28 | Rolling Stone | March 2020
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years ago is fucking incredible,” says
an executive who works with a lead-
ing classic-rock act.
It took a lot of work to get there. In
the years immediately after he died,
there almost wasn’t a Presley estate
at all. In 1973, his manager, “Colonel”
Tom Parker, arranged for Presley to
sell royalties for his entire back cat-
alog to that point — upward of 1,000
songs — for a flat $5.4 million. That
deal, made necessary by Presley’s out-
rageous spending and Parker’s gam-
bling debt, still has repercussions
today: The Presley estate sees no rec-
ord royalties on many of his biggest
hits. (It does co-own the copyrights for
some of the songs Presley covered, re-
sulting in additional income.) In Pres-
ley’s and his manager’s minds at the
time, they would lean heavily on tour-
ing revenue for income.
All that changed with Presley’s death
in 1977. By the early Eighties, his estate
was tanking, plagued by a $10 million
IRS bill and income slumping to less
than $1 million a year. Around that
time, his ex-wife, Priscilla, took charge
and put together the first of several
new teams to overhaul the estate. In
1982, Graceland opened to the public,
allowing fans to get access to the mainE
LVIS PRESLEY may have died
43 years ago, but on a re-
cent morning in midtown
New York, plans were un-
derway to resurrect him. In a confer-
ence room in the offices of Authentic
Brands Group, the firm in charge of li-
censing and marketing Presley, execu-
tives are discussing the many projects
they have been working on since tak-
ing over the estate in 2013. There’s an
Elvis filter on Snapchat, which gives
you his face, pompadour, and be-
dazzled jacket. There’s a plan to re-
lease a video of Elvis and all of his
beloved animals on the Dodo, a pop-
ular pet site (you will also be able to
buy CBD-infused Hound Dog treats).
There are film and TV projects, in-
cluding Agent King, an offbeat animat-
ed series coming to Netflix next year.
Co-created by Priscilla Presley, the
show will aim for a BoJack Horseman
feel, where a cartoon Elvis goes un-
dercover as a crime-busting govern-
ment spy. At the head of the table, CEO
Jamie Salter confidently promises that
next year will be “probably the biggest
year in the history of Elvis Presley.”
These plans are all part of a major
effort to make Presley cool again. More
than 60 years after his first momen-
tous sessions at Sun Records, his em-
pire is in need of a reboot. While the
Presley estate was annually pulling in
$60 million a decade ago, that number
has fallen by 30 percent, according to
Forbes. Sales of memorabilia dropped
from nearly $4 million in 2017 to less
than $1.5 million last year, according to
Invaluable, which tracks auction hous-
es. This winter’s Elvis: Seen and Unseen
tour, featuring surviving members of
his TCB band playing along to video
footage of Presley, was postponed, for
the second time, due to “unforeseen
circumstances” with the archival foot-
age. According to the Guardian, a 2017
U.K. poll found that nearly 30 percent
of respondents ages 18 to 24 had never
heard one of Presley’s songs.
Given that Presley was one of the
first rock stars, the campaign to bring
him back amounts to what one music
executive calls a “canary in the coal
mine” for the future legacy of rock &
roll. Can it possibly work — and what
does it mean for the future careers and
earnings of artists like the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, who
followed Presley?
One possible path forward is Team
Presley’s branding push, the most ag-
gressive in decades. “Brands die as
they get older, and the reason brands
die as they get older is because the
older generation goes away,” says Salt-
er, whose company also represents
Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali.
“If you don’t push those brands to the
younger generation at all times, even-
tually you age yourself out. And that’s
what was going on with Elvis.”T
ODAY, THE PRESLEY ESTATE IS
estimated to be worth between
$400 million and $500 million,
according to one Presley exec. That’s
less than the Beatles (whose song cat-
alog is said to be worth more than $1
billion) and Queen (thanks to Bohemi-
an Rhapsody, the surviving members
top Presley at $575 million). But its in-
come is still impressive: “Forty mil-
lion a year for a guy who died over 40floor of Elvis’ home, plus his cars and
his gun collection. It pulled in 3,000
people on its first day and went on to
draw 700,000 attendees a year. By the
end of that decade, the Presley estate
was making $15 million annually.
In 1993, Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie
Presley, turned 25. Per his will, she
was put in charge of a new trust to run
the family business, Elvis Presley En-
terprises. (Priscilla had acted as an ex-
ecutor but was not in the will, since
she and Elvis were not married when
he died.) Hoping to make the busi-
ness more profitable, Lisa Marie sold
an 85 percent interest in the company
in 2005 to CKX, the company that also
owned American Idol. “You have to ei-
ther grow or go down,” she said. But it
didn’t grow. Plans to expand Graceland
fell apart after the 2008 stock mar-
ket crash; in 2011, CKX was sold to a
private-equity firm, which two years
later put the Presley estate on the mar-
ket. Authentic Brands Group snapped
it up in a $145 million deal.
In the current arrangement, ABG
is in charge of the licensing and mer-
chandising of Presley’s name, image,
and likeness. Lisa Marie still retains
ownership of Graceland and her fa-
ther’s personal possessions, and sheThe Presley estate’s
earnings have slipped in
the past decade — but a
new team is hellbent on
overhauling his image
By DAVID BROWNE
Can Elvis Presley Rise Again?
ALL SHOOK UP A fan at the Graceland gift shop. The Presley home draws about a half-million people a year.