Money for Nothing
by Dire Straits
- 136
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 5
- Acousticness
Mark Knopfler wrote "Money for Nothing" in an appliance store in New York City. At the back, a wall of televisions was tuned to MTV, and a man in a baseball cap, work boots and a checkered shirt was delivering boxes. He commented on what he saw, saying things like "What are those, Hawaiian noises?... That ain't workin'". Knopfler borrowed a pen and paper and started writing the lines down right there. He wanted to keep the man's words.
The riff came while he was improvising in the studio. He modeled the guitar tone on ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, whose band was a fixture of early MTV. The drum parts of Terry Williams gave trouble. Session musician Omar Hakim redid them, though Williams' intro and tom-tom fills stayed. Sting sings the falsetto introduction. His "I want my MTV" is set to the melody of "Don't Stand So Close to Me". That earned him a share of the writing credit. John Illsley recalled that Sting came to Montserrat to windsurf and was invited to supper at the studio. Keyboardist Alan Clark claims the intro was his idea.
The single came out on June 28, 1985. It spent three weeks at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 and reached number four in the UK.
Money for Nothing runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
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