‘It paid in the end’: The family that bankrolled AC/DC – and still owns their catalogue

It’s a 50-year showbiz relationship, as enduring as any of AC/DC’s timeless hits, yet the bond between the band’s founding brothers, Malcolm and Angus Young and the late music impresario, Ted Albert, who helped make them famous, seems destined to remain shrouded in mystery.

Ahead of AC/DC’s upcoming tour of Australia in November and December – the band sold 320,000 tickets on one day alone in June – the low-key, Sydney-based Albert family refuses, albeit politely, to discuss any of the Young brothers: neither Angus, now 70, nor Malcolm, who died in 2017, aged 64, nor their older brother, George, founder of The Easybeats, who died just three weeks before him at 70.

This is despite the Youngs playing an intrinsic role in the Albert family’s enormous impact on the Australian entertainment industry. Ted’s great-grandfather, Swiss émigré Jacques Albert, went from selling watches and harmonicas in the 19th century to owning a media empire – originally called J Albert & Son, later becoming Albert Productions – that encompassed radio and television. Ultimately, it signed some of the biggest rock and pop acts to come out of Australia, including AC/DC in June 1974.

Ted died young – of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 53 – and in 2016 his family sold Albert Productions to the German music giant BMG. Despite exiting the recording industry, though, it retained ownership of its prize jewel: AC/DC’s music catalogue, which includes, of course, everything the brothers ever wrote, including mega-hits T.N.T. (1975), Highway To Hell (1979) and You Shook Me All Night Long (1980). It ranks as one of the most valuable catalogues in the world, reported to be on par with that of British super-group Pink Floyd, which sold last year for $US400 million.

The band’s music still regularly features in movie soundtracks and commercials, generating substantial publishing fees. “There’s no doubt the AC/DC catalogue has been the Albert family’s cash-cow for the past 50 years,” says music biographer Jeff Apter, who wrote Malcolm Young: The Man Who Made AC/DC. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

In 2010, journalist Jane Albert – Ted’s niece – touched on the enduring relationship in her book House of Hits, revealing how Ted Albert bankrolled AC/DC for almost a decade before turning a profit. “For him, it was a long-term investment,” Angus Young told her, “but it paid in the end.”

Today, the family’s focus is the Ted Albert Foundation, which funds “positive social outcomes through the power of music”.

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