“The most played song on MTV”: the best way to become rich as a songwriter, according to Devo
In About A Boy, Hugh Grant plays Will Freeman, a good-looking, charming British man-about-town who falls in love and has wacky escapades as a result. So far, so standard. However, his character lives a vapid, carefree lifestyle brought on by what sounds like a creation of total fantasy. Freeman’s father wrote a smash hit song, and every year, an amount of money akin to a very generous year’s salary is dumped in his bank account from the royalties. However, as Devo singer Mark Mothersbaugh may ask, is this such a fantasy?
A closer look shows that the story’s writer, Nick Hornby, depicted a situation that, while uncommon, happens occasionally. There are songs so popular and so enduring that their royalties could make up the GDP of a small country. For the likes of ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Billie Jean’, and ‘Wonderwall’, this makes perfect sense. They’re some of the most beloved songs in pop history, of course the publishing rights would make anyone wealthy. It’s not just songs like that that make a pretty penny, though.
Back in About A Boy, Grant’s character doesn’t just have his bills paid by a smash hit song. He has them paid by a smash hit Christmas song. If you want to be cynical about it, it’s the reason why the otherwise terminal genre of Christmas music is so popular. If you can secure a holiday standard, then you’ve essentially got a guaranteed radio hit every single year around wintertime. It’s an intoxicating prospect, one responsible for some truly horrific old bollocks shoved out in the name of getting on some seasonal radio playlists.
However, it goes even further than that. It was in the news recently that Mark Mothersbaugh, frontman of art-rock wackos Devo, makes a million dollars every year from the residuals of one song. What song might that be? ‘Whip It’? ‘Working In The Coal Mine’? Nope, it’s the 20-second clip of their song ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ that was reworked as the theme of the MTV show Ridiculousness. You might not have heard of either song or show, I know I hadn’t, but the show’s been on the air since 2011, runs several dozen times a week and for a period of time, was MTV’s sole night time programming.
All those snippets add up to one heck of a payday for Mark. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Mothersbaugh’s wife and manager Anita Greenspan said, “It’s ironic and kind of funny. At the beginning of MTV, you saw a lot of Devo because they were too early to make videos, but MTV started questioning the videos Devo was making. They were subversive; they didn’t like them and wouldn’t play them anymore. Now ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ is easily the most-played song on MTV.”
It’s not even Mothersbaugh’s first rodeo, either. In the 1990s, he was tapped up by TV producers Klasky Csupo Inc to write the theme music for a cartoon series they were making. He was later able to buy a house from the proceeds of their show Rugrats. In an age where the bottom has almost completely fallen out of selling music directly to the consumer, writing for film and TV has become one of the few ways that music can become a recurring money-spinner.
So, don’t give up on trying to write that hit. However, think more broadly about the way that hit can be used. It may not be a radio smash, but if it can front a hit TV show, then you may have a far more enduring hit on your hands.
