Music & Money

It's hard to believe that the much hyped launch of Microsoft's Windows-95 was fifteen years ago.

The campaign was much talked about at the time mostly because of its use of the Rolling Stones song Start me up.

They paid a squillion dollars to secure the rights. And it was the first time The Stones had ever licensed one of their songs for advertising.

Today my friend Mona put me onto an interesting yet little known story about the ad.

According to head of Windows Brad Silverberg, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (the writers of the song) delivered a live version of the track rather than the expected studio version.

The reason why?

Well apart from Jagger and Richards many of the band members playing on the live version were hired hands.

So the bulk of the money from Microsoft would have gone to Jagger and Richards.

Sneaky bastards!

Luckily for the other Stones members Microsoft stuck to their guns and demanded the original track.