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Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson were two of the biggest names in modern music, and their relationship once seemed like a rare meeting of creative legends.
They shared studio time, public appearances, and even a sense of mutual admiration that appeared to bridge generations, genres, and business experiences.
Yet one piece of advice Paul McCartney gave Michael Jackson would eventually become one of the most talked-about examples of how trust, timing, and commercial instincts can collide.
They shared studio time, public appearances, and even a sense of mutual admiration that appeared to bridge generations, genres, and business experiences.
Yet one piece of advice Paul McCartney gave Michael Jackson would eventually become one of the most talked-about examples of how trust, timing, and commercial instincts can collide.
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00:00Paul McCartney once told Michael Jackson, the real money in music was owning the songs,
00:05not just singing them. Years later, Jackson bought the Beatles catalog instead.
00:09One piece of advice sparked one of music's most famous business disputes,
00:14and the fallout lasted for decades. In the early 1980s, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson
00:19weren't just two of the biggest names in music. They were actual friends,
00:23working together on actual songs. The two would go on to have hits with the duets,
00:27The Girl Is Mine, the lead single from Jackson's album Thriller in 1982, and Say Say Say that was
00:34featured on McCartney's album Pipes of Peace in 1983. They were in the studio together, trading ideas,
00:41building something that felt like a partnership between two guys who genuinely respected each
00:46other. During one of those sessions, most accounts point to the Say Say Say recording. Jackson asked
00:52McCartney for business advice. Not songwriting advice, business advice. And McCartney, who by that
00:58point had spent over a decade learning the hard way about how the music industry actually works,
01:04decided to give him a real answer. He didn't just tell Jackson in the abstract that publishing
01:09was where the money lived. McCartney showed Jackson a thick booklet displaying all the song and
01:14publishing rights he owned, from which he was then reportedly earning $40 million from songs written
01:20by others. Picture that for a second. McCartney sitting there with a literal folder of other
01:26people's songs, showing Jackson the receipts on how much passive income flows to whoever owns the
01:32publishing. Not whoever's voice is on the record. Jackson listened, and according to McCartney's own
01:38retelling, Jackson didn't just nod along politely, he got specific. According to McCartney, Jackson said,
01:44I'm going to get yours. Referring to the Beatles songs which McCartney thought was a joke, replying,
01:50ho ho, you you're good. McCartney laughed it off. Jackson was young, ambitious, and clearly hungry to
01:57learn the game. But nobody sitting in that room thought the joke was actually a plan. Except it was.
02:03Jackson soon told his attorney, John Branca, that he wanted copyrights too. And he started building a
02:09catalog the old-fashioned way, buying smaller groups of songs. Tied to artists like Sly,
02:14and the family stone in older pop hits such as Runaround Sue and The Wanderer. This wasn't a
02:20throwaway comment Jackson forgot about the next morning. He went and found a lawyer and started
02:25acquiring song rights, methodically. The same way McCartney had described. Then in 1984, everything
02:32changed. In 1984, Branca told Jackson that music publishing company ATV was for sale. And ATV
02:40owned the rights to 251 Beatles songs, including Hey Jude, Yesterday and Let It Be, as well as 4,000
02:47other songs in a library of sound effects. This wasn't some random catalog. This was the actual
02:53publishing rights to the songs McCartney and John Lennon had written together. The songs McCartney
02:59didn't own, hadn't owned since 1969, and had wanted back for years. Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
03:06Branca reportedly approached McCartney and Lennon's widow Yoko Ono to ascertain their plans,
03:11if any, regarding the proposed sale, but was told neither would be bidding.
03:16McCartney had already looked at buying the catalog once before and decided it wasn't worth it.
03:21When the Beatles' catalog came up for sale, McCartney initially said he wasn't interested
03:26in buying it because it was too expensive. He'd later try to change his mind. McCartney eventually
03:31changed his mind and attempted to persuade Yoko Ono to join him in a bid for the music,
03:36but she declined. But by then it was too late to matter. Meanwhile, Jackson's team was moving.
03:43Branca initially bid $30 million on Jackson's behalf, but because of interest from other parties,
03:49the singer encouraged the attorney to increase the bid on multiple occasions. Before striking a deal
03:54for $47.5 million. Negotiations dragged on for months. At one point, Holmes Accord's lawyers were
04:02initially fearful that Jackson was bidding for his friend McCartney, which tells you how strange this
04:07whole situation looked. Even to the people brokering it. Why would the king of pop want the Beatles
04:12publishing unless he was doing a favor for his friend? He wasn't. The negotiations continued until
04:18Jackson increased his bid to $47.5 million. And the deal was completed in August of 1985.
04:26Michael Jackson now owned the publishing rights to more than 250 Beatles songs. Songs McCartney had
04:32co-written. Songs that made up a chunk of the most valuable catalog in music history. The joke from a
04:38few years earlier wasn't a joke anymore. And McCartney, the man who'd handed over the playbook,
04:43was the one who got played by it. To understand why this deal landed so hard, you have to understand
04:49where both men were standing in the years leading up to it, because this wasn't two strangers colliding
04:55over money. This was two careers that had been circling each other for over a decade before the
05:00ATV deal ever came up. McCartney's side of the story actually starts long before Jackson enters the
05:06picture. Back in the world of the Beatles themselves. In 1969, Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney
05:13failed in their bid to gain control of their publishing. After their publishing company,
05:18Northern Songs, was sold to Grade. That single event set McCartney's entire relationship with his
05:24own catalog for the rest of his life. Due to an unfavorable deal, the band signed in 1963.
05:29That did not grant them publishing rights to their own songs. McCartney had been fighting ever since
05:35to buy back the music credited to himself and John Lennon. So by the time McCartney met Jackson,
05:40he wasn't some naive rock star who'd never thought about ownership. He was a man who had already lost
05:46control of his life's work once. Who understood exactly how painful that loss was. And who had
05:52spent years trying to claw pieces of it back. That's precisely why the advice he gave Jackson
05:57carried so much weight. It wasn't theory, it was a lesson learned from his own scar tissue.
06:02Jackson on the other hand, was climbing. Jackson and McCartney's friendship began in the 1970s,
06:08when two of the greatest forces. That music has ever seen combined to chew the fat,
06:13and on occasion, talk business. With their first meeting beginning when McCartney offered Jackson
06:18the chance to buy Girlfriend for an upcoming album. Jackson was still a young star, finding his footing
06:24outside the Jackson 5. And McCartney, more than a decade his senior, and already, a legend twice over,
06:30became something like a mentor in those early conversations. That mentorship produced actual music.
06:37They recorded The Girl Is Mine for Thriller, and Say Say Say for McCartney's Pipes of Peace.
06:42And by all public appearances, they genuinely liked each other. Thriller alone was turning into the
06:48best-selling album of all time. And McCartney's presence on it was a genuine collaboration between
06:53equals, not a favor. The two men were writing hits together, showing up on each other's records,
06:59and building a public friendship that fans could see playing out in real time. But underneath the
07:05collaboration, something else was happening. McCartney talked freely about music publishing,
07:10because McCartney had already figured out what many artists learn too late. The real money is not
07:15always in singing the song, but in owning it. He wasn't hoarding that knowledge. He was actively
07:21teaching it to the person he was working with. Because that's what friends do, and because McCartney
07:26had no reason to think Jackson would ever turn that lesson against him specifically.
07:30Jackson absorbed the lesson fast, and he didn't stop at Beatles songs.
07:35Paul and I both learned the hard way about business, Jackson wrote in his 1988 autobiography,
07:40Moonwalk, and the importance of publishing and royalties, and the dignity of songwriting.
07:45That line matters because it shows Jackson genuinely understood the stakes of what he was doing.
07:51He wasn't stumbling into a lucky purchase, he was executing a lesson he'd been explicitly taught.
07:56By the time ATV came up for sale in the mid-1980s, the company wasn't just some obscure publisher.
08:02By the mid-1980s, the Beatles catalog had come under the ownership of Company ATV,
08:08which was headed by Australian billionaire Robert Holmes Accord, who appeared ready to
08:13offload the prized collection to the highest bidder. This was a company built on decades of hits,
08:18and whoever bought it wasn't just buying songs. They were buying leverage over some of the most
08:23famous music ever recorded, and over the man who wrote half of it. The financial mechanics of why
08:29this mattered so much come down to something simple. A music publisher owns the rights to a
08:34song's lyrics and composition. And any time a song is performed, played on TV or radio, used in a
08:40commercial, etc. The publisher collects royalties, with that money traditionally split 50-50 with the
08:46songwriter. So even after Jackson bought ATV, McCartney would still get paid as a songwriter.
08:52But the control, the say over how the songs got used, the decisions on licensing, the actual
08:58ownership of the asset, that belonged to whoever held the publishing. And as of August 1985, that
09:04was Michael Jackson. The stage was set. Two men who'd built genuine chemistry in the studio,
09:10who had platinum records to show for their partnership, were about to become the central
09:14figures in one of the most talked-about ownership disputes in music history. And the fuse had already
09:20been lit, the moment McCartney opened up that folder, and started explaining how the business
09:25really worked. The actual purchase of ATV didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen quietly
09:31either. It was a drawn-out, high-stakes negotiation, that stretched across the better part of a year,
09:37with lawyers on both sides, fighting over a catalog, that both men knew was worth fighting for.
09:42It started with Jackson's team, testing the waters. When Jackson's longtime lawyer,
09:47John Branca, got wind that ATV was for sale in 1984. He approached Michael about making an offer.
09:54And Michael instructed Branca to spare no expense in acquiring the Beatles' catalog.
09:59That instruction alone tells you Jackson wasn't casually interested. He wanted it,
10:04and he wanted his lawyer to fight for it no matter what it took. The early numbers were modest by
10:09comparison to where things ended up. The highest bid on the catalog was $40 million.
10:14So Jackson and Branca prepared an offer that was likely to scare everyone off. $47.5 million.
10:22That number, in the mid-1980s, was staggering for a music publishing catalog. Nobody had paid
10:28anything close to that for song rights before. Robert Holmes at court tentatively accepted their
10:33offer, and both sides began the process of due diligence. And due diligence in this case was brutal.
10:39The negotiations between Jackson's and Holmes at court's lawyers took 10 months and cost Jackson
10:45personally over $1 million. With his legal team spending months at the U.S. Library of Congress,
10:51studying the validity of each of the 4,000 song copyrights. And more than 100 lawyers needed to
10:57generate eight different contracts, until both sides finally agreed on the deal. This wasn't a
11:02handshake deal. This was a legal operation the size of a corporate merger, built entirely around securing
11:08rights to songs that included the Beatles' entire songwriting legacy. Throughout all of this,
11:14McCartney's name kept surfacing, not as a bidder, but as a ghost in the room. Holmes at court's lawyers
11:20were initially fearful that Jackson was bidding for his friend McCartney. Which meant even the
11:24sellers assumed there was no way Jackson would actually want these songs for himself, competing
11:29against the very man who wrote them. That assumption turned out to be completely wrong.
11:35The negotiations continued, until Jackson increased his bid to $47.5 million. And on August 10, 1985,
11:43the deal was completed. Word became public days later. Public reports announced the acquisition
11:49on August 14, 1985. Though the Lowe's Angels Times later reported that the contract itself had been signed
11:57in the early hours of August 10. Either way, by the middle of that August, it was official.
12:02Michael Jackson owned the publishing rights to 251 Beatles songs, and Paul McCartney did not.
12:08McCartney's reaction, once it sank in, wasn't subtle. He didn't hide his feelings behind polite
12:14industry language. McCartney called the purchase dodgy, because Jackson bought the rug they're
12:19standing on. That phrase stuck around for decades, because it captured exactly what McCartney felt
12:25had happened. Not a legitimate business loss, but a friend pulling the ground out from under him,
12:30using the very advice McCartney had given him. Jackson, for his part, mostly stayed quiet in
12:35public about the specifics. But behind closed doors, when McCartney raised the issue directly,
12:41Jackson's response became one of the most quoted lines in this entire saga. When McCartney complained
12:47that he'd written those songs for nothing, and couldn't buy them back at these phenomenal sums,
12:52Jackson's response was, Oh Paul, that's just business. Four words, that's just business.
12:58To McCartney, that response landed like a slap. He hadn't just given Jackson a tip over dinner,
13:03he'd shown him his own financial records. Walked him through the entire mechanics of publishing,
13:09and helped turn a curious young collaborator into someone who understood the game well enough to beat
13:14him at it. And now that same person was shrugging off the outcome as nothing personal.
13:19There was also the matter of what Jackson actually did with the songs once he had them.
13:24McCartney had never wanted the Beatles catalog treated like generic commercial property,
13:29but that's exactly what started happening. The music legend was upset about licensing of the
13:34Beatles music for commercials under Jackson's ownership, as this was one thing the band never
13:40wanted. Every time Revolution showed up selling sneakers or another Beatles track got dropped into
13:46an ad campaign. It was a reminder that decisions about his own songs were now completely out of
13:51his hands. By any measure, the deal was a financial triumph for Jackson. It was a brilliant deal,
13:57and possibly, the most expensive lesson Paul McCartney ever gave anyone for free. But it came at the
14:03cost of a friendship that had, up until that point, looked like one of the more unlikely and genuine
14:08bonds in pop music. The bidding war was over. What came next was decades of silence, resentment,
14:14and one very long legal fight to undo it. Once the ATV deal closed, the friendship between McCartney
14:20and Jackson didn't explode, it just quietly died. And McCartney spent years afterward trying,
14:26without much success, to get some kind of financial fairness restored, even if he couldn't get the
14:31ownership back. The first attempts were personal, not legal. McCartney reached out directly,
14:37hoping that whatever bond they'd had would count for something. In the late 1990s,
14:42McCartney wrote letters to Jackson, as he believed he deserved a raise for his songwriting.
14:47This wasn't McCartney trying to reclaim the whole catalog. He was simply asking for a better royalty,
14:53rate, on his own compositions. A reasonable ask, given he was the one who'd actually written the
14:58songs Jackson now owned. The response, or lack of one, said everything. He won't even answer my
15:04letters, so we haven't talked. And we don't have that great a relationship,
15:08McCartney explained in 2001. No response, not a rejection, not a negotiation, just silence.
15:15Stretched out over years, for a man who'd once shown Jackson, his own publishing folder,
15:20like a mentor sharing trade secrets. That silence must have felt like the final insult.
15:26McCartney later opened up about the frustration in more detail, during a conversation on the Howard
15:31Stern show. After the deal went down, McCartney reached out to Michael. Concerning a raise in the
15:36royalty payments he received from the Beatles catalog. And according to McCartney, Jackson
15:41replied, Oh, that's just business. Same four words as before. It's remarkable how that single phrase
15:48became the entire epitaph for their friendship, repeated back by McCartney years later, as proof
15:54of exactly how little his old collaborator seemed to care about what had been lost between them
15:59personally. Further recalling his attitude toward Jackson at the time, McCartney added,
16:04that they'd never talked about it, that Jackson wouldn't even answer his letters, and that they
16:09simply didn't have a great relationship anymore. Two men who'd once stood in a recording booth
16:15together, trading verses on The Girl Is Mine and Say Say Say, reduced to unanswered mail. Despite the
16:21personal freeze, the two kept some public distance rather than outright war. Until Jackson's death in
16:272009, he and McCartney remained respectful. Speaking of one another publicly, but never had the same
16:34relationship again. It was a strange kind of truce, polite in interviews, frozen everywhere else.
16:40Then Jackson's financial situation started to shift the whole picture. At the time of his death
16:45in 2009, the self-proclaimed king of pop was $500 million in the hole. And the ATV catalog had become
16:53one of his few truly reliable assets. Years earlier facing mounting debt in the mid-1990s,
17:00when Jackson was in debt, he sold half of ATV to Sony, forming the joint venture, Sony-slash-ATV.
17:07The catalog McCartney's own songs, sat inside, kept getting passed between corporate hands,
17:12further and further from McCartney's reach, while Jackson used it as leverage to stay solvent.
17:18After Jackson's death, ownership consolidated even further away from McCartney. Sony agreed to buy out
17:24Michael Jackson, a state's half of Sony-slash-ATV Music Publishing, for $750 million, giving the
17:31corporation full control of the catalog. That had once belonged, in part, to Jackson personally.
17:37For McCartney, this meant his own songs were no longer even tied. To the friend who'd outbid him,
17:43they now belonged to a media conglomerate. With no personal history in the story at all.
17:48But there was one thing McCartney had that no purchase price could touch. American copyright law,
17:54a provision of the Copyright Act, allows authors and co-authors to reclaim the copyrights in their
17:59works, after a set period of time, provided that they serve termination notices. On the current
18:05rights holder, this wasn't some obscure loophole McCartney stumbled into late. He'd been quietly
18:11working the system for years. McCartney first filed for copyright termination back in October 2008.
18:17For Love Me Do, and since then, McCartney had filed additional termination requests. With a single
18:23batch filed in 2010, containing 40 song compositions. For years, it looked like a formality. Then a case
18:30involving Duren Duren changed the temperature entirely. A UK court ruling became the basis of
18:37Duren Duren's attempt to terminate Sony-slash-ATV's ownership of their songs, and the band's case
18:43ultimately failed. Because the court sided with the English interpretation of copyright law,
18:48ensuring their songs remained under Sony-slash-ATV's control. Suddenly, McCartney's own termination
18:54notices, filed years earlier, looked a lot less like a guarantee. So McCartney went on the offensive.
19:01On January 18, 2017, Paul McCartney filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court,
19:07Southern District of New York, against Sony-slash-ATV Music Publishing. He wasn't waiting
19:13to see if Sony-slash-ATV would try the same defense. That had worked against Duren Duren,
19:19McCartney sought a court's declaration that he could reclaim outright many of his Beatles compositions
19:24from the 1960s and 70s. Citing songs that he and John Lennon jointly created from 1962 to 1971,
19:32during which time they typically assigned their copyright interests to publishers. In exchange
19:37for royalties, the specific target date mattered enormously. The lawsuit was McCartney's preemptive
19:43effort to ensure that the copyrights, once owned by Michael Jackson, would go to him starting in
19:49October 2018. The first song eligible to be claimed back was Love Me Do, with the rest of the catalog
19:55following in years after, ending in 2026. More than three decades after McCartney had first lost his
20:02grip on those songs. The law finally offered him a door back in, and this time, he wasn't going to
20:08leave it to chance. The lawsuit didn't drag on for years the way some music industry legal battles do.
20:14Within months, both sides found their way to a resolution, and McCartney finally got what he'd
20:19been chasing since the mid-1980s. Paul McCartney reached a confidential settlement of his lawsuit
20:26against Sony-slash-ATV Music Publishing, in which he sought to reclaim copyrights to songs by the
20:31Beatles. The word confidential matters here. The exact terms were never made public, and neither
20:37side gave much detail beyond the fact that the matter was resolved. A lawyer for McCartney informed
20:43a judge that the two sides have resolved this matter by entering into a confidential settlement
20:49agreement. A U.S. district judge signed an order dismissing the case, but agreed to revisit it if a
20:55dispute arose. That detail alone tells you the settlement wasn't a total surrender by either party.
21:01It was a negotiated landing that both sides could live with, quietly without spelling out exactly
21:07who conceded what. What we do know is the timeline lined up with what McCartney had been fighting for,
21:13since he first filed those termination notices back in 2008. The Beatles' songs began reverting to him,
21:19starting with Love Me Do, in October of 2018, and the rest of the catalog was set to follow him
21:25year
21:26by year afterward. More than three decades after Jackson's bid closed the door on him,
21:31McCartney had finally found the legal mechanism to walk back through it. Not by outbidding anyone this
21:37time, but by outlasting the clock. That copyright law had quietly been running the whole time.
21:42It's worth sitting with how strange that whole arc really is. McCartney handed Jackson the blueprint.
21:48Jackson used it almost immediately, buying up smaller catalogs before circling back to the one that
21:54mattered most. The one with McCartney's own name on it. The purchase turned a friendship built on real
22:00musical chemistry into a relationship reduced to unanswered letters and a single dismissive line
22:06about business. And then decades later, it was the law itself, not a phone call. Not a reconciliation
22:12that finally returned what McCartney had lost. By the time McCartney reflected publicly on Jackson,
22:19the bitterness had softened into something closer to grief. After Jackson's death, McCartney didn't
22:25lead with the grudge. McCartney issued a statement saying he felt privileged to have hung out and
22:30worked with Michael, calling him a massively talented boy-man with a gentle soul. Whatever business damage
22:36had been done, McCartney still recognized what they'd built together in the studio before any of the
22:42publishing rights ever came between them. And the financial afterlife of that catalog kept growing long
22:48after both men had moved past the fight over it directly. Jackson merged ATV with Sony's publishing
22:54business in 1995, in a joint venture generally valued at about $100 million for his side. And in 2016,
23:02Sony bought the Jackson estate's remaining 50% stake. For $750 million, that means a catalog acquired,
23:10for $47.5 million, eventually turned into an asset, worth many times that amount, even before
23:17counting decades of licensing revenue. The number McCartney once considered too expensive to bid on,
23:23had ballooned into one of the most lucrative single purchases in entertainment history,
23:28just not for him. Even George Harrison, watching from the outside, couldn't quite make sense of how
23:34it had all played out. In a 1988 interview, Harrison said he thought it was very strange because
23:39Jackson was supposed to be Paul's friend. Adding that he personally only had about 10 or 12 songs in that
23:45catalog, and that he'd still like them back. It wasn't just McCartney who felt the sting of watching a
23:51friend's advice turn into a wedge between old bandmates and their own legacy. What's left today is a strange
23:57kind of resolution. McCartney has his songwriting rights back, piece by piece. As the copyright clock keeps
24:03ticking toward the finish line, set out in his settlement. Sony still controls plenty of the business machinery
24:09around those songs. And the friendship that started it all, two men trading hits in a studio,
24:15one showing the other his own financial playbook, never came back the way the music once suggested it
24:21might. The advice worked exactly as McCartney described it, it just didn't work for him.
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