Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/the-beat-goes-on-for-cher-as-she-wins-in-royalty-feud-with-sonny-bonos-widow.html
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Don’t mess with Cher.
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Off topic but …
I only learnt about Carol Kaye relatively recently, from reading this - which I would highly recommend to anyone and everyone with even only a passing interest in modern music.
Impeccably researched and elegantly written.
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Carol Kaye was featured in The Wrecking Crew.
See a bit of her and The Beat Goes On in this trailer.
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The Act allows songwriters and their heirs to reclaim control over their intellectual property, nullifying previous agreements with third parties.
Too bad Cher isn’t a 3rd party. She and Bono are literally the first parties involved.
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Right … this wasn’t a contract with a soul-less record company exploiting a naive writer. This was a divorce settlement with the woman whose voice and stage presence made those royalties possible.
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The sheer audacity of Bono’s widow filing this suit against Bono’s ex, Cher; who actually co-wrote the songs.
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To me that seems like some kind of attempt at erasure of Cher’s importance and contribution. Those royalties wouldn’t exist without her, she deserves and is entitled to her part.
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It may not even be that sinister; apparently Bono’s estate was “only” worth 2 million when he died, and he did no estate planning.
While I could easily live quite comfortably on that amount for the rest of my life, odds are good that someone who had grown accustomed to a more lavish lifestyle could not.
This seems like a money grab that failed, hard.
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I’m curious how much royalties would have been coming to the act of “Sonny without Cher”. There’s some lede buried here, as the law cited was known as the “Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act”,
his wife Mary, in Congress, having taken office following Sonny’s death, was a sponsor of the bill.
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This Billboard article goes into little more detail:
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