The Beach Boys Sell the Rights to Their Intellectual Property

Plenty of legendary musicians — including Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Stevie Nicks — have made the decision to cash out and sell their song catalogs recently, but the Beach Boys are taking it a step further: as the NME reports, the iconic pop group has sold the rights to their entire brand to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group.

There’s no word on how much Iconic Artists Group paid for the Beach Boys’ intellectual property, but given the scope of what they now own (which includes the band’s master recordings, the rights to the “Beach Boys” name, their likenesses, a share of their publishing rights and all memorabilia), one has to assume it was hundreds of millions of dollars. The band will still own an interest in its assets, but as NME writes, Iconic Artists Group will now have power over their business decisions.

“The Beach Boys, in a sense, are not just a band,” Iconic CEO Olivier Chastan told Rolling Stone. “They’re a lifestyle. They’re a consumer brand. And they’ve never really exploited that.”

Chastan also provided a hint about how he may exploit that moving forward, saying he wanted to explore virtual reality and other tech options. “That includes VR, AR, 3D, CGI, natural language processing, et cetera,” he said. “That, to me, is probably the most interesting aspect of what’s going to transform our business. In five years, I could send you a text and say, ‘At 2 p.m., let’s put our Oculus Rift glasses on, and let’s go see the Beach Boys record ‘Good Vibrations’ at Western Recorders.’”