Last week on Vulture’s Good One podcast, during the lightning round, Marc Maron was asked how much it cost him to use the Taylor Swift song “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” in his upcoming comedy special. “$50,000,” he said—and that was just for one minute of use. (The song is referenced in a bit, not used in the intro or credits.)
That sounds steep, and amusingly, he didn’t get a discount even after reaching out to Jack Antonoff (the song’s co-writer and a former guest on the WTF podcast), who told Maron to go through the usual channels. On different episode of the same podcast, Brett Goldstein said he got the Beatles’ “Yesterday” for basically free after sending a letter to Paul McCartney.
When licensing a song, you typically have to pay for the publishing rights and the master recording. In Goldstein’s case, he only had to pay for the publishing, which is why TV shows and movies often use covers — they only need to pay the publishing fee, plus the cost of hiring someone to record the new version. It’s obviously cheaper to bring in Gary Jules to cover “Mad World” for Donnie Darko than to pay Tears for Fears for the original master. That probably cost under $10,000, though Jules’ version is arguably more iconic now than the original.
I was curious, though. Is $50,000 for a single minute an outrageous fee, or actually pretty standard? I remembered that Mad Men famously paid $250,000 to use The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a season five episode, though they also licensed the original master. Meanwhile, the 2019 film Yesterday reportedly paid $10 million for 17 covers of Beatles songs—about 40 percent of the film’s entire budget.
On the other end of the spectrum, the 1999 film Varsity Blues reportedly paid $500,000 to use AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” and that was over 25 years ago. Another 1999 film, Cruel Intentions reportedly paid $1 million for The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” although the price of that was driven up because it samples from the Rolling Stones.
These figures are rarely made public, though there were also unconfirmed rumors that Stranger Things paid Kate Bush $150,000 for Running Up That Hill.
Given that this is a Taylor Swift song, $50,000 for one minute actually sounds reasonable. Still, Maron probably should’ve just written Taylor a letter — that often seems to do the trick.
