I guess when you’re a “rolling stone,” it’s pretty implicit that you just can’t stay in one place, isn’t it? Especially after 40-odd years, I would imagine that your band is probably more or less obligated to clean off some of that gathering moss and start living up to that name that you picked back when you were a heady 20-year-old who hated... well, people like you.
With that in mind, Mick Jagger and co. have decided to do the most reckless thing that a pack of rebels in their 60s can still do and leave their GIANT-ASS CORPORATE RECORD LABEL for another GIANT-ASS CORPORATE RECORD LABEL for the possibility of making even more money! Hey, there’s nothing more reckless than trying to fatten up your pension checks, right?
In a roughly $15 million deal that includes four decades of their catalogue, the Stones are up-and-leavin’ EMI for the hotter, younger, blonder Universal Music. “Universal are forward thinking, creative and hands-on music people,” the band’s management stated in a presumed swipe at EMI boss Guy Hands’ clutches. The new deal entails that Sir Mick and the boys will switch all their albums since 1971’s Sticky Fingers to the rival label from EMI, to whom the Stones first signed back in 1977.
The Stones’ back-catalogue (including the likes of Black and Blue and Exile on Main Street) currently generates about $3 million a year, but Universal believes it can squeeze a little juice out of these withered old turnips, indicating recently that it plans to re-release each of the band’s classic albums individually at some point in the near future. Further, since Universal also currently controls The Stones’ ’60s output in Britain (released through the Decca label), the deal will unify the band’s entire recorded collection (at least in the UK) under a single, “universal” banner (get it?). Meanwhile, poor old EMI wished the Stones well but couldn’t resist a swipe of its own at the notion of diminishing returns on such an aging band, saying in a statement that “EMI Music will only ever conclude mutually beneficial agreements with its artists.”
The Stones’ decision is the latest in a hilariously embarrassing series of clashes between major artists and Mr. Hands, after his company took over the struggling label last year for £2.1 billion, which include disgusted walk-outs by the likes of Radiohead and Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz). Jagger and crew’s Universal deal will last for five years, sources say, which, since they have at least one foot in the grave already, should be just long enough to allow those familiar artist sentiments of “I’d rather die than work for Guy Hands” to come true.
