Sony reportedly agreed to pay £1 billion to members of Queen to buy the catalog and publishing rights to the group's songs. This is the highest payment in the world ever made for the publishing rights of a song held by a recording artist.
The Queen group still has 52.6 million monthly active listeners on Spotify even though the original singer Freddie Mercury died in 1991. The last album was released in 1995. However, Queen's popularity is still high helped by the extraordinary response of the biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody in the year 2018.
Should the purchase be finalized, Sony also holds the rights to Queen's image which they can commercialize. Previously artists like Bruce Springsteen sold his catalog for $500 million while Bob Dylan was paid $300 million.
