Beatles move into 21st century via rap, brands

No contractual obligation
In fact, Sony/ATV is not contractually required to obtain approval by John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, or by McCartney before it can license the compositions, but Bandier says he believes there is a “moral obligation” to speak with them about licensing the songs. In the internecine history of the Beatles’ publishing, Lennon and McCartney effectively lost control of the group’s song rights even while the group was still a recording entity, in 1969.

That was when Northern Songs, the company established six years earlier solely to publish their joint compositions by English publisher Dick James and Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was sold to British media tycoon Lew Grade’s ATV Music. Ownership of ATV subsequently passed to Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes a Court and then, in 1985, to Michael Jackson.

In 1995, Sony came into the picture, forming a joint venture with trusts formed by Jackson, creating a new entity: Sony/ATV Music Publishing. That publishing company includes the Northern Songs catalogue that contains 259 copyrights by Lennon and McCartney. These songs essentially represent everything recorded under the Beatles name by Lennon and McCartney, except for five songs: their first two U.K. singles, “Love Me Do”/”P.S. I Love You” and “Please Please Me”/”Ask Me Why,” and ”Penny Lane,” “gifted” by Jackson to Holmes a Court under a specific provision of Jackson’s purchase of the ATV catalogue.

The long and winding road
When it comes to the Beatles’ original studio recordings, controlled by EMI-Capitol Records, permission is another matter. After Nike used the Beatles’ original of “Revolution” in 1987 for its “Revolution in Motion” TV commercial campaign (in a licensing deal worth $250,000 to the label, according to Nike at the time), Apple Corps and Apple Records sued Nike, its advertising agency and EMI-Capitol for $15 million.

Paul Russell, former chairman of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, recalls, “Once Sony/ATV was formed, any requests for those songs came to Sony/ATV and not to Michael Jackson.

“(When) those requests came in, serious requests for serious money, for products that we knew were noncontentious, they would come to me and we would form a view, and then we’d go to Michael, even though he didn’t have the right to approve it, and say, ’We’ve received this request, we think it’s the right price and an OK use, what do you think?’ If somebody had come back to us, either Michael or the Apple people, and said, ’We really don’t want you to do this,’ we probably wouldn’t have done it.”

According to a 1988 New York Times report, Apple’s attorney Leonard Marks said that “Ono and the (then) three surviving Beatles each own 25 percent of Apple and that the company required ’unanimity among the four Beatles’ interests in order to act.”’

In 1989, it was announced that the dispute had been resolved, in a formal statement that all outstanding lawsuits between the Beatles/Apple and EMI-Capitol— some of them dating back 20 years — had been settled. The parties agreed that no further Beatles recordings would be licensed for commercial use, although the Nike commercial can now be seen on YouTube.

Brian Southall, author of “Northern Songs: The True Story of the Beatles’ Publishing Empire,” published in August in the United States by Omnibus Press, says, “There aren’t a lot of Lennon/McCartney songs that appear in adverts since the Nike ad. And you’ll never, ever find the Beatles singing as a background to a TV commercial. You could take a song and get it recorded by ’A. N. Other.’ But Michael (Jackson)’s attitude in the early days was, ’These are the greatest songs ever recorded, and they ain’t gonna end up on a cornflakes ad.”’

Nevertheless, Ono was quoted by Time magazine at the time as saying the “Revolution” commercial was “making John’s music accessible to a new generation.” That’s exactly how Bandier feels today about actively promoting the Beatles via licensing, and others agree that current commercial realities make the eventual appearance of their original recordings in commercials and films much more likely.

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