In the earliest days of MTV, few songs were more inescapable than Devo’s fractured New Wave classic “Whip It.” With hardly any bands making music videos when MTV launched in 1981, the fledgling network, desperate for content, played the song nearly every hour, turning “Whip It” into one of the most recognizable hits of the Eighties and catapulting the band into ubiquitous, if unlikely, visual icons.
Today, another Devo track dominates MTV’s airwaves.
While “Whip It” is Devo’s best-known song, it’s far from lead singer and primary songwriter Mark Mothersbaugh’s most lucrative track over the past decade. That would be “Uncontrollable Urge,” which never appeared on the Billboard Hot 100, has no gold or platinum certifications, and only has about 5 million YouTube views and 30 million all-time streams on Spotify. (“Whip It” has four times as many YouTube views and nearly six times as many Spotify streams.)
One huge difference separates the two songs: a cover of “Uncontrollable Urge” soundtracks the comedy clip show Rob Dyrdek’s Ridiculousness, which can play on MTV for as much as 14 hours in a 24-hour period, nearly every day of the week. (At its peak in 2020, it played an astonishing 113 hours out of MTV’s entire 168-hour lineup, according to Variety.) Over the past decade, through 42 seasons, 1,545 episodes and countless reruns airing every 30 minutes, the performance royalties on that song net Mothersbaugh around $1 million per year, according to an estimate from his wife and manager Anita Greenspan.
“I’ve written so many other songs for films and television shows,” Mothersbaugh, who’s composed the themes for Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Rugrats alongside multiple Wes Anderson films, tells Rolling Stone. “I would’ve been shocked [years ago] if you told me this is the one that would become this prime source of income.”
“It’s ironic and kind of funny,” Greenspan adds. “In the beginning of MTV you saw a lot of Devo because they were early to make videos, but MTV started questioning the videos Devo were making. [The videos] were subversive, they didn’t like them and wouldn’t play them anymore. Now ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ is easily the most-played song on MTV, so [Devo] wins.’”
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The two Devo songs became ubiquitous on MTV for starkly different reasons, yet ironically the throughline behind their success is the same: the network needed to find a way to fill up airtime.
“Devo was in heavy rotation,” “Weird Al” Yankovic recalled in the 2011 book I Want My MTV. “Not because MTV loved Devo, but because it was a twenty-four-hour network and they needed product.”
It’s also proven incredibly reliable for BMG, Devo’s publishing company. While the company oversees the catalogs of legends like George Harrison and Mick Jagger, BMG executive Jonathan Palmer says that “Uncontrollable Urge” has consistently been the company’s top earning sync license — the license publishers grant to allow programs to use their music.
“Uncontrollable Urge” is a unique case in the little-discussed but potentially highly lucrative business of theme songs. Making it as a musician remains a tremendous challenge whether you’re trying to be a pop star or film composer, but a solid TV placement is a lucrative opportunity for those who can pull one off.
Songwriters hope to make money through several different royalty streams, most reliably through performance royalties, a backend payment songwriters receive whenever their compositions are played on the radio, in public spaces like restaurants or concert venues, or in TV shows and movies.
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Performance royalties are set and collected by performance rights organizations such as BMI and ASCAP. They negotiate with television networks and streaming services to set rates, receive the money from the platforms and dole out royalties to their songwriters. Given the paucity of income many songwriters receive from streaming services, these royalties can play an outsized role in both their career and their pocket.
The Devo track is an extreme example; most shows, after all, don’t air anywhere near the frequency that MTV plays Ridiculousness every day. Still, “Uncontrollable Urge” — which otherwise would have earned around $150,000 all time in streaming royalties from Spotify — highlights a legitimate business for songwriters and composers fortunate enough to get their work attached to popular TV shows.
That’s been the case for the Barenaked Ladies, whose frontman Ed Robertson wrote the theme for The Big Bang Theory. The sitcom is one of the most successful TV shows of all time, airing new episodes on CBS for 12 years from 2007 to 2019. It secured a lucrative streaming deal with Max, and with its syndication deal on TBS, it typically airs on TV between four and seven hours a day.
Robertson is reluctant to divulge the exact amount he’s made on royalties between the show’s original run and syndication, but the amount appears astronomical. “It’s not seven digits, and it’s not 10 digits, but it’s in between those somewhere,” he says. “I don’t want to be gauche and specific about it either, but it’s been life-changing.
“The Big Bang Theory absolutely changed everything for me,” Robertson adds. “It’s been like having a number one hit multiple times a year, every year for the past decade. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
Robertson says the theme has earned him more than the rest of Barenaked Ladies’ music combined, which includes six gold and platinum albums (one of those being the four-time platinum album Stunt) as well as the number one hit single “One Week.” “The Big Bang Theory,” Robertson says, “dwarfed ‘One Week’ and made it look like an insignificant thing.”
Adding further to his payday, Robertson says that amid the ongoing catalog boom, he sold some of the rights to the theme, though he declined to say how much he sold it for or who purchased it.
“It’s reached a point where it doesn’t even matter what happens in the future with more song royalties anymore, and that’s part of why I’ve been able to enjoy touring over the last many years,” Robertson says. “We make records we like that are interesting to us. We’ve got no one to impress anymore but ourselves. That’s the most fortunate part of this whole situation, the Big Bang Theory theme has made our band perpetually self-sustaining, and that’s a lot of fun.”
Robertson is one of several songwriters and composers who’ve hit the jackpot getting their music on popular shows. Justin Shukat is the president of Primary Wave Publishing, the company that owns the music rights of the late legendary songwriter Allee Willis. Willis co-wrote the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” the theme song for Friends, and as Shukat notes, her 15 percent cut of the song alone brings in about $700,000 a year.
A show like The Office — which similarly plays on TV for hours a day while drawing huge streaming numbers — likely nets similar figures, while long-running soap operas like General Hospital and The Young and the Restless that continue to air daily are quietly some of the biggest earners. (The king, according to many who spoke for this article, is composer Mike Post, whose music can be heard on Law and Order and its various spinoffs. As one industry executive quipped, “It’s him and Taylor Swift.”)
Composer Doug Cuomo, who wrote the theme to Sex and the City, tells Rolling Stone that when the show went into syndication, he called up the company that manages his performance royalties and “asked if this was a mistake.” “My quarterly payment was literally 10 times more than I’d ever gotten before,” he says.
But while there’s lottery dollars for the top earners, making a living off of writing for TV and films is, for many, a pipe dream. Yet a theme on a more nominally popular program can still net a songwriter a stable living, and significantly more than their attempts to break into pop music.
For Marco Jacobo, a Los Angeles music producer, his most lucrative song was a decade in the making. He released “Hold ‘Em” – a song built around a funk drum break and triumphant trumpet stabs – back in 2011. But through a connection with his label Now-Again Records, an indie label specializing in reissues and music for sampling, the track became the placeholder for Abbott Elementary, one of the few popular network sitcoms of the streaming era.
The Abbott team liked “Hold ‘Em” enough to keep it as the official theme, where it has opened the show through its current four-season run. “Hold ‘Em” has only ever garnered enough Spotify streams to earn Jacobo about $300, but the Abbott placement has earned Jacobo six figures since the show’s 2021 debut.
“It isn’t something I ever would’ve expected, I released more songs since then I was sure would’ve been picked up and … crickets,” Jacobo says. “The one that makes it could end up sitting there for 10 years just like this one did. It’s changed a lot of things; it’s a blessing. This song is maybe 40 percent of my business now.”
As the president of the Songwriters of North America, Michelle Lewis spends much of her days advocating for better pay for songwriters and was instrumental in helping pass the landmark Music Modernization Act of 2018. The irony that a TV show can pay a songwriter better than an album cut on a popular record isn’t lost on her. Today, Lewis says, it’s much more feasible for mainstream writers to make a living through TV music rather than in the mainstream music industry.
“No one’s buying albums anymore, streaming still doesn’t pay songwriters what we were getting from album sales, and you’re relying on a song getting to radio — which is a shrinking platform — to get paid anything,” she tells Rolling Stone. “With pop writing, the stars have to align. It has to be the right time, the right artist, the right A&R person. But when you’re on a show, the show’s coming out, your music isn’t on the cutting room floor. Pop writing, you’re just throwing a random jigsaw piece into a pile without a bigger picture. At least when you write for a series, it’s part of a world, and that world has value.”
She should know. Lewis began her career writing for the likes of Cher and Hillary Duff, but found success as a TV music composer, with her most lucrative works coming from the themes to popular children’s TV shows Doc McStuffins on Disney and Nickelodeon’s The Loud House. Given how frequently Nick and Disney play these shows throughout the day, she says those placements earned her a combined $300,000 per year while the shows were both airing in the mid-2010s.
Still, songwriters and composers in the TV world face a rapidly changing business as television transitions from the traditional cable model to streaming. Network television isn’t where the biggest shows live today, but ironically for songwriters, the network rates are still much higher than on streaming platforms like Netflix. One industry executive estimates that network television pays out 15 times more than a streaming service on a per-minute of music.
That’s because PROs collect from the networks based on a fixed rate rather than how many people watched a show on a given night. Streaming services, meanwhile, pay on a per-stream basis. And it takes significantly more streams to match the network rates.
“In some ways, this is similar to what songwriters saw with music streaming years ago,” the industry executive says. “Everyone used to say if you get a [writing credit] on a [popular] album, you buy a house. Now it’s worth nothing. With streaming, there’s no longer any scarcity. It’s going to require a ton of streams to get back to the economics that existed the way things were. There’s fewer people making money.”
“It’s like having a number one hit multiple times a year, every year for the past decade.”
‘Big Bang Theory’ composer Ed Robertson
The industry executive expects a significant shift in how songwriters get paid on performance royalties in the years ahead and says the PROs will have to be wary of how they can negotiate with the platforms to ensure writers get their due.
Greenspan, who represents several other composers along with Mothersbaugh, says the payments from streaming services toward composers needs to be “rectified.” She recalled how Mothersbaugh’s payment for Rugrats back in the Nineties paid for their home.
“Are the writers making the themes on Apple and Netflix making the same as Mark from [a network]? They should pay the network rates; they’re making money and there’s no reason not to,” Greenspan says. “This isn’t like the days of Gilligan’s Island anymore; there’s not a lot of network television now.”
The general malaise around the state of Hollywood isn’t helpful, either. As studios greenlight fewer projects, writers have less opportunities to get their work placed. And with the “Skip intro” button on many streaming services changing the way viewers watch TV, some shows have nixed theme songs altogether and use a cold open instead.
There’s also the matter of what becomes of syndication overall. For decades, a TV program getting syndicated was a producer’s dream, but as cable goes the way of the dinosaur, the dilemma of how to fill a station with nearly two dozen hours of content could be irrelevant as streaming services let viewers watch whatever they want, whenever they want. Would “Uncontrollable Urge” make nearly as much money in a world with infinite content and no pressure to fill a broadcast slate? That’s questionable.
Still, for now, it carries a legacy as one piece of music MTV is still playing.
“This was the very first song off our first album. MTV stopped playing us but we came to the other side of the circle,” Mothersbaugh says. “But it’s a nice ironic twist because this was one of the songs we never even made a music video for. And now it’s maybe the most-played song ever on MTV.”
