TBD on Ning
another gotta love it story..
Welcome to ‘Margaritaville,’ the Most Lucrative Song Ever
By Keenan Mayo | BusinessWeek – 4 hours agoNew Jersey Governor Chris Christie cut the ribbon on Thursday outside Atlantic City’s newest tourist attraction: Margaritaville. The $35 million, 40,000-square-foot complex houses two restaurants, multiple bars, a beach-themed casino, and several breezy, laid-back retail stores—all tucked away in a larger gambling mecca called Resorts. The singer and songwriter of the eponymous song was conspicuously absent from the festivities. For Jimmy Buffett, the grand opening was no special occasion: The Atlantic City outpost is the 27th Margaritaville in the world.
Margaritaville Enterprises, founded in 2006 and based in Orlando, sells everything from beachwear to furniture and also oversees at least one Caribbean island resort, two American resorts, and four casinos. You can buy Margaritaville rum and combine it with a Margaritaville drink mixer in your very own Margaritaville blender that costs $349.99. According to the Orlando Business Journal, the company brought in at least $100 million in revenue in 2007. As a private company, Margaritaville doesn’t release information about its holdings, but by all accounts it has only expanded since then.
To think that all of this poured forth from a goofy, three-chord song—a mere 208 words, roughly half the length of this article—written about being lazy and getting drunk. But as Buffett’s Parrothead empire continues to spread, one can’t help but wonder whether a more lucrative song exists. “If there is anything on the same scale as a Margaritaville, it’s not a song—it’s a motion picture,” says Robert Brauneis, a professor of intellectual property at the George Washington University Law School and author of a research paper on Happy Birthday to You, which continues to generate upwards of $2 million a year. “When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you have to think in terms of Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh, or Transformers. That’s probably in the same order of magnitude.”
As a recording, Margaritaville doesn’t post stratospheric numbers. After debuting on Buffett’s 1977 album Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude, it peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 100 charts. According to the 2012 BBC documentary The Richest Songs in the World, Margaritaville doesn’t crack the top 10, which is populated by three Christmas songs. The two highest-ranking pop songs are You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, by the Righteous Brothers, and Yesterday, by the Beatles. (No. 1 was Happy Birthday to You.) “If you want to get technical, there are two Margaritavilles,” says Brauneis. “There’s the copyright that protects the song, which is valuable because of the stream of income. Then there’s the trademark that has developed out of the song’s title, and legally that’s a different piece of intellectual property.”
Of course, this means the song and the brand are separate legal entities and could, in theory, be sold separately. But this isn’t the case. If you want to check Buffett’s tour dates, there’s no JimmyBuffett.com—there’s only Margaritaville.com, where his music career and the rest of his empire are seamlessly melded into one site.
“From a larger business perspective, when you combine the two and look at what the song stands for as a lifestyle and as a branding vehicle,” says Brauneis, “it’s worth far more than Happy Birthday. I can’t think of another example of a song that has that total impact.”
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Goodwin on
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Great singer indeed ....
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Permalink Reply by frenchy on
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not a bad thought chief .. i should get busy on it right away .. but then they could probably only sing it in vegas cause it wouldn't be pg ..
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Permalink Reply by ProblemAgain on
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frick...this could be a movie...a farce....and it was....imagine spending 2 years and who knows HOW much money trying to figure out if someone said dirty words?
Florida teacher instigated FBI’s two-year investigation of ‘Louie Louie’
The Daily Caller – Mon, May 27, 2013You probably have at least some knowledge about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s scrutiny of the ostensibly raunchy lyrics of “Louie Louie,” the Richard Berry-penned rock song popularized in 1963 by an otherwise obscure band called The Kingsmen.
What you may not know is that person responsible for setting off the investigation — which, amazingly, lasted two long years — appears to have been a teacher at Sarasota Junior High School in Florida.
The Smithsonian magazine’s website has the story.
The irate teacher, whose name is frustratingly redacted throughout 119 pages of material at the FBI’s archival website, wrote to then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1964 claiming with certainty that the spectacularly indecipherable lyrics of “Louie Louie” were obscene.
“Who do you turn to when your teen age daughter buys and bring home pornographic or obscene materials being sold along with objects directed and aimed at the teenage market in every City, Village and Record shop in this Nation?” the teacher asks.
“We all know there is obscene materials available for those who seek it, but when they start sneaking in this material in the guise of the latest teen age rock & roll hit record these morons have gone too far.”
The letter ends with this quadruple-question-marked plea: “How can we stamp out this menace? ? ? ?”
The letter-writer explains that he (clues hint at a male author) went to considerable lengths to decode the lyrics — no doubt listening to the song he thought was obscene dozens and even hundreds of times.
The letter-writer says that the lyrics he concludes he has discovered are so bawdy that he can’t include them with his letter to Robert Kennedy.
Nevertheless, the very next page in the FBI’s archive is a typed version of someone’s stab at it. It’s pretty dirty. The second stanza, as imagined in someone’s fervid mind, goes:
Tonight at ten I’ll lay her again
We’ll fuck your girl and by the way
And…on that chair I’ll lay her there
I felt my bone…ah…in her hair
Later, on page 22 of the FBI collection, someone else takes a similar stab:
At night at 10 I lay her again
Fuck you girl, Oh, all the way
Oh, my bed and I lay her there
I meet a rose in her hair
According to The Smithsonian, here are the actual lyrics in that stanza:
Three nights and days we sailed the sea;
me think of girl constantly.
On the ship, I dream she there;
I smell the rose, in her hair.
FBI agents spent two years analyzing the record and playing it at different speeds, according to the Daily Mail. In the final analysis, the Bureau’s gumshoes could not determine what the words were.
The agents never bothered to get in touch with Jack Ely, the original singer for The Kingsmen, to ask him what he had actually sung, notes The Smithsonian.
http://news.yahoo.com/florida-teacher-instigated-fbi-two-investigat...
maybe if they played it backwards and at different speeds..(shaking head and facepalm...idjits!)
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