26 Alec Guinness’s Star Wars Royalties
Alec Guinness only agreed to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars after George Lucas guaranteed him 2.25% of all gross royalties without requiring him to make a public appearance.
27. Fatboy Slim sampled so many songs to create “The Rockafeller Skank” (also known as “Funk Soul Brother”) that he had to give up 100% of the song’s royalties to pay the original artists.
28. Australian artist Gotye turned down $10 million in YouTube royalties for his hit “Somebody That I Used to Know.” He said, “I’m not interested in selling music, and that’s why I don’t put ads on my channel.”
29. Alexey Pajitnov invented Tetris in 1984, but he earned no royalties because he lived under the Soviet government. It wasn’t until 1996, after moving to the United States and founding The Tetris Company, that he started making money from it.
30. According to Hollywood accounting, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which cost $6 million to produce and grossed over $600 million in theaters worldwide, somehow managed to lose $20 million to avoid paying any royalties.
31 Tasmanian Devil Royalties Donation
Warner Bros. donates royalties from their Tasmanian Devil character to help fight a facial tumor that is decimating the population of Tasmanian Devils.
32. The funk band Vulfpeck released a completely silent album on Spotify in 2014 and asked their fans to play it on repeat while they slept. The album, called “Sleepify,” earned $20,000 in royalties before Spotify caught on. This money allowed Vulfpeck to give their fans a free tour.
33. The creator of the Operation board game never received any royalties for the game and could not afford his own surgery until friends and fans raised money for him online.
34. Artists like Kanye West and Jay-Z have sampled “Bam Bam,” but Sister Nancy, the singer, did not receive any royalties from her record until 2014. She was working in a bank in New York and decided to take the record label to court. She now receives 50% of the royalties.
35. Michael Jackson earned $2 for every “Thriller” album sold, which was one of the highest royalty rates of that time.
36 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Royalties
Scott Fitzgerald only received $13 in royalties from his book “The Great Gatsby” during his lifetime.
37. Marvel owned the rights to the name Hulk Hogan from 1984 to 2004. For each match Hogan wrestled, Marvel received $100. Marvel also earned royalties on merchandise and every project involving his name. When he dropped “Hulk” and started going by “Hollywood” Hogan in 1996, he avoided paying the fees.
38. Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s official photographer, received royalties from all uses of Hitler’s image, even on postage stamps. Over the course of Hitler’s rule, he became a millionaire.
39. Mike Love gets a third of the royalties for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for writing just one line (“Good night baby, sleep tight baby”), while Tony Asher receives only a sixth for writing the rest of the lyrics.
40. After oil was discovered on their homelands, 60 or more wealthy, full-blood Osage Native Americans were killed from 1918 to 1931. The murders appear to have been committed by people intent on taking over their great wealth, whose land was producing valuable oil and had annual royalties.
41 Sheryl Crow’s Song Royalties
The lyrics for Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” were adapted from a poem in a poetry book that her producer found in a used bookstore. The book, which initially had a print run of only 500 copies, saw multiple reprints and earned its author, Wyn Cooper, substantial royalties.
42. Every Alaska resident receives an annual “oil royalty check,” representing their share of Alaskan oil revenue. In 2008, the payout reached a high of $2,069 per person, or $8,276 for a family of four.
43. Due to a practice known as “Hollywood Accounting,” Winston Groom, the author of the original “Forrest Gump” book, did not receive a single cent in royalties from the film’s earnings ($677 million).
44. When Stephen King published “Joyland” in 2013, a Canadian author who had previously published a novel of the same name began receiving royalty checks because King fans mistakenly bought her book.
45. To climb Mount Everest, climbers must pay a $11,000 royalty fee to the Nepali government. Each climbing season, the government earns around $3.25 million.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Finnish Taxi Music Royalties
In Finland, cab drivers are required by law to pay royalty fees for songs played on their taxi radios while transporting paying passengers. This is because cab drivers use music for commercial purposes. The Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society receives an annual fixed sum payment.
47. In 2008, Warner Music Group collected over $5,000 a day ($2 million a year) in royalties for public usage of the “Happy Birthday” song. They have been known to charge up to $10,000 for the song’s use in films. This is why many restaurants have their own birthday songs.
48. The singer-songwriter Alice Cooper pays yearly royalties to the members of the band Alice Cooper for the right to use the name commercially, as it was originally the band’s copyrighted name before he adopted it as his own.
49. Under the US Copyright Office, “supernatural beings” cannot hold copyrights, so technically, if they were real, vampires or werewolves couldn’t receive royalties for their original content.
50. In 2016, Getty Images sold a portion of the over 100,000 photos that the original photographer had donated royalty-free to the Library of Congress. Getty Images then demanded payment from the photographer for using the photos she owned. She sued them (unsuccessfully) for over $1 billion.
RE: Fact #9 (Mariah Carey’s Christmas Royalties) – That number’s probably way higher, you know? From ’94 to ’17, the song made $60 million in royalties. That’s like $2.6 million a year. And since she wrote and sings it, I bet she gets more than 18% of that.
Plus, don’t forget the remix with Justin Bieber!
Someone else said it was closer to $3.4 million a year, which seems about right. Every year since 1994!
RE: Fact #9 (Mariah Carey’s Christmas Royalties) – That’s probably just her UK sales and plays, not the whole world.
That makes way more sense, the number seemed super low. Maybe that’s what she gets from the song being in those “Love Actually” reruns every year.
RE: Fact #22 (Peter Pan’s Perpetual Royalties) – Maybe if we just let Disney keep Mickey Mouse, they’ll stop messing with our laws and leave other companies alone.
The Neville Chamberlain approach, huh?
RE: Fact #9 (Mariah Carey’s Christmas Royalties) – I work at a Christmas amusement park. This song is part of one of the light shows they put on every half hour. The show runs for four hours, and they alternate between two different shows, so this song plays four times a night. They do this three nights a week for seven weeks. So, I’ll be hearing it 84 times this year, without even turning on the radio or going to a store. And it’s not even the worst song they play.
I’m curious, what’s the absolute worst song on the show?
Christmastime is the worst.
RE: Fact #13 (Puff Daddy’s Royalty Lawsuit) – Puffy didn’t even write the words, he just produced the song.
That’s pretty normal in hip hop. It’s one thing if someone writes all your songs, that’s just not cool, but sometimes artists will come up with lyrics that would fit another artist better and give them the verse.
Like, they’ll write a song and think, “___ could really nail this the way I hear it in my head.”
DJ Khaled checking in with his team: another hit on the way!
RE: Fact #29 (Tetris Royalties Post-Soviet Era) – He’s a cool dude, I met him in person.
It’s weird, everyone knows Tetris, but I bet most people couldn’t tell you who made it. I had no idea it was invented by one person until today.
It’s pretty much the same for most inventions, right? I find it more interesting that most people don’t know who invented the refrigerator or the computer chip.
RE: Fact #8 (Lonnie Johnson’s Super Soaker Royalties) – The original yellow Super Soaker was totally awesome when I was a kid.
RE: Fact #11 (Norman Greenbaum’s Song Royalties) – Back in the late 90s, in the Bay Area, Greg Kihn, the local DJ and former rock star, called up Greenbaum for an interview on his show. Norman’s mom answered the phone and said he was out back with the goats. Turns out, he was a goat farmer!
Greg Kihn’s a cool dude. I remember hearing him say years ago that he gets his “Weird Al money” every month, which is the royalties for the parody of his song.
RE: Fact #39 (Mike Love’s Song Royalties) – Asher’s usually cool with how the credit is split, but he’s always felt a bit bummed about “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” He wrote all the lyrics, inspired by talks with Wilson, but settled for his usual half of the writing credit. It turned into a huge hit from the album.
Mike Love claims he added a single line to the song in the studio.
When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994 over the songwriting credits for 35 songs, he included “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” because of that line. Now, Love gets a third of the songwriting royalties, split between the three writers. This means Wilson gets half the money for writing all the music, Love gets a third for writing “Good night baby, sleep tight baby”, and Asher gets a sixth, half of Love’s share, for writing all the rest of the lyrics.
It’s not like anyone is doing anything wrong. Love wrote the entire lyrics or a big chunk of them for most of the songs in the lawsuit. Since the lawsuit covered so many songs, they used the same formula for songs like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” even though he only wrote a little bit, and for songs like “California Girls” where everyone agrees Love wrote the whole lyrics. It’s just a bunch of reasonable decisions that make sense on their own, but they left Asher getting a lot less money from one of his biggest hits than he should.
RE: Fact #2 (Ulysses S. Grant’s Royalty Deal) – Mark Twain was seriously cool.
RE: Fact #50 (Getty Images’ Photo Royalties) – How is this even possible. That woman needs a better lawyer.
A billion dollars? That’s just crazy!
Sue for a billion, settle for a million, you’re a million bucks richer.
RE: Fact #5 (Paul Desmond’s Royalties for Charity) – One of the all-time greats on the sax. A music critic said he was like a dry martini, super smooth and sophisticated.
RE: Fact #16 (Bryan Cranston’s Show Royalties) – His book, “A Life in Parts,” is really good. He actually narrates it himself on Audible, so you can hear his voice. He talks about this stuff in detail, along with a bunch of other cool things from his life.
I was hanging out at the airport, bored out of my mind, when this Bryan Cranston book just jumped out at me. I was tempted to buy it right then and there, but then I thought, “Nah, I’ll wait and get it somewhere cheaper.” So, I added it to my “to-buy” list and moved on.
RE: Fact #43 (Forrest Gump’s Royalty Dispute) – Hmm, I wonder what movie I should download today… Thanks for the list of companies in the article, I’ll be grabbing some movies from them.
RE: Fact #38 (Heinrich Hoffmann’s Royalties from Hitler) – Hoffman also hooked Hitler up with Eva Braun and Dr. Theodor Morell, the guy who gave him all those crazy drugs, like amphetamines, cocaine, oxycodone, barbiturates, morphine, strychnine, and testosterone.
That doctor is amazing, like a superhero for addicts. They might have even been the key to the Allies winning the war.
It’s wild that Hitler lasted as long as he did, right? There had to be other tries to take him out besides the Stauffenberg one, no?
RE: Fact #5 (Paul Desmond’s Royalties for Charity) – He meant well, but the American Red Cross has gotten pretty messed up. There are a bunch of stories about it online, some really bad stuff.
I’m just going to assume they were more legit back then.
Back in the 1950s, the American Red Cross said that white blood was good for everyone, but Black blood was only for Black people. Southern chapters held onto this belief all the way into the 1970s.
RE: Fact #48 (Alice Cooper’s Band Royalties) – He’s a born-again Christian, you know, the kind that’s super serious about it.
RE: Fact #35 (Michael Jackson’s Thriller Royalties) – Wow, that’s seriously crazy. Bands these days would do anything for that kind of exposure.
RE: Fact #46 (Finnish Taxi Music Royalties) – Maybe you could just use music that’s already free to use?
RE: Fact #49 (Supernatural Beings’ Copyright Royalties) – If they’re real, they’re probably just normal.
RE: Fact #15 (Lone Survivor’s Royalties Support) – Hey, “Afghani” is actually super offensive, you know? Just call someone from Afghanistan an Afghan. Afghani is the name of their money.
It’s not “super rude”, it’s just not the right way to say it. You’re the one taking offense.
RE: Fact #1 (Pharrell’s Minimal Royalties – Happy) – He’s bummed.
He’s got a place to stay.
RE: Fact #43 (Forrest Gump’s Royalty Dispute) – It’s messed up how much money Hollywood makes, and it’s so easy for jerks to keep it all. David Prowse hasn’t seen a dime of it, for the same reason.
RE: Fact #10 (Ariana Grande’s Royalties Split) – Ten percent of a gazillion dollars is still a whole lot of money.
Looks like you’ve got the numbers right.
RE: Fact #20 (Mein Kampf Royalties Distribution) – He’s awesome! He took down Hitler and gave all the money he made to good causes.
That guy was a real jerk, though. Why kill the guy who took down Hitler?
That’s messed up. Hitler was killed by someone, and then that person was also killed. It’s like a twisted loop.
RE: Fact #4 (Dolly Parton’s Song Royalties) – Time to get motivated!
Yawning and stretching, trying to wake up.
RE: Fact #44 (Stephen King’s Book Royalties) – It’s funny, the same thing happened to Between Shades of Grey. People were looking for Fifty Shades of Grey, but ended up buying the wrong book. It’s actually a better book though, and it helped the author become more well-known.
RE: Fact #23 (Nas’s Daughter’s Album Royalties) – Nas’s album, *Stillmatic*, dropped on December 18th, 2001, and sold a crazy 342,600 copies in its first week! It hit number 5 on the Billboard 200 chart. Check out the back of the *Stillmatic* CD, and you’ll see Destiny Jones listed as an Executive Producer in the bottom right corner. Destiny even posted on Instagram in December 2017 about *Stillmatic* being the first album she executively produced, saying, “Happy 16th Birthday Stillmatic! The first album I ever executive produced! And at only 7 years old lol.”
It’s crazy how an album with 342,600 sales only debuted at number 8 back in the day. Now, anything with over 300,000 first week sales is practically guaranteed to top the charts.
Wonder if Drake’s ever hit up Nas’ daughters on social media.
Drake’s probably not into getting taken out by Nas.
RE: Fact #7 (Richard Ashcroft’s Royalties for Symphony) – I ran into that guy on the street the other day.
RE: Fact #18 (John Garand’s Unpaid Royalties) – It’s weird that Garand never got a dime for his M1 rifle design, even though millions of them were made. He gave up all the rights to his inventions back in 1936. He didn’t have to be paid, but it does seem a little unfair to give him nothing at all.
I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. It’s not like it’s some big deal.
I’m a designer for a tech company. We get paid to do our jobs, and that’s that. No one expects royalties for designing or developing stuff for the company.
It would be different if the army just took Garand’s idea and built it. But he was working for them, developing and refining it until it was ready. So why would he have rights to the finished product? Seems pretty strange to me.
It’s true he was just following orders, but a lot of folks still think the US should owe someone for that amazing weapon. Patton even called it the “greatest battle implement ever devised”! It definitely saved a lot of American lives with all that extra firepower.
Kind of rude, even a bit boorish, actually.
Yeah, Garand was a government worker, right? At Springfield Armory. So, that probably means he didn’t get any royalties from the manufacturing. If he’d been with a private gun company, he might have gotten a piece of the profits.
Browning left Winchester and went to FN Herstal because he wasn’t getting paid for his designs. So yeah, it’s possible.
It depends on what kind of deal he got. Most places give you a little bit of the company stock and a bonus based on how much they make each year, but they don’t usually give you a share of the money made from a particular product you worked on.
RE: Fact #8 (Lonnie Johnson’s Super Soaker Royalties) – Remember those Super Soakers that could blast water forever? Now they’re all puny! I found some that said they reach 30 feet, but they look like regular squirt guns. I need some serious firepower to take down my kids!
This lawsuit’s making it tough to get those super soakers with the big pumps because of licensing.
So now they’re just attaching the pump straight to the water, so you don’t have to store pressure and release it with a trigger. Or they use a weak electric pump.
At least with Nerf, the spring blasters work well, and electric motors have gotten way better.
Patents only last for 20 years, right? So, shouldn’t the technology behind the Super Soaker be public domain now?
Is there more to it than that?
They’re discontinued, something about licensing. You can find old ones on eBay for about $250 though.
They’re back!
RE: Fact #22 (Peter Pan’s Perpetual Royalties) – So, it’s not the only thing. Everything in the British Museum is under “crown copyright”, and it lasts forever.
The British Museum was awesome, but wow, they really took stuff from everywhere! Like, every culture imaginable is there in London. The whole Parthenon is there, but then you see stuff from China, Korea, Native Americans, even the Aztecs. I mean, I literally think the only culture missing was Japan.
RE: Fact #21 (The Lion Sleeps Tonight Royalties) – Disney’s been playing a lot of games with copyright, so I don’t feel bad for them.
RE: Fact #42 (Alaska’s Oil Royalty Payments) – Governor Jay Hammond came up with this awesome system, but the $1,000 a year it gives out doesn’t really cover how expensive it is to live in Alaska. Politicians are always trying to get their hands on it, especially this year with the huge budget hole. It’s like the golden goose, don’t try to mess it up.
What makes things so expensive? Is it just the cost of getting stuff to people?
Yes
RE: Fact #43 (Forrest Gump’s Royalty Dispute) – Apparently, they used Hollywood Accounting to make it look like “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” lost a ton of money – $167 million, to be exact.
So, the guy who played Darth Vader got stiffed on royalties because they said *Return of the Jedi* didn’t make money. But a big part of a movie’s cost is marketing, and they just hire a company they own to do it! Shady stuff.
RE: Fact #46 (Finnish Taxi Music Royalties) – They call it the Teosto Mafia for a reason, they’ll try to squeeze every penny out of you. And get this, the artists don’t even get the money! Teosto just divvies it up their own way.
RE: Fact #24 (Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek Royalties) –
The lyrics are as follows:
Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand’ring in star-flight
I know
He’ll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.
We used to sing that in choir back in high school. I have no idea why.
RE: Fact #13 (Puff Daddy’s Royalty Lawsuit) – So, P. Diddy just went ahead and used Sting’s song without asking. He pays Sting about 2K a day for it, but Sting still owns the song. P. Diddy still owns the record itself, though, and gets all the profits from that.
That’s actually not true, the A&R who worked there when the album came out tweeted about it. She and others who worked there try to clear it up, but the rumor keeps coming back every year. Apparently, Sting said it in an interview once, and Puffy joked about it being 5k a day, but the deal was made before the album even dropped, even if it was a big amount.
Yeah, the headline made me think the guy was a jerk, but this explains it better, thanks.
Thanks for fixing that fact. My autistic self couldn’t take it.
RE: Fact #29 (Tetris Royalties Post-Soviet Era) – My old college prof swore Tetris was ripped off from his thesis! Apparently, it was about visualizing how computer memory works, and some guy heard him talking about it and turned it into a game.
Did your teacher grow up in the Soviet Union?
That’s pretty wild. He actually worked on the Russian nuclear program, right up until the year after Chernobyl happened! Then he moved to Canada. Talk about timing.
RE: Fact #41 (Sheryl Crow’s Song Royalties) – And the poet, Wyn Cooper, later got sued by his friend for using a quote from him in the poem:
RE: Fact #41 (Sheryl Crow’s Song Royalties) – Wyn Cooper was teaching poetry at my college when his song blew up. He went from nobody to rich in like a year, grew a huge beard, and got himself a red convertible. He seemed like a cool guy, but it was kinda strange seeing him lose his mind a little during that whole wild ride. I mean, we were just college kids, no way we could understand what that must’ve been like for him.
RE: Fact #21 (The Lion Sleeps Tonight Royalties) – I could just burst into that song at any moment.
RE: Fact #11 (Norman Greenbaum’s Song Royalties) – It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. I remember reading about this years ago. Greenbaum was washing dishes when “Spirit in the Sky” got picked for the Apollo 13 soundtrack. He’s been doing okay ever since.
The Guardians probably got him a new place.
I think it’s used in Contact too.
RE: Fact #40 (Osage Native Americans’ Royalties) – This book, “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann is really good, it talks about all this stuff. It’s super engaging, you won’t want to put it down. Plus, it says they were the first to include mineral rights in their deals.
RE: Fact #29 (Tetris Royalties Post-Soviet Era) – The Tetris B theme is just the best, I could listen to it for ages on YouTube.
RE: Fact #1 (Pharrell’s Minimal Royalties – Happy) – David Crosby wrote a really interesting article about how little digital music companies pay artists. You’d be surprised how small those payments are.
Pandora drops 150 grand on the music label for three months of this song, and the label gives the artist a measly 3K?
Then the Sony/ATV CEO has the nerve to tell Pandora they’re not paying enough because Pharrell only got 3K?
The problem is with Sony, not Pandora.
It’s kind of crazy how musicians make way more money from concerts than they do from people actually buying their music. They should be getting a much bigger cut from the sales of their music, not just the record labels. It’s super unfair that they have to rely so much on touring.
RE: Fact #18 (John Garand’s Unpaid Royalties) – It’s pretty standard. I’ve got a bunch of patents, but they’re all tied to my old jobs – that’s just how it works. I’ve even got patents on every single overhead light fixture in every Target store in the country! I designed every part, and I even got a few plaques to show for it.
RE: Fact #39 (Mike Love’s Song Royalties) – Not the worst thing Mike Love’s ever done.
RE: Fact #17 (Jeopardy! Theme Royalties) – Reminds me of the time Robert Altman used one of his son’s poems for the theme song of MASH. The movie became a hit, then a TV show, and his son ended up making a fortune from the royalties. Talk about a sweet deal! To show his thanks, he got his dad a plaid tie for Father’s Day.
RE: Fact #3 (Cliff Burton’s Scholarship Royalties) – Ray Burton’s family had a really tough time, they lost another kid before. Cliff started playing bass when he was 13 after his brother died. His parents said he was like, “I’m gonna be the best bassist for my brother.”
RE: Fact #31 (Tasmanian Devil Royalties Donation) – This article is a bit old, but I was wondering if the research they talked about, the one funded by WB, actually led to that crazy finding about Tasmanian Devils spreading their facial cancer. I saw a TED Talk about it that was really interesting.
It’s weird that the fact is about Warner Bros giving money, not the crazy fact that cancer can be contagious and some tumors are basically parasites.
This kind of cancer is pretty common, but the devils make it special. You see, normally an animal’s body would reject cells from another animal. But back in Tasmania, the devil population got really small, maybe only 200 to 500 devils on the whole island.
Usually, there’s enough difference in genes within a species to stop inbreeding problems. But with the devils, there were so few that they all have very similar genes. Their bodies can’t tell the difference between their own cells and another devil’s cells.
The worst part is that they bite and scratch each other during mating, which means they transfer a lot of blood. And as you know, cancer often spreads through the blood.
So, basically, most devils are super easy to pass the cancer around.
My biology teacher in Tasmania bred healthy devils, so I know all this.
Basically, the devils are all inbred, so their bodies don’t know the difference between their own cells and other cells, including cancer cells.
RE: Fact #33 (Operation Game Creator’s Royalties) – He sold the game for $500, lock, stock, and barrel. He’s the one to blame, he’s really bad at negotiating.
But, this is a good example of how messed up copyrights and patents are these days. Yeah, it was all legal and it’s his fault for being dumb, no one stole anything – but it still doesn’t feel right. When someone makes something amazing for everyone, they should get the benefits, not some company who just signed a lucky little contract. The whole point of copyright was to reward creativity, not make it about being clever.
The Superman story is a good example. Back in ’38, the guys who made Superman sold their character to DC for a measly $130. When Superman became a big hit, they didn’t get any money because they no longer owned him. They spent their whole lives suing and calling out DC to get some money. Finally, DC started giving them a little something so they’d stop making a fuss, but they never got rich. Not like Bob Kane, who made a better deal and became a millionaire. Bob Kane probably had less to do with Batman than the guys who created Superman had with their character, but he made a lot more money because he was a better negotiator.
Yeah, it was all legal, but we’re the ones who decide what’s legal, right? It’s a common story and we should change the system so it doesn’t happen so much. The way it is now, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to.
RE: Fact #26 (Alec Guinness’s Star Wars Royalties) – You might be wondering how much Sir Alec made from all this. Well, thanks to the Star Wars re-releases in the 90s, he and his estate have earned over $95 million from the franchise. Even though he passed away in 2000, his estate keeps making millions from royalties, licensing deals, and merchandise. To give you an idea, he made more money playing Obi-Wan Kenobi than he did from all his other 40 films combined – even his Oscar-winning role in The Bridge on the River Kwai!
He got paid $95 million for just 17 minutes of screen time! That’s a lot of cash. Not bad. But the thing about him doing all that acting in one day, that was just some dumb rumor on factrepublic.
Who’s the highest-paid actor ever, if you adjust for inflation? Like, Jack Nicholson in Batman? Or maybe Marlon Brando in Superman? And what about Johnny Depp in Pirates?
That’s a lot of money!
RE: Fact #14 (Monty Python’s Spamalot Royalties) – Whoa, how do you end up owing 800k in royalties?
RE: Fact #5 (Paul Desmond’s Royalties for Charity) – I’m a sucker for songs with funky time signatures.
Check out Dave Brubeck’s version if you want to hear what I mean.
RE: Fact #40 (Osage Native Americans’ Royalties) – That once-wealthy place is now a deserted ghost town.
Probably made a ton of money for some real jerks. Their kids are probably spoiled and never had to lift a finger.
They gotta work, you know, to keep the system rigged in favor of the folks who don’t actually work.
RE: Fact #23 (Nas’s Daughter’s Album Royalties) – He once said in an interview, “See, I’m a good guy, I’m tryin’ to stick around for my daughter. But if I should die, I know all of my albums support her.”