We’re living through the Götterdämmerung of the rock-and-roll era. When he sings, they make bank.īut it isn’t really fair to single out Young for ridicule. Quite simply, Hipgnosis and its backers are now part owners of Neil Young. Now, every time we purchase or stream one of his songs, half the royalties that would previously have gone to Young as songwriter are instead paid out to Hipgnosis.

At the start of this year, they paid around $150 million to acquire 50 percent of Neil Young’s publishing rights. I never presumed there was a corresponding list of business interests he would sing for, but what do you know? There is, and it includes Morgan Stanley, Brewin Dolphin, BNY Mellon, and the investment arm of the Church of England.Īll of the above are investors in Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited, a UK-based “song management” company creating shareholder value by buying and exploiting the copyrights to successful music catalogs.

I suppose I’d always interpreted these lines as a sample of the wide range of stuff Neil Young is unwilling to sing for, implying a more general indictment of pop music’s increasingly shameless integration with advertising and corporate branding. “Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi / Ain’t singin’ for Coke / I don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.” So goes the first verse of Neil Young’s 1988 hit “This Note’s for You.” In the second verse, this shitlist expands to cover Miller, Bud, politicians, and Spuds, the latter referring, of course, to Bud Light’s late-eighties canine mascot Spuds MacKenzie, rather than the humble and blameless potato.

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