Recently, we’ve seen many news articles on the sale of celebrity archives for significant amounts of money.1 Archives are a particular asset consisting of a compilation of music, writings or other artistic expressions. Bruce Springsteen’s recent half a billion dollar catalog sale was only the latest mega-transaction in 2021, a year in which many prominent artists’ catalogs were sold, garnering astounding prices. Other notable musicians sold their archives for large amounts (for example Bob Dylan for $300 million, and Elvis, Paul Simon, Neil Young and Tina Turner each for mega-millions). Charles Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip, is consistently one of the highest earning deceased celebrities. In a typical year, his heirs have been known to earn more in royalties, which increases the fair market value of the archive, than the heirs of John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Elizabeth Taylor combined. In January 2022, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s library sold for $2.35 million.2 To this impressive list, we can add the archives of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and other Nobel laureates, which each sold for high values in recent years.3
Sometimes, an estate’s beneficiaries aren’t even aware that the decedent had a valuable archive. I’ve recently seen the situation in which the trustee of an estate found an archive that, on inspection, turned out to have significant value (for example, an archive consisting of 8,000-plus photos by a world-famous naturalist photographer or an archive of many letters penned by J.D. Salinger, both of which privately placed for hundreds of thousands of dollars). Another “archive” of 3,900-plus bottles of scotch whiskey sat in a basement museum and sold for in excess of $8 million dollars, one bottle achieving the staggering price of $1.3 million.
Given the significant amounts involved in the sale of these archives, estate-planning attorneys should understand the basics about how these archives are valued. The archives’ owners, the estate trustees and/or the possible heirs will need to value the archives and, once valued, decide whether to donate them to reduce the tax liabilities they’ll incur or keep the archives as part of their family legacy.
Value Based on Intended Use
Value is subjective and, therefore, must originate from the archive’s use. The same object may be valued at different amounts under different circumstances. For instance, an object such as a singular Picasso image may be: (1) sold directly in the open market for $400,000; (2) licensed as a logo for a line of clothing for $1.5 million; (3) printed in an edition of 20 being sold for $12,000 each, or (4) valued at $20 million as an important declaration of Picasso’s personal emotions sent to his lover.
Value of Information
Once objects are valued as a collection as opposed to an individual piece, they may be worth more. For example, the music archives of Springsteen and Dylan are collections of objects containing valued information. By preserving these material musical objects, it’s hoped that future generations will be able to reconstruct matters belonging to our society like events, beliefs or values. For Dylan in particular, after over 58 years, more than 600 songs and one Nobel Prize, the cultural and economic value of his songwriting body of work has grown exponentially. Dylan wrote music that reflected the times in which he was living, giving an important perspective of the rebellious 60s, as well as the more placid years following.
Music archives not only yield economic benefits but also have value by addressing social and, possibly, ethnic perceptions. Harry Belafonte’s personal archive, acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library (the Schomburg Center), provides a snapshot of a life that mingled art and activism.
The Schomburg Center acquired Belafonte’s personal archive—a vast maze of photographs, recordings, films, letters, artwork, clippings, albums and other materials. The archive illuminates not just his career as a musician and actor but also as an activist and connector who seemed to know everyone, from Paul Robeson and Marlon Brando to Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys and Nelson Mandela. Asked what he hoped people would glean from his archive, Belafonte was both grand and humble: “What people learn when they read Mark Twain, when they read Frederick Douglass, when they listen to Ella Fitzgerald—what the times and the people were like.”4
Archives are valuable because they provide information about aspects of a society that individuals find relevant. Archives are strongly related to culture in an anthropological sense because they form an expression of a culture.
Educational Compendium
If an archive is destined to be an addition to a university or library collection, it may become a uniquely valued resource as it adds to a compendium that’s been built up over years, in which the value of every item is enhanced by its relationship to others in the collection. A university or library will select and receive those items for donation that meet the particular goals and needs of its patrons. In valuing a university or library collection rather than a museum collection, the major consideration is: What’s the value of this collection to the university or library, its researchers and students? What does it contribute to the university or library? What would it cost to replace the services the university and the library offer through the collection? This measure of value is known as its “deprival” value. “Academic libraries can help higher education institutions retain and graduate students, a keystone part of institutional missions.”5 Salinger’s writings, which when purchased were vault bound, would do much to advance an understanding of the WWII experience as they describe his landing on D-Day as well as his development as a writer of such distinction.
Macro-Appraisals
The latest step in appraisal theory has been to move away from the documents themselves and look at the context in which they were created. To this end, noted Canadian archivist and scholar Terry Cook has put forward a strategy of macro-appraisal.6 Before anything can be said about the value of documents, something has to be known about the organizations that created them and the events that they relate to. According to Cook:
In this ‘macro-appraisal’ phase, archivists would seek to understand why records were created rather than only what they contain, how they were created and used by their original users rather than how they may be used in the future, and what formal functions and mandates of the creator they supported rather than what internal structure or physical characteristics they may or may not have. […] Phrased differently, the central appraisal question, with macro-appraisal, becomes: Why and where were they documented? Rather than: What documentation should be kept?7
“Rock music from the 1970s and ’80s continue to be popular on radio, TV, the movies and on streaming sites like Spotify and Pandora” says Barry Massarsky, an economist and consultant who calculates music portfolio values.8 That means the assets of Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Stevie Nicks, who recently sold part of her catalog for $80 million, are worth more today. “The yield on publishing rights has risen to 18, from 13 to 14 two years ago,” Massarsky adds.9 Thinking about archives in this manner turns the focus on the future, instead of the past.
The trustee or heirs, as the stewards of a visionary’s, artist’s or politician’s legacy, have the responsibility of valuing, for estate tax purposes, the archive. As noted above, this is a complicated issue, requiring a macro-appraisal of the history and context of the archive, a future appraisal (that is, imagining how the archive might be used and valued in the future), as well as a present day appraisal of value. The first step is to identify what’s in the archive and how it relates to the overall financial and legacy goals of the owners, heirs and trustees.
While the primary goal of an appraisal of an archive is assessing it for estate tax and/or donation purposes, there are other uses of an archive appraisal, the most likely being for insurance purposes. An archive could be lost, damaged or stolen. The impact on a family, museum or library of a missing archive could be devastating.
Endnotes
1. See, e.g., www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/arts/music/bruce-springsteen-sells-music-catalog.html; www.forbes.com/sites/arielshapiro/2021/04/30/inside-paul-simons-catalog-sale-at-250-million-its-one-of-musics-biggest-bob-dylan/?sh=26fe66762ade.
3. See, e.g., www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59392771; www.freepressjournal.in/cmcm/late-british-physicist-stephen-hawkings-papers-wheelchair-for-sale.
4. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/arts/harry-belafonte-archives-schomburg.html?referringSource=articleShare.
5. Terry Cook, “Macro-appraisal and functional analysis: documenting governance rather than government,” Journal of the Society of Archivists (2004), at
pp. 5-18, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0037981042000199106.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Liz Moyer, “Iconic Rock Songs Are Suddenly Hot Commodities. One Reason: Streaming,” Barrons (Dec. 11, 2020).
9. Ibid.