Somewhere in a damp Parisian hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie schoolteacher called Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, glanced at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out of the window at the working girls below, and rattled off a small reggae-flavoured number about a prostitute he had never met.
He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column.
That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreats, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweating the asset” I have ever encountered in business.
Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week’s offering. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn’t, got a few pence per copy. And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.
Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life’s work. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are positively obscene, and rising.
Why? Because, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion globally last year. Streaming alone topped $20 billion, fully 69 per cent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten consecutive years of growth. The very technology that everyone solemnly said would kill the music industry, Napster, file-sharing, the iPod, the internet itself, has instead resurrected it as the perfect annuity. Music doesn’t sell once any more. It sells forever, in fractions of a penny, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.
Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who fitted my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The barrister who drafted our new sponsorship contracts billed by the hour and that was that. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all selling time, all watching the clock, all running flat out until the day they retire and the cheques stop. Even the great industrial fortunes of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, required factories, foundries, lorries, lawyers, picket lines and the occasional hostile takeover. Whereas Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of Yesterday in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, scribbled “scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs” as placeholder lyrics, and has since banked north of £19.5 million on a single song — the most-covered tune in human history, with more than three thousand versions. The Beatles’ catalogue is now valued comfortably north of £1.2 billion and reportedly throws off £70 to £90 million a year for owners who, gloriously, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.
This is the lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It is not what you make. It is what you make that keeps making. The whole intellectual property economy, software, brands, patents, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and bills you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people about him. Coca-Cola scribbled a formula on a piece of paper in 1886 and has paid for four generations of dividend cheques. But none of them, not one, possesses the casual, narcotic genius of the songwriter who spent an afternoon humming and is still cashing seven-figure royalty statements in his seventies.
We business owners should be furious. And inspired. In November 2023, The Beatles even released Now and Then, a John Lennon demo from the late seventies, patched up with artificial intelligence and a bit of Peter Jackson studio wizardry, and it strolled to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart-topper. The asset, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and now sweating for a fourth generation of listeners who weren’t born when their grandparents bought the original LP.
So the next time some private equity grandee bangs the boardroom table demanding “operational efficiency” and “recurring revenue streams”, remind him gently that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a paunchy Geordie with a guitar humming nonsense about a Parisian prostitute in 1977 and banking nine-figure cheques in his seventies. The rest of us should be so lucky. Or, more usefully, so clever.
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Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold It for £240 Million