Bob Dylan Sells Entire Catalog of Songs to Universal Music Publishing

"Family" is the obvious guess.

After 2-3 million you don't really "need" money for anything yourself.

You take them for family, because you can, to not let it go away, because you want the power that comes with it, and for extravagance. But not for "need".

Well I'd also wonder what he'd need to retain ownership for. For some people that's important, but others it's not, especially if they trust the new stewards.

It was less likely that Dylan was looking to unload his catalogue, and more likely Universal were just extremely hungry for it. At that point you can name the price.

If he thinks he'd have enough money by selling for $x, he should probably take $x + $y and donate $y to some cause.

He has 6 children, 2 ex-wives, and I don’t know how many grandchildren. I can think of a couple of reasons they could use some cash.

Also, this settles what could have been a pretty thorny inheritance issue.

>> Especially considering his age.

A lawyer might call this "cold hand" control. He, like every other rich old person, is probably setting up a complex will to control how his wealth functions after his death (the cold hand from the grave). If he gives a song to someone, that person can do what they want with it. They could keep the money. Sell the song. Or just sit on it and let it never be played again. The dead man would not be in control. But if he convert that song into a pile of cash, and inserts that cash into a trust, then the dead man can exercise more direct/itemized control for many years to come.

Give your house to your son and the day after you die he can sell it. But fund a trust to "administer" the house and you can tell the kid he can live in it but never sell it. Even decades later, the dead hand still controls the house and behavior of the child. Rich people do these things. When I was a law student working at a legal clinic, maybe 1/4 of the clients were old people who wanted to leave their house to their daughter but didn't want her to sell the day after they died. My advice was always to not do this because it burdened the daughter immensely. They didn't care. They wanted the house to continue in the family forever regardless.

I wonder why he needs the liquidity. I'm sure he's making a ton of money from royalties alone. Even to his ancestors, it's probably better off long term, and good enough short term, to leave the catalog than cash.

I figure it's more about his legacy. Better to have the music commercially exploited by experts than by a family office.

I consider Tom Petty to be a vastly superior artist to Britney Spears. She has far greater commercial appeal however and her music is worth more today if you're selling a catalog. The same would factor in to selling the Dylan catalog. Dylan's music is not very popular with young people and will not be very popular in the future (see: Elvis, Cher, Neil Diamond, Clapton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Rod Stewart, Chicago, etc; their music doesn't sell at all like it used to), although I'm sure it'll be redone endlessly. Do young people care about Simon & Garfunkel? Not in the least and they won't tomorrow either. That music will all fade by the year, relegated to a small fraction of the interest it once had, as the primary generation or two that listened to it die.

After 60 years Dylan has sold less than the Backstreet Boys. He produced relatively few hits compared to other renowned, popular artists. His style of music doesn't lend itself to vast commercial success. Someone will pay a premium to acquire his catalog because he's such a great artist and it's a large & influential catalog, however there is a practical limit to that.

> Streaming brings in a fraction of cent per play so his catalog can't be generating more than a million dollars per year at best.

Wow, I think that's wildly off the mark. Bob Dylan probably has several billion streams per year, if not more. On Spotify right now, his top 10 songs have a billion streams. Obviously those did not all occur in a single year, but Dylan's catalogue is deep, and Spotify is hardly the only platform.

One billion streams per year is about $4 million on Spotify.

This was my first thought as well. The likelihood of those who inherit his copyrights to either squander them or being taken for a ride by the music industry is very high.

So him selling them himself allows him to negotiate better conditions and more money, which will do more to protect his legacy than just holding on to them until his death.

"Welcome to the new age" ;) https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=lyrics+ra...

I would be surprised if you haven't heard Radioactive - it's plastered on many TV commercials and featured heavily on radio.

We might see a bunch of post-covid guitar groups.

Decca were proven wrong in a year or so, so that was indeed a short-lived change.

Meanwhile, rock has stopped being "edgy" for 20+ years, and has stopped topping the charts and streams for equally long.

The set they played Decca wasn't their best tracks at the time. It's on anthology PT 1

The set they later played to George Martin was much more like the classic Beatles

Same, but vice versa.

The official rivalry is between the Beatles and the Stones, and some of us have even embraced both.

I think Dylan has aged much better than the Beatles have: their sound is very emblematic of a particular era of music in my mind. Of course, it may be that their focus on heavy, lush production, particularly in their later work, makes them particularly vulnerable to changes in taste. Dylan's work, on the other hand, is generally much more spare and focused on guitar and voice.

Beatles _seem_ overrated because of how much influence they have had. Every great musician after them has probably learned from them, imitated them and improved upon their techniques.

So, if you listen to recent artists first and then go back and listen to Beatles, they sound more of the same, even though in their time they were kilometers ahead of everyone else.

Yeah in essence they are not well known because they haven't adapted to the times

They block any video with a sample of their song on YT even if they would have made money from it

So, tough. Back to being unknown then

> The Beatles, Elvis, even Dylan played a lot of covers of old blues tunes or other songs that had been lost by that current generation and were made popular again.

> I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot

These are two different things, from a legal and licensing standpoint. My understanding is that sampling (expensive, no set pricing) and covering (set pricing) are distinct. I think that if you cover a song, you agree to credit the original person as writer and pay them an (industry standard) fraction of the royalties. But sampling requires negotiation for usage rights and can get expensive quite quickly. I suspect people are not sampling the Beatles because it would be expensive, but that's a distinct question from that of whether people are covering the Beatles.

I was curious, and it seems Beatles songs are pretty widely covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cover_versions_of_Beat...

quite a lot of songs that Elvis had in his catalog were by the top professional song writers in his day, the thing is though that a lot of those songs are in a style of songwriting that was rendered somewhat outdated by Dylan and the Beatles.

Generally speaking these kinds of arrangements are made with the expectation that the company managing these copyrights are going to generously sublicense everything to maximize profit. So, for example, Dylan will be selling his songs off to people who want you to listen to them as much as possible. Nobody spends 9 figures on a song's rights without expecting to make 10 figures on it.

The Beatles followed the Disney/Nintendo school of copyright management, where you just hold onto something valuable for the fear that actually making money off the thing you own will make it worth less in the future. This is what gives you shit like the "Disney Vault" where you periodically take old works off the market entirely for the sake of artificial scarcity. In this particular case, The Beatles were a massive hole in pretty much every digital music store's back catalog, so much so that them finally selling digital copies of their songs was considered actual tech news.

Whether or not a work actually thrives once it's been escheated to the public domain is really complicated. You see, the act of reusing something in the public domain also grants you copyright over anything you added to the work. Disney's reuse of public domain stories not only saved them money, but it also took things out of the public domain, in a sense. Yes, all of the old Hans Christen Andersen stories are very much open to reuse, but only if you're careful not to use the bits Disney added into their adaptations - and there are a lot of them. So if your goal is to just keep the work accessible and relevant, something akin to a Creative Commons ShareAlike license might be more appropriate than a public domain dedication.

>The alternative would be to release the songs as public domain like Tom Lehrer

In the United States, authors cannot put creative works in the public domain. The concept of abandoning copyright doesn't exist in US law. At best, copyright holders can license their works permissively.

Be aware that authors (except work-for-hires) and their heirs have an inalienable statutory right of termination, which allows them to terminate copyright transfers and licenses in certain circumstances.

Nah. Give it 30 years and that's that. Ideally, every artist should live long enough to see what the rest of the world does with their work (both good and bad) when it's set free.

If it's the right of an artist to be allowed to sell their IP to a corporation (which doesn't 'die' in the biological sense), then there needs to be a disconnect between the author/IP holder's health and the duration for which copyright should be given. Personally, I'm in favor of a fixed copyright duration after creation. I would prefer a requirement to offer 'fair' terms, if such a thing could be determined (probably not possible).

The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works. If there's no copyright it's easy for anyone to copy the work without paying, so there's no incentive to make works for money. If copyright lasts for the entire lifetime of the author there's no incentive to keep making new works after they've become successful. The ideal term should be long enough to make a profit form the work, but short enough to encourage authors to keep making new works for continual income.

> Doesn't it make more sense for IP to cease with the author/artist's passing?

No because it would be unfair to artists who die young.

There should be a time frame. 20 years. One generation is long enough to make money off your work.

Popular artists may start to die much earlier with such legislation.

That's neat, what's Teddit. A non-cluttered version of the site?

Chart position means little unless you're listening to FM music radio.