Nirvana untouched: Plans to work Cobain's corpse flops

Back in 2006, Courtney Love did a deal bringing in a company called Primary Wave Music Publishing to work on the Nirvana back catalogue. They paid her fifty million dollars, with the plan of using the songs to soundtrack adverts and video games.

It hasn't been a staggering success, with the company having managed to scrape a return of a little under two and a half million.

Why so? Partly because it's Nirvana - you're not really going to get that many supermarket chains lining up to use Polly as a soundtrack for their ad spots, are you?

And partly - perhaps more so - because Primary Wave only controlled 50% of the catalogue; the other 50% was controlled by Love and the rest of the band:

A source told Portfolio that one deal to license a number of NIRVANA songs for a special episode of "CSI: Miami", that would be written around the music, collapsed when Love, the publisher and former members of NIRVANA asked for "twice the industry standard" in licensing fees, leading CBS-TV to back off.

At least Courtney didn't insist on writing the episode of CSI. CBS should thank its lucky stars it didn't spend weeks taking delivery of small pieces of paper with the words "plottKILLRy ANADAms" scrawled all over.