned. If I Should Fall Behind (live in NYC version) makes her cry to this day. Racing in the Street and Southside Johnny's cover of Hearts of Stone left her gobsmacked. She became an instant convert.

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Posted
1 hour ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Very heavy on female artists including Patty, Alanis, the Chick's plus some Radney Foster

Also a female artist.

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Posted

went down a YouTube rabbit hole the other night and watched the official video for "If I should Fall Behind".  

Nils is such a fantastic musician.  A pro's pro, and the guy can do anything.  I respect the shit out of that guy, and as far as I can tell, so does every musician that he's ever worked with.

 

But he's a goofy-looking motherfucker. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

went down a YouTube rabbit hole the other night and watched the official video for "If I should Fall Behind".  

Nils is such a fantastic musician.  A pro's pro, and the guy can do anything.  I respect the shit out of that guy, and as far as I can tell, so does every musician that he's ever worked with.

 

But he's a goofy-looking motherfucker. 

his solo stuff is meh.

Posted (edited)
7 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Patty's cover of Stolen Car is incredible. It's kinda funny because when my wife & I were dating, she made me a mix disc of some of her favorite songs for me to take along on a business trip. Very heavy on female artists including Patty, Alanis, the Chick's plus some Radney Foster, etc. Two of the tracks on there were Bruce covers: Stolen Car and Because the Night by 10,000 Maniacs.

I called her from the hotel one night & she asked me if I missed her, was I thinking about her, etc. All the things young lovers do when everything is fresh & new. She asked me if I liked the music & what I thought about the CD, and I told her I liked it & the Bruce songs were a nice extra touch.

She says "huh? I didn't put any Springsteen on there" very defensively. I think for a second she might have thought I had another GF who had sent me some traveling music. I had to tell her to go look at the liner notes & see who wrote them. She was shocked. She knew only the radio hits. When I got back home I made her a disc of deeper cuts & she was stunned. If I Should Fall Behind (live in NYC version) makes her cry to this day. Racing in the Street and Southside Johnny's cover of Hearts of Stone left her gobsmacked. She became an instant convert.

that's a great story.  I'll admit, losing my first love to divorce and all that happened made "if I should fall behind" feel like a song of failure for me, and I've worked hard to repurpose it, as i have with much of the music that I held dear from a prior life, but this one we are talking about is still so absolutely pure I can't and won't lose it for what it is, the most poignant and beautiful love song I've ever heard.

I think your point about "deeper cuts" and music that isn't super popular in his catalog and how your wife was stunned and became an instant convert is on point - I could actually take or leave his anthem rock, top 40 stuff, it's fun and okay, but if you like folk music, if you like meaningful lyrics, if you like artists with undeniable melancholy in their music then there is no way you aren't a Bruce fan unless you haven't taken the time to explore.  I go back to "Straight Time" - it's one of the few songs I know where my mind paints the picture, I'm actually watching a movie in my head while he's singing that song - and I think the music fan that loves music with these attributes might have that one track in their top 10 all time and that's from someone who mainlines TVZ and a bunch of other troubled souls on the reg (Pancho and Lefty is another I sometimes see a movie in my mind's eye while listening). Highway 29 is another I'm watching the movie as I listen.  And that is the most telling fact for me if an artist is really good at their craft, when the movie just plays in my mind, you're listening to a fantastic artist.  Bruce is absolute upper echelon on story telling, somber, folksy, melancholic sounds and if that's your style and you haven't deep dived Bruce's catalog you are way missing out.

Edited by troph
Posted

Not to buzzkill . . . oh who am I kidding . . . I have never understood why Patty Griffin's producers don't catch tuning issues.  The guitar on "Stolen Car" is simply out of tune.  Her later releases have pitch problems in her vocals.  BAD pitch problems.  I don't know her beyond a couple of quick meets, but I know her ex (no not Robert) and early in her career she seemed like she was about to be shot out of a cannon.  It all kinda stalled out.  It's too bad, she made some truly hair-raising music at her peak.

Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Not to buzzkill . . . oh who am I kidding . . . I have never understood why Patty Griffin's producers don't catch tuning issues.  The guitar on "Stolen Car" is simply out of tune.  Her later releases have pitch problems in her vocals.  BAD pitch problems.  I don't know her beyond a couple of quick meets, but I know her ex (no not Robert) and early in her career she seemed like she was about to be shot out of a cannon.  It all kinda stalled out.  It's too bad, she made some truly hair-raising music at her peak.

I’m at that age that I’m starting to calcify in my tastes, at least with artists of a certain era, I’ll admit I have not spent much time in her newer music but I’ll say, “when it don’t come easy” might be the second greatest love song ever written. …. “I’ll drive out and find you…” gets me, every, time. 

these lyrics are so fucking tight…

”Red lights are flashing on the highway
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home tonight
Everywhere the waters getting rough
Your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home tonight

But if you break down
I'll drive out and find you
If you forget my love 
I'll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don't come easy

I don't know nothing except change will come
Year after year what we do is undone
Time keeps moving from a crawl to a run
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home

You're out there walking down a highway
And all of the signs got blown away
Sometimes you wonder if you're walking in the wrong direction”

man that song is so good.

Edited by troph
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