Business News The Beatles | Page 33

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The US trailer for Help! with (from the rear) Harrison, McCartney, Lennon and (largely obscured) Starr

company Associated TeleVision (ATV), in which Lennon and McCartney received stock. Briefly owned by Australian business magnate Robert Holmes à Court, ATV Music was sold in 1985 to Michael Jackson for a reported $47 million (trumping a joint bid by McCartney and Yoko Ono), giving him control over the publishing rights to more than 200 songs composed by Lennon and McCartney.

Jackson and Sony merged their music publishing businesses in 1995, becoming joint owners of most of the Lennon-McCartney songs recorded by the Beatles, although Lennon's estate and McCartney still receive their respective shares of the royalties. Although the Jackson-Sony catalogue includes most of the Beatles' greatest hits, some of their earliest songs were published by an EMI subsidiary, Ardmore & Beechwood, before Lennon and McCartney signed with James. McCartney acquired the publishing rights to "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" from Ardmore in the 1980s. Harrison and Starr allowed their songwriting contracts with Northern Songs to lapse in 1968, signing with Apple Publishing instead. Harrison created Harrisongs, which still owns the rights to his post-1967 songs such as "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something", while Starr's Startling Music holds the rights to his own post-1967 songs recorded by the Beatles, "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".