Could you please explain what that actually means when Simon said he doesn't own One Direction name?
I’m not a specialist, and we haven’t discussed contracts and business within the music industry for a while, so I apologize if I’m missing some facts. But basically, control over the band's name can have a massive impact on decision-making and financial outcomes. If he owned the name One Direction, that would give him full control over the brand, merch, and sort all commercial uses. The fucker regrets not owning it because he 👏 wants 👏 to 👏 profit 👏 more 👏. It’s all about money. He could be licensing products (he even mentions animations in the video), he could also organize a potential reunion and do whatever he wanted with the band, who knows…
There are so many layers to this. He also mentioned that a band member dropping out of half the tour wouldn’t be a problem if he owned the band because band ownership includes controlling decisions like continuing a tour despite these kinds of changes. I haven’t watched the full interview, but it seems to me he implies that One Direction wouldn’t be on indefinite hiatus if it were up to him. He could even have potentially reformed the band with new members or taken other directions to keep it going without even needing the consent of OT5. I mean, that’s how messed up things could have been. He regrets that the artists are the ones still in control and profiting from it!!!! He wanted to own it so the actual band members would be just puppets, not really an important part of it. No human decency, just money and business. And people still don’t believe all the awful things that went down behind the scenes. We don’t know half of what these fucking greedy people put the boys through.
Side note: He also implies multiple times that Syco did fully own the band at some point. Which is confusing, because we obviously know how controlling the label was for them and how much they profited from One Direction, but I’m pretty sure the boys always owned at least part of the band, they created a company at the very beginning and they obviously still own it and earn from the band to this day. So I’d love to know what the deal actually was and what point this changed.
In reference to this