Undoubtedly one of the year’s biggest releases, Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR debuted at number one on the Billboard charts last May. As the album’s single “good 4 u” also hit number one, some fans began to notice the similarities between the Rodrigo track and Paramore’s 2007 song “Misery Business.” The similarities were so striking that mashups of the two songs began popping up online, including one on YouTube that has earned more than 3 million views since its May 14 upload.
Fans weren’t the only ones who noticed.
Per Variety, Rodrigo and Paramore were in contact even before “Good 4 U” was released. The credit is an “interpolation,” which is “an element of a previously recorded song re-recorded and incorporated into a new song.” Last week, Rodrigo added the band’s songwriters Hayley Williams and Josh Farro to the writing credits for the song, which could be a massive payday for the pair. Songwriting and publishing royalties are the sweetest plumb in this case, with estimates somewhere in the seven-figure arena.
“It’s hard to give an exact value, because there really are a lot of variables, but in public performance [alone], it’s a seven-figure number ranging from $1.2 million to probably north of $2 million on the amount of spins, how long it’s been on the radio, how many formats it got play from,” a source told Variety.
The numbers on “good 4 u” are already pretty staggering, with more than 527 million streams, 134,000 song sales, 324,000 radio plays, and 246,000 album sales, reports Variety. “Using informed assumptions of how much each transaction would pay, Christopher Hull, partner and co-practice leader at Citrin Cooperman, roughly estimates the publisher and writer royalties for U.S. consumption of ‘Good 4 U’ at more than $1.4 million.” [Whistles].
All of that isn’t going directly to Paramore, though. They’ll be sharing a cut of that with the publisher. But sources tell Variety that Rodrigo is giving Williams and Farro a 50/50 split on the single. Pretty nice, especially considering, as one music attorney tells Variety, the song could net approximately $10 million. The “Misery Business” is a-booming.
