Parrottheads rejoice! Balladeer Jimmy Buffett's best known song, "Margaritaville," has been named the "most lucrative song ever" by Bloomberg's Businessweek. Buffett's consumer products empire "Margaritaville Enterprises" is named after the 1977 song. Nearly every store in any shopping mall has the ability to market a Margaritaville product that matches its prescribed venue.
There are Margaritaville drink mixes and blenders, Margaritaville apparel, and even a number of Margaritaville casinos, including the newest $35 million venture at supertropical Atlantic City, N.J. in the Resorts complex. There is also of course the download or hard copy of "Margaritaville" itself.
The nearly 40-year-old tune wasn't Jimmy Buffett's first, and definitely was not his last. Backed by keyboardist Michael Utley and the rest of the Coral Reefer Band, Buffett's entire library is so widely recognizable, the band could likely play multiple concerts composed of completely different songs and not have the Parrotthead audience at a loss for lyrics.
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Sure, many may gawk as average people from all walks of life converge on a single concert venue, where they point their hands atop their heads in the "Fin Dance" and bat around inflatable beach balls whose owners will likely never regain them. But, for many Parrottheads, Buffett's tunes, including "Margaritaville," offer the listener a three-minute mental "change in latitude" from the world around them, which they consider more than worthwhile, despite any social consequences.
The inclusiveness of Buffett's self-described "gulf-western" genre is said to be one of the many reasons for which "Margaritaville" was named the most profitable tune in history: there is something marketed by Margaritaville Enterprises, musical or otherwise, that possibly appeals to nearly every individual.
Buffett himself cited the wide-ranging popularity of his music in that way: "I'd like for people to think that maybe-if you wore your grass skirt or coconut bra, and you happened to be like a brain surgeon, and you're just kind of whooping it up here tonight: Just wear it to work on Monday and see what happens," he said on-stage in 2011 in Las Vegas, "Could be a confidence builder in the patient, could scare the **** out of them, I don't know," Buffett said, as the Coral Reefers began to play "One Particular Harbor."
Commenting on the fact that the ever-popular "Happy Birthday" is still a copyrighted tune as well, Professor Robert Brauneis of George Washington University Law School said that he could "not think of another example of a song [besides "Margaritaville"] that has that [same] total impact," referring to Margaritaville's $100 million per annum revenue brand-wide, versus "Happy Birthday's" $2 million per year revenue stream.
"You have to think in terms of Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh or Transformers," Brauneis said of the "magnitude" of Margaritaville's largesse.
Believe it or not, despite the size of the Margaritaville franchise today, the song only reached as high as #8 on the Billboard 100 charts at the time of its original release. And yes, Margaritaville does indeed market salt shakers.
Watch one of Jimmy's earliest performances of "Margaritaville," on the "Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" in 1981:
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