million copies. In July, Northern Songs and Maclen Music sued Paul and Linda McCartney for violating an exclusive rights agreement by collaborating on "Another Day". Although six of the eleven songs on Ram were also co-written with Linda, both parties agreed the issue of royalties for the album could be decided at a later date. In June 1972, Associated Television (ATV), which then owned Northern Songs, announced that "all differences between them have been amicably settled" and the McCartneys signed a new seven-year co-publishing contract between ATV and McCartney Music. Critical reception Upon its release, Ram was poorly received by music critics. McCartney was particularly hurt by the harsh reviews − especially as he had attempted to address the points raised in criticism of his earlier album, McCartney, by adopting a more professional approach this time around. In his review for Rolling Stone, Jon Landau called Ram "incredibly inconsequential" and "monumentally irrelevant", and criticised its lack of intensity and energy. He added that it exposes McCartney as having "benefited immensely from collaboration" with the Beatles, particularly John Lennon, who "held the reins in on McCartney's cutsie-pie, florid attempts at pure rock muzak" and kept him from "going off the deep end that leads to an album as emotionally vacuous as Ram". Playboy accused McCartney of "substituting facility for any real substance", and compared it to "watching someone juggle five guitars: It's fairly impressive, but you keep wondering why he bothers." In NME, Alan Smith further called it "an excursion into almost unrelieved tedium" and "the worst thing Paul McCartney has ever done." Robert Christgau, writing in The Village Voice, called it "a bad record, a classic form/content mismatch", and felt that McCartney succumbed to "conspicuous consumption" by overworking himself and obscenely producing a style of music meant to be soft and whimsical. In a slightly more positive note, Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker found Ram an overall better record than McCartney, but still found it subpar to the recent releases of Harrison and Lennon. Charlesworth concluded: "A good album by anybody's standards and certainly far better than the majority released by British groups and singers. Trouble is you expect too much from a man like Paul McCartney." Writing four years later, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler from NME suggested that "it would be naive to have expected the McCartneys to produce anything other than a mediocre record ... Grisly though