Thursday, May 17, 2007

Live2sell

I don't quite know what the Evergreen executive means when he says, "Tupac was one of the most prolific songwriters that ever lived....We are honored to be working with Afeni Shakur and helping to realize the full potential of this catalog." Maybe "honored" is actually code for "lucky it cost us only $5 million." And "full potential" might mean, well, that's the interesting part, right?

Tupac Shakur last made the Forbes bad-Karma list of top-earning dead celebrities in 2003. He has since been passed by the likes of Ray Charles and George Harrison. No one's gonna catch Elvis. Since Evergreen only bought into the Tupac Shakur song catalog, there may not be any Graceland themepark for activists in the works but Evergreen is a publishing company that buys celebrity catalogs -- MC Hammer's was bought out of bankruptcy! sweet! -- and has "about $150 million in financial backing from Lehman Brothers' private-equity arm." They're into profits. So will there be commercials? Should we start the countdown now for Tupac's Dancing With The Stars moment? And is that better or worse than a duet with Celine?

4 comments:

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Anonymous said...

That’s like saying, well, we got Jim Belushi or Charlie Murphy to show up at the event. They’re, you know, almost as good.

(Of course, there’s an inverse prinicple too. Like, if you could get Ben Stiller or Dane Cook, wouldn’t you really want someone else from either of their families instead?)

Irene Done said...

You bring up something I've always wondered about: why IS Dane Cook famous?