Pink Floyd becomes another brick in Sony's wall with massive music rights deal

Pink Floyd is about to find out if money really is a gas. After what Variety describes as “years of false starts,” the band has finally completed a deal to sell their entire music catalog as well as their name-and-likeness rights to Sony for $400 million. The deal includes all of the band’s recorded albums—such as hits like The Wall, The Dark Side Of The Moon, and Animals—as well as merchandise, theatrical rights, and presumably, according to Variety, access to their iconic album artwork. Songwriting credits were left out of the deal and will remain with individual writers.

But while the band hypothesized that cash was “the root of all evil” in their 1973 song “Money,” its individual members—lead songwriters Roger Waters and David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and the estates of keyboardist Richard Wright and founding singer-songwriter Roger “Syd” Barrett—might have slightly more nuanced answers if you asked them today. Financial Times, which originally reported the deal, claims that it was delayed at least two years due to infighting among the band about tax structures and, more saliently, some incendiary comments made in recent years by Waters. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Rogers spoke out against Israel, in favor of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and against the United States, which he called “the most evil [country in the world] of all by a factor of at least 10 times.”

In this case, the money might actually buy happiness for at least one member of the band. In a separate Rolling Stone interview, Gilmour said that he wanted to close the deal less for financial reasons than “to be rid of the decision making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going,” which he called “my dream.” In 2018, Mason—who has been caught in the middle of all of this for years—said of the infighting in his own interview with Rolling Stone, “It’s really disappointing these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads.”

Pink Floyd adds to Sony’s growing collection of “heritage” artists, into which they’ve invested over a billion dollars in recent years. Other artists in the catalog include Queen, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, and more.