Pete Townshend is locking down his empire while refusing to hit the brakes on his career. The Who’s legendary frontman just inked a massive nine-figure deal with Primary Wave, handing over the keys to his name, image, likeness, and a slice of his music rights. It’s a massive play, especially considering he already offloaded his publishing catalog and other assets to Spirit Music for a cool $100 million a few years back. Now, Primary Wave and Spirit are teaming up to aggressively push The Who’s unmistakable catalog into more movies and television shows.
At 80 years old, you’d think the guy would be ready to kick back. Not even close. Townshend made it clear that partnering with Primary Wave is actually giving him the juice to keep working. He mentioned that their demanding, high-octane energy is exactly what he needs right now, estimating he has about a solid decade of creative output left in the tank. Instead of coasting, he’s spreading his bandwidth across theater, art, books, and producing. Just in the last couple of years, he’s helmed four different records. That run includes a Woody Guthrie-inspired song cycle called Fire and Dust with Reg Meuross, a collaborative project with the Bookshop Band, and producing an album for indie up-and-comers The Wild Things.
Primary Wave has essentially made a sport out of buying up rock royalty. Over the last few years, they’ve snapped up catalogs and likeness rights from massive estates like Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Prince, and The Cars’ Ric Ocasek. They recently grabbed half of The Notorious B.I.G.’s estate and bought out Britney Spears’ massive catalog, adding to a roster that already scooped up Stevie Nicks’ publishing back in 2020. Adam Lowenberg, Primary Wave’s CMO, summed up the Townshend acquisition by stating the obvious: there simply is no rock music without Pete Townshend’s genius, calling him an innovator who exists entirely in his own lane.
While legacy icons like Townshend are busy securing the financial architecture of their catalogs, the physical architecture of modern heavy music is being driven forward by a totally different breed of rock royalty. An artist’s footprint in this industry isn’t just about IP and sync placements—it’s also about the literal tools they design to push the genre forward.
Enter John Petrucci and his ongoing obsession with the perfect instrument.
Ernie Ball Music Man just rolled out the new Majesty Premium Select lineup, dropping in 6, 7, and 8-string configurations. If you know anything about Petrucci’s signature gear, you know these aren’t just off-the-shelf axes. They represent the absolute pinnacle of tone, precision, and versatility, built entirely around his hyper-specific preferences for both woodwork and electronics.
Built out in Music Man’s California factory, these high-end models share a brutal but elegant core foundation. You’re looking at an alder body paired with a Honduran mahogany neck-through design, capped off with a seriously thick maple top. The ebony fretboard sits at a flat 17-inch radius, loaded with 24 medium jumbo stainless steel frets and glow-in-the-dark side markers so you never get lost on a dark stage. They tweak the geometry depending on your string count, too. The 6 and 7-string versions stick to a standard 25.5-inch scale, while the 8-string goes multi-scale, fanning from 25.5 inches on the high end down to 27 inches for tight, aggressive lows. Nut widths scale up naturally to match, sitting at 43mm on the six-string, 47.6mm for the seven, and a massive 57.2mm on the eight.
Under the hood, the electronics are essentially a tonal Swiss Army knife. Schaller M6-IND locking tuners keep the tuning rock solid, but the real heavy lifting happens in the pickup routing. The rig runs a DiMarzio Rainmaker in the neck and a Dreamcatcher in the bridge, backed up by a Fishman Powerbridge piezo system baked into the saddles for acoustic voicings.
The switching options are where things get ridiculous. There’s a 3-way toggle for the magnetic pickups featuring a customizable middle position, alongside a completely separate 3-way toggle for the piezo. The magnetic volume knob hides a push/push 20dB gain boost for solos, while the master tone knob acts as another push/push switch to activate the custom pickup configurations. Add in a dedicated piezo volume and a slick back-mounted push/push button to flip the whole guitar between mono and stereo outputs, and you’ve got a rig that genuinely covers every base imaginable.