The Amy Winehouse Business Is Booming

As Anthony D’Amato preps backstage at Sony Hall in midtown Manhattan, it’s hard not to notice his six-foot height, horn-rimmed glasses — and the name “Amy” in large black letters on the side of his head. It’s not a tattoo, just black liquid eyeliner easy to wash off, but it suits the occasion. In a few minutes, the New Jerseyan and his 12-piece band will walk onstage, take their places beneath an LED sign lit up with Amy Winehouse’s first name and a simulation of her signature beehive, and play her Back to Black album start to finish — and hardly for the first time, either.

“I really never imagined that it would become something that I would have done maybe 200 times at this point,” says D’Amato, who uses the stage name Remember Jones. “My queer friends, all people of color, my mom — everybody knew who Amy Winehouse was.”

In July 2011, Winehouse was found dead of alcohol poisoning at her home in the Camden neighborhood in London. She left behind a mere two albums (including the 2006 retro-pop classic Back to Black) and a checkered personal life plagued by addiction, marriage, divorce, and a million paparazzi photos documenting it all. In the years since, her musical and cultural influence have only grown. Lana Del Rey, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Future have all cited her as an influence; Miley Cyrus and Måneskin have covered her songs onstage. D’Amato’s show is merely one of many tribute acts working around the world, from the U.S. and the U.K. to Serbia and Slovenia, many featuring Winehouse lookalike singers sporting her trademark hairstyle, winged eyeliner, pumps, and miniskirts. 

Fans can make a pilgrimage to Camden to see a life-size bronze statue of Winehouse erected in her honor in 2014. (Early this year, to protest Israel’s attacks in Gaza, someone covered the Star of David necklace on the statue with a sticker of a Palestinian flag.) For $135,000, Winehouse die-hards — who call themselves either Winettes or Cherries (after her song “Cherry”) — could even own the nearly 230 books in her personal library. A few years ago, the Washington, D.C., rare-books dealer Type Punch Matrix bought the collection at a charity auction organized by Winehouse’s family and is now offering it for sale. The collection includes books on her hero Frank Sinatra, Jackie Collins novels, bios of musicians who battled addiction (Anthony Kiedis, Jimi Hendrix), a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl with an unfinished lyric tucked inside, and certain volumes with obvious wear and tear.

“It’s pretty clear she was reading some of these in the bathtub, or lighting candles in her apartment and these were under them,” says Type Punch Matrix co-owner Brian Cassidy. “The condition helps tell the story and speaks to the life.” One book sports a lipstick kiss. “I can’t prove it’s Amy’s,” Cassidy says, “but I’m pretty sure.”

At the same time, the musical-industrial complex around Winehouse has expanded. Her legacy now includes more than a dozen reissues, compilations, live recordings, and documentaries. This year, the reissue of her 2003 debut, Frank, will be commemorated with a new edition and video for “In My Bed.”

Next up is Back to Black, a biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (who also helmed the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy) that premiered in the U.K. this month and opens in the States on May 17. During filming, the director herself noticed Winehouse’s ubiquity. “You walk into a restaurant, she’s singing,” Taylor-Johnson says. “You walk around the corner, there’s a mural. You walk into a shop, there’s a poster. You see people with a T-shirt or a scarf. It feels everywhere all the time.”

When Winehouse died, much was made of her age — 27, the same as Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and others in the so-called “27 Club.” At the time, comparisons to those rock legends felt a little premature, but 13 years after her death, they’ve been proven true. One of the first major pop stars of the millennium, Winehouse is now the equivalent of a Cobain or Morrison for the generation who came of age with pop in this century, and with a fan base and industry to match. “She’s in the same breath, not just biographically but artistically,” says Cassidy. “There’s tragedy there, but also a lot of joy and creativity. There’s something very archetypal about her life.”

As her former bass player Dale Davis says, “You get these people who come along once a generation and just change everything up completely. So it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that interest is still there. It’s a short career, like Cobain, but the impact is massive, isn’t it?”

WHEN TRYING TO PINPOINT the moment that the posthumous Winehouse industry kicked into gear, all roads point to Amy, director Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary. The film made $23 million worldwide, an exceptional number for a doc of any sort, and won the Oscar for best documentary. “There was interest right after that,” says Sony Music Publishing executive Chris Jones, who oversees the licensing of her songs. 

Soon after the film, Davis was approached about reuniting Winehouse’s touring band behind an Amy-style frontperson. Originally called Forever Amy and since renamed the Amy Winehouse Band, the U.K.-based tribute show re-creates a standard Winehouse set list. “If we’re going to give people the feeling of how it was,” Davis says, “I thought it was easier to stick to an original show and have the same format.” 

Davis, who admits he had concerns about the idea, says he experienced an unsettling moment during one of the group’s early shows in 2016, when an Italian singer was performing as Winehouse. “My bass guitar wouldn’t stay in tune for the whole night,” he says. “At that point, I thought Amy was trying to tell me something.” But after seeing emotional fans at shows and hearing from another that their mother was dying — and attended the show so she could have a Winehouse experience before she passed — Davis reconciled with his decision. Save for a period during the pandemic, the Amy Winehouse Band has been working ever since. Davis also says that Amy’s father, Mitch Winehouse (who declined comment for this story), saw a show and gave his blessing: “He found it very emotional.” 

Both the Winehouse Band and D’Amato’s “Back to Back to Black” shows purposefully avoid lead singers who replicate Winehouse’s look; the Winehouse Band’s current frontperson, Bronte Shande, sports neither beehive nor Amy-style makeup. “I want someone to have the spirit of Amy like Bronte does,” Davis says. “I’ve worked with the original Amy. I don’t need to work with someone who looks like her.” D’Amato, whose show features both him and several different male and female singers, also has mixed feelings about lookalike acts. “I don’t knock it, but some of them are just not great,” he says. “The singer can’t quite sing it or doesn’t pull off the thing. You can’t really try to copy Amy.”

Not every Winehouse-related project has panned out. A hologram tour, in which Davis and her old band would have accompanied a simulated Winehouse, was announced in 2018 but fell through for reasons that remain unclear. But overall, the business of Winehouse appears to be in healthy shape. According to one industry source, her publishing catalog is likely valued at nearly 20 times its annual earnings (on the high end of such evaluations). Last year, Openville Ltd., the private company directed by her divorced parents, Mitch and Janis, that oversees that business, had equity of about $2 million. According to Royalty Exchange, which allows investors to buy shares of royalties of select songs, Winehouse’s catalog is “highlighted by consistent, still-growing earnings” and is “above the 75th percentile of all catalogs analyzed by Royalty Exchange.” Last year, the video for “Back to Black” vaulted past 1 billion views on YouTube, 17 years after its release.

The Winehouse windfall is sure to spike with the release of Back to Black, which stars British actress Marisa Abela and traces Winehouse’s life from her teen years through her death. “Interest has been steady over the last five, six years,” says Jones. “I think the forthcoming film will boost that significantly.” Rockabilia, the online store that sells officially licensed music merch, is predicting a surge in its Winehouse T-shirt sales. “We’ve definitely seen an uptick in Bob Marley with the movie that just came out,” says co-owner Frankie Blydenburgh. “I think Amy will pick up for sure.”

During the filming of Back to Black, photos of Abela as Winehouse made their way around the internet, much to the displeasure of some Winehouse fans. “It’s a fucking sick joke — Amy would be pissed off at this shit,” wrote a fan in a typical sentiment. Davis witnessed the outcry for himself. “I’ve had people who are supposedly friends of mine on my Instagram feed saying, ‘Let’s make a petition to stop the film,’” he says. “It’s so fresh in people’s minds, and they have a lot of opinions.” Adds Taylor-Johnson, “You’re like, ‘You’re judging an entire movie on one picture.’ I think people are nervous, and all I can say is I treated her with reverence, respect, and everything she deserved.”

The fervency of Winehouse’s fan base may recall that of past rock legends, but it also brings with it a new twist. Her breakthrough coincided with the rise of social media, and the way her life was so publicly on display connected with members of a generation who’ve lived their lives on social media as well. “Seeing her and some of her struggles, some people identify with it instead of sensationalizing it,” says D’Amato. “They think, ‘She’s more like me.’” 

After his band’s 90-minute show, which included favorites like “Valerie” and “Fuck Me Pumps,” D’Amato was approached by a fan with a Winehouse tattoo on her arm. “This happens pretty often,” he says later. “I always thought I should be taking a photo with the people who show me their tattoos. To put Amy on your skin, it’s got to connect to you in a deep way.”