Coming to a store near you: Bob Marley video games, shoes ... snowboards?
Heirs of the Jamaican reggae legend are plunging into the global trademark wars, seeking to enforce their exclusive rights to an image that has grown steadily in scope since the Jamaican superstar died of brain cancer in 1981 at age 36.
The Marley name, look and sound are estimated to generate an estimated US$600 million a year in sales of unlicensed wares. Legal sales are much smaller — just US$4 million for his descendants in 2007, according to Forbes magazine. The Marleys refuse to give a figure.
The family has hired Toronto-based Hilco Consumer Capital to protect their rights to the brand. Hilco chief executive officer Jamie Salter believes Marley products could be a US$1 billion business in a few years.
“The family managed all the rights before Hilco was brought on board,” said Marley’s fourth son, Rohan. “We didn’t have a real good grasp on the international scope prior to Hilco, nor the proper management.”
The turn to big business has stirred some grousing from die-hard fans in Internet chat rooms, who say it goes against the grain of a singer who preached non-materialism and popularized the Rastafarian credo of oneness with nature and marijuana consumption as a sacrament.
But Lorna Wainwright, who manages a Kingston studio and music shop called Tuff Gong, Marley’s nickname during his slum boyhood in a nearby slum, backed the move, saying “the world needs the Bob Marley police.”
“It’s a free-for-all out there with all the fakes, all the piracy,” she said. “It’s important to continue getting his real message out like when he was alive because the world is in a crisis and Bob Marley’s lyrics provide a solution.”
A representative of the Bobo Ashanti order, a Rastafarian group, also expressed support.
“Bob Marley was and still is a stepping stone for many around the world who seek Rastafari roots and culture,” said the Rasta rep who identified himself as the Honorable Prophet Moambeh Acosta in an e-mail. “We can only hope and pray for the [family’s] success ... as the task seems insurmountable due to the years of piracy and counterfeiting.”
Rather than focusing on street vendors, who hawk everything from Bob Marley T-shirts to beach towels, the partnership is creating a new line of products dubbed “House of Marley” and will police the trademark vigilantly.
“You’re never going to stop the guys in the streets, flea markets ... but you try as much as you can,” Salter said.
Snowboards and tropical Jamaica may seem an odd pairing, but they’re among a wide variety of planned merchandise featuring the dreadlocked musician’s image, name or message — backpacks, stationery, headphones, musical instruments, restaurants.
Items are expected to hit the market in the middle of next year.
Marley “would be amused to know that his face is being used to brand a wide range of products and services, some of which he himself might never have thought of using,” said Carolyn Cooper, former coordinator of the reggae studies unit at Jamaica’s University of the West Indies.
But the Marley family is absolutely right to emulate the estates of other pop heroes in protecting the trademark, Cooper said.
Marley’s lyrics promoting social justice made him an icon. His One Love anthem woos tourists to Jamaica on TV spots featuring white-sand beaches and swaying palms.
Most of Marley’s heirs are also musicians, including his widow, Rita, and son Ziggy, who won four Grammys with the Melody Makers, a band that included another son, Stephen, and daughters Sharon and Cedella. Son Damian has won three Grammys.
The family says it cares less about moving merchandise than about preserving the patriarch’s legacy in such efforts as the Marley organic coffee farm, whose product is dried, roasted and packaged in bags emblazoned with song titles such as One Love and Mystic Morning.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver