‘It’s All Over Now’? — Lessons from the Rolling Stones school of business

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The death of Charlie Watts may put the kibosh on The Rolling Stones touring business worth billions since Mick Jagger and Keith Richards often said if the drummer left, the band’s future would be in doubt.

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Of course it may be hardly surprising. Watts turned 80 in June and the others are nearly there.

To be sure that didn’t stop the band from planning to go ahead without Watts for its remaining “No Filter” tour dates in North America this fall, concerts that had been shelved because of the pandemic. “No Filter” has already become the eighth-highest grossing tour of all time, earning US$416 million (C$525 million) over 44 dates, according to Billboard Boxscore.

Watts had to go to hospital for an emergency procedure this summer. It was successful, but then he needed more time to recuperate, so he withdrew from the tour, replaced by Richards’ long time drummer, Steven Jordan.

Then it appears Watts developed a post-op complication. He died Tuesday.

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Jagger, the band’s flamboyant centre-piece, was always protective of the reserved and dapper drummer. “Charlie’s not taking questions tonight,” a cheeky Jagger told journalists at Toronto’s so-called SARS-stock in 2003, when a scribe had tossed a query at the quiet one. That concert in front of more than 400,000 fans at a former air base was one of the larger ones the Stones had played.

Of course, it was brokered by Stones promoter Michael Cohl, a Canadian who in 1989 had revolutionized the way the band toured. It was just before then in the mid-‘80s — when the Stones were at their lowest creatively and the Jagger-Richards feuding at its highest — that Watts slipped into drink and drug addiction.

“Even Keith Richards, bless him, told me to get it together,” Watts said later.

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As the band emerged from irrelevance, infighting and Watts’ only slip into a rock n roll stereotype to record and tour “Steels Wheels” as the decade closed, it was Cohl who led their business to a new level. He gave the band a giant lump sum for the time, US$40 million for 40 shows, then bypassed local promoters to arrange the tour dates himself.

Previously bands had a tour director deal with local promoters in each city, collecting their different fees after the shows. Cohl changed all that, and ramped up merchandise, beer and car company sponsorships and other concert ties-in like TV deals to turn the band’s money-making ability up to eleven.

Cohl-run tours from 1989 to before the Licks tour started in Sept. 2002 generated about US$1 billion in revenue, Fortune reported then. The Stones grossed US$558 million for their “A Bigger Bang Tour” during 2005-2007, an all-time record at the time, according to Billboard Boxscore.

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Ed Sheeran now holds the highest spot, with a tour ending in 2019 taking in US$776 million, Boxscore says.

The Stones have always been a business. Altamont aside, they appeared to make pretty sound business decisions, and their career offers business lessons.

These include hiring tough entertainment lawyer Allen Klein in the mid-‘60s, later setting up their own record label and commissioning the lips logo that elevated their marketing to a new level in the early ’70s.

Watts, who trained and worked as a graphic artist before joining the band in 1963, was an integral part of the marketing. He worked on the cover of 1967’s “Between the Buttons” and suggested the 1975 tour promotion of playing on a flatbed truck on a Manhattan street like a New Orleans band might, reflecting his fervent love of jazz.

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I’ll never forget the deals I did in the ’60s, which were just terrible

Mick Jagger

Also a clothes horse, Watts oversaw the band’s merchandising with Jagger as it expanded in later years to include all sorts of apparel beyond logo T-shirts to jackets and skirts, and items including luggage and even face masks.

Another business lesson is Jagger’s lack of sentimentality. The band dropped keyboardist Ian Stewart from the official lineup because he lacked the right look and fired co-founder Brian Jones when he could no longer function.

Others cite Jagger’s formative stint at the London School of Economics, but he has downplayed that education, saying he only studied economic history. Everything he knows he learned along the way, his skills especially honed by enduring onerous early contracts where the band earned little. “I’ll never forget the deals I did in the ’60s, which were just terrible,” Jagger told Fortune in 2002. “You say, ‘Oh, I’m a creative person, I won’t worry about this.’ But that just doesn’t work. Because everyone would just steal every penny you’ve got.”

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Finding a market niche and exploiting it is also good business, says Rich Cohen, author of “The Sun & Moon & The Rolling Stones.” “Rather than trying to become new Beatles, as many other bands did, the Stones became their opposite,” Cohen wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Wholesomeness from the Beatles, sleaze from the Stones; love from the Beatles, sex from the Stones.”

Along the way, they learned to maintain the brand. Bassist Bill Wyman left the band nearly 30 years ago — he’s now 84. Former noodling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor is a blues man of a certain age, not the pirate personality of Richards who inspires Johnny Depp characters.

Ronnie Wood, who joined in the mid-70s, just fits in. He almost looks like a cross between Jagger and Richards. While maintaining the brand, the band also took steps to protect it. Stones songs often feature in movies, though not in as many commercials in relative terms. Microsoft paid them US$4 million to use “Start Me Up” to launch Windows 95, according to Fortune, but Jagger prefers film licensing.

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Having skilled lawyers provides further protection, suing when there’s a ripoff, or intellectual property theft, like when The Verve lifted notes from an orchestral version of “The Last Time” for its song Bittersweet Symphony, a hit in 1997. In 2019, Jagger and Richards gave the song rights back to The Verve.

The Stones’ business is well organized. Different corporate entities control touring, recording, publishing and merchandizing. Jagger, Richards, Wood and the late Watts are a partnership atop the different companies, all based in The Netherlands for tax reasons. The Stones have famously always been conscious of tax laws.

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That’s why they recorded “Exile On Main Street” in the south of France to escape high British taxes. It’s why they rehearsed in Canada before touring instead of in the U.S. (And we thought it was because they loved apologetic Canadians, the El Mocambo and Crescent School.)

And for a time, the Stones were adept at reinvention, says Cohen, an important tactic in marketing any product for decades. They moved from pop, to trippy rock, blues rock, disco and later added some production effects from new wave and even hip hop, though they were hardly David Bowie in the reinvention department.

And in later years you could rather say they’ve stuck more or less to the same product on tour, oldies hits, which is another business lesson in itself — stick to your core product.

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Though to keep the marketing hype going, they have tried to reinvent the spectacle a little by adding special guests, playing in old venues where they have a history, like London’s Hyde Park, and in new countries like in the Middle East. They even added festivals they’d never done before, like England’s Glastonbury in 2013.

Not all of it appealed to Watts, though, who hated stadiums and when playing them tried to imagine somehow he was in a jazz club like London’s Ronnie Scott’s. “I don’t like playing outdoors, and I don’t like festivals,” he told The Guardian. “I never liked the hippy thing to start with. It’s not what I’d like to do for a weekend, I can tell you.”