Well for many people (mainly if you are older than me) December 8th is a day of sadness so I'd be remissed if I at least didn't mention that on this day 30 years ago John Lennon was murdered. Most of the nation learned of this while watching Monday Night Football. Considering we didn't have Facebook let alone the Internet, 24 hours news channels or twitter most people would not have found out possibly for days because newspapers were already on the printing press and morning news shows were in their infancy. Howard Cosell broke the news to the country during the Patriots vs Dolphins game because coincidentally an ABC employee happened to be at the same emergency room Lennon was rushed to.
Growing up I wasn't a huge Beatles fan; sure I know all their music now but as a kid I used to listen to my dad's records & 8 tracks so that included a lot of Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys and Cheech & Chong. My first real recollection of a Beatles song was in a Nike Ad back in the 80's when they used "Revolution". Which in many ways was historically significant. Not only was it a ground breaking Ad but it was also the 1st time a Beatles song was used in marketing and they were none to happy.
Fast forward to this past month and most people when you mention The Beatles they'd say oh yeah they just became available on iTunes which is also extremely historically significant. Most people are unaware of the back story to the bad blood between iTunes (Apple Computers) and The Beatles but since I work with a huge Beatles fan I was filled in on this info a few weeks ago. Most people when you hear the word Apple you think Apple Computers & the iPod well a funny thing happened across the pond back in the 60's. The Beatles were huge and had a ton of money and nothing to do with it so they decided to start a company which they called Apple Corps Ltd...pun intended. It had numerous divisions but mainly was a music company.
Several years later the Steves started a computer company and they just so happened to call it Apple. Well word got back to The Beatles and they filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in 1978. It took 4 years to settle but part of that settlement was that Apple Computers would not enter the music business and Apple Corps would not enter the computer business. Simple enough right...wrong. Computers advanced and Apple Computers added audio recording capabilities. Enter lawsuit number 2. Jump ahead a few years and this time a big settlement of lawsuit #3 that involved Apple Computers own pun intended system sound to their operating system....they called it sosumi (so sue me). Again they agreed that Apple Computers had rights to goods & services used to play content and Apple Corps had rights to the creative content....i.e. the music.
Things stayed nice for over 10 years then in 2003 iTunes as we know came into existence. The lawsuit lasted several years focusing on the Apple logo. We now see that logo splashed on everything because the Beatles lost this battle but the war wasn't over in their eyes. The following year in 2007 Steve Jobs ended the feud by buying out Apple Corps trademark on the apple for roughly $500 million and as of a few weeks ago The Beatles have the number one album again via their emergence on iTunes.
Now back to the Nike Ad. See like most people of the 60's & 70's The Beatles were about peace, love, counter culture and weren't exactly concerned about the rights to their music just the rights of the people. Which ended up costing them a lot of royalties they were due for their music and eventually they lost the rights to a bunch of their songs. Which is where Michael Jackson gets involved. You see he bought the rights to 200 Beatles songs and some 4000 others back in 1985 so Nike paid EMI records and Michael Jackson an equal sum to be allowed to use the song for 1 year which was an absurd amount of money at the time for a commercial but it was obviously a good decision as it was ranked as one of the top 100 business events that shaped the 20th century.
Hope you enjoyed the Beatles/Nike/Apple/Apple/Monday Night Football history lesson that has culminated into how The Beatles ended up with 17 of the top 80 (mostly in the top 30) downloaded albums on iTunes and this is some 45+ years after they held the top 5 singles and 2 top albums in the USA all at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment