Singer has been a frequent flogger of his songs, his clothes, his drawings and his whiskeys
The estimated figure is pretty mind-blowing – at over $300m (£225m), it dwarfs the $22m he got for extending his publishing contract in 2010 – but it comes as little surprise that Bob Dylan has sold the rights to his back catalogue. For one thing, selling your publishing rights or your master recordings is commonplace among artists of a certain stature, netting them huge lump sums in the process and giving the buyer ownership of the kind of songs that people are clearly going to be playing and recording cover versions of for the rest of eternity: everyone from Elton John to Stevie Nicks has done it.
And for another, it’s a move very much in keeping with Dylan’s sharp business sense. The fact that he’s ceded control of how the songs are used might cause palpitations for a certain kind of Dylan nut. Will this Nobel prize winner’s hallowed oeuvre now be allowed to play on the soundtrack of anything, no matter how inappropriate, so long as someone stumps up the requisite cash? But, in fairness, it’s hard to see how his catalogue’s new owners might exploit his songs in a way that the man himself hasn’t already done in recent years. A 2015 article in Variety claimed Dylan’s songs had already appeared more than 500 times in films and on television, a state of affairs that may have had something to do with the fact that Dylan himself, in contrast to some of his peers, was apparently highly amenable to their use. “To me there’s literally nothing more simple than clearing a Bob Dylan song,” said Thomas Golubić, a music supervisor known for his work on Breaking Bad.
