`Buying the Beatles, by Zach O'Malley Greenburg

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“This is what I do. I bought the Buddy Holly catalogue, a Broadway catalogue,” McCartney told the young singer. “Here’s the computer printout of all the songs I own.” Jackson was fascinated. He wanted to start doing the same, and his entrepreneurial instincts quickly clicked into gear. “Paul and I had both learned the hard way about business and the importance of publishing and royalties and the dignity of songwriting,” Jackson wrote in his autobiography.

I haven't yet plunged into the publishing world, and formal copyright matters, but I will.  But I get the sense that once a publisher steps in, the artist loses some measure of control - and ownership - over his or her art.  Apparently the artist can acquire those publishing rights.  For a fee.  But that fee, for something that has innate value, amounts to an investment, and a return may very well await that artist. Paul McCartney knew it, and beginning with that conversation just outside London, Michael Jackson also knew it.

For Holmes à Court, there were few pleasures greater than a grueling business negotiation. He took particular glee in toying with overzealous Americans (“They are just looking for me to play according to their rules and make it a big game,” he once said of his stateside counterparts. “The Viet Cong didn’t play by the rules, and look what happened.”) None of that mattered to Jackson. His instructions to Branca: “You gotta get me that catalogue.”

Robert Holmes à Court was an Austrailian billionaire who owned the Sony/ATV catalog, two-thirds of which was Beatles songs, which Jackson wanted terribly.  The billionaire played up his ownership rather well, and knew how to play hardball with exquisite power and control.  Any negotiator, artist or otherwise, must realize that others may play under a very different set of rules.  In that context, they must decide, then, how exactly to play.

There’s also an artistic explanation for McCartney’s unwillingness. “I never thought Paul McCartney would buy it because it’s very difficult for a creator of something [to buy] it,” says Bandier. “It would be like Picasso, who spent a day doing a painting, to buy it for $5 million like twenty years later. It wouldn’t be a thing that Paul would do.”

I'd say there is something distasteful about having to buy your own stuff.  But that is thinking like an artist or an aficionado.  This is business, and requires business sentiments and steeliness.  

Jackson’s constant refrain: “You can’t put a price on a Picasso . . .you can’t put a price on these songs, there’s no value on them. They’re the best songs that have ever been written.” During a finance committee meeting, Jackson wrote Branca the aforementioned note that still sits in the lawyer’s home: “IT’S MY CATALOGUE.” 

But, oh, you can put a price on a Picasso.  Or a Beatle, for that matter.  It's a veritable commodity and is subject to financial transaction.

The latter told Jackson he was making a mistake and that he should stick to being an artist. “That was my advice,” says the former CBS chief. “And he disregarded it, luckily.” Jackson didn’t have a business school education, and multiples of cash flow meant little to him. But he had a tremendous sense of value—and in Branca, a lieutenant able to help him make the most of that.

No one is endowed with foresight, absolutely no one. Someone may have a sense, or someone may engage in Big Data analytics and arrive at predictive models, and they still don't have a crystal ball to look into.  What Jackson had, without any doubt, however, was his ferocity of want and his aesthetics for ownership.

Jackson’s single-minded focus on buying the catalogue despite vociferous objections from the record industry’s brightest minds might strike some as impetuous. But in hindsight, it’s clear that he was correct to follow his instincts, even to those who doubted him at first—and that his sense of the value of copyrights was impeccable.

Sometimes we have to listen to what others say.  Other times we must not listen to what others say.  The complexity and the beauty of anything in life - art, business, or something else altogether - is determining which situation exactly we're in at a given moment.

Reference: Buying The Beatles: Inside Michael Jackson's Best Business Bet.