Pink Floyd rocker David Gilmour shared his reasons for selling the band’s music catalog weeks before it was reported that a $400 million deal had been struck.
The Financial Times reported on Thursday that members of the British rock band have agreed to sell the rights to their sizable catalog to record label Sony. According to the publication, the deal includes recorded music.
Sony will also get rights to the band members’ likeness, clearing the way for the label to produce spin-off ventures, such as TV shows, movies and related merchandise, according to the FT. The deal is reported to have been at least two years in the making.
The publication reported that while Sony has acquired the recorded rights of Pink Floyd’s songs, the band members have retained the songwriting rights. Newsweek has contacted a representative of Pink Floyd via email for comment.
David Gilmour on July 2, 2016, in Rome, Italy. The Pink Floyd musician had revealed plans to sell the band’s catalog weeks before the deal was reported.
Roberto Panucci/Corbis via Getty Images
News of the deal comes weeks after Pink Floyd vocalist and guitarist Gilmour confirmed to The Washington Post that there were plans to sell the band’s catalog.
“My reason for wanting to do it is I don’t want to burden my kids with that whole legacy,” Gilmour explained during the interview, which was published on September 6.
Alluding to his decades-long feud with former bandmate Roger Waters, Gilmour—who joined Pink Floyd two years after its 1965 inception—added: “And I also have had enough of the burdens of looking after that f****** legacy for the last nearly 40 years with the s*** and the arguments that go on. And I just want to be shorn of it.”
Waters, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, made headlines back in 2021, when he rejected Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg‘s request to use one of the band’s tracks in an Instagram campaign.
Responding to Zuckerberg’s desire to use the classic 1979 track “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” Waters pulled out a sheet of paper, as he said: “This is something that I actually put in my folder when I came out here today.
“You have no idea what it is—nobody does—because it arrived on the internet to me this morning. It’s a request for the rights to use my song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),’ in the making of a film to promote Instagram.”
He went on: “So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me… with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and the answer is, ‘f*** you! No f***ing way!
“And I only mention that because it’s the insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything. So those of us who do have any power, and I do have a little bit—in terms of control of the publishing of my songs I do anyway. So I will not be a party to this bull****, Zuckerberg.”
Reading out a portion of the letter said to be from Zuckerberg, Waters said at a forum supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “We want to thank you for considering this project. We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and necessary today, which speaks to how timeless a work [it is].”
“It’s true, and yet they want to sojourn it,” continued Waters, who quit Pink Floyd in 1985. “They want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram even bigger and more powerful than it already is, so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room.”
He added: “You think, how did this little pr***, who started off going, ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a 4 out of 5, she’s ugly, we’ll give her a 1.’ How the f*** did he get any power in anything? And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”
A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to Newsweek at the time that Instagram’s marketing team had reached out to Waters, but stated that no details were formally discussed. “We respect the decisions made by musicians and creators on whether or not they would like to work with us,” the representative added.
