Bob Dylan Sold His Songs?!
Today’s Artist of the Day: Siamese Dream, The Smashing Pumpkins
What's up, everybody? Can you believe that Bob Dylan sold his entire catalog? I can't wait to dive more into this.
Universal Music just purchased 600 Bob Dylan songs. What... In Bob Dylan's memoir, he makes a mention of his first music publishing deal, and he said that he was given 100 bucks against future royalties, and at the time, that was just all right with him. Fifty-eight years later, and 600 songs later, he is now perpetually wealthy for generations to come. As if he wasn't already. But this is massive. Now, the official word has not been released, but everyone in the industry is estimating the deal to be around $300 million.
So let's do some quick math here. $300 million divided by 600 songs equals $500,000 a song. I mean, this is like fairy tale money, Dylan's catalog is definitely one that's been sought after, and why wouldn't it be - over 6,000 different artists has covered his songs and rerelease them as their own. Demand is prolific by any stretch of the imagination, and if you're gonna go after a catalog, you might as well go after one, like Dylan. If you follow this channel, just two weeks ago, I released the video that talks about holding on to your masters and having control over your artistic career by you fronting the money and putting out your art in the beginning of your career, so that you don't give too much of your royalties away in the very beginning, that type of deal could be very critical on the very steep arc of a career, if you are able to write a hit song or get any sort of traction or anything like that, going on the other side of one's career and thinking about where he is in his time and space, this is probably the smartest thing I think Dylan could have done with his catalogue.
If you have all of these songs that are super desirable and everybody loves them, you know that when you die, there's gonna be a war between your family and how your assets were laid out to be dispersed amongst your family, the ones you're leaving behind in his life. And potentially companies like Universal that wanna sweep in and grab catalogs after death plus seven years or whatever the latest incarnation of the copyright laws are, so I think this is extremely smart, it takes the guess work completely out of all of this and relieves your future relatives of continuing to handle the fight between the record labels and the rights to your music.
Well just go ahead and sell your music now and just get that lump sum payment when you're in your seventies like Dylan, and just move on. Big companies like Universal are always paying attention to what music becomes public domain, so they can sweep in and snatch it up, and that doesn't make them bad, it's just the rules, but they always wanna get the cheapest sort of buy that could then turn them into a profit and just going ahead and selling your catalog at Dylan's age, I think he's actually in his eighties now, I think he's like maybe early eighties, I have to look, but the truth is, is that selling it now just makes things so much easier for when you transition to the next life or whatever.
Not to mention now, all of that cash is liquid and you're able to do a lot of generational wealth moves that can really set up your family for the rest of their lives, or maybe you take the money and you do something generationally good with it, like provide some sort of grant funding once a year for a variety of people to apply for and to make positive impact and change for generations to come in that way, either way, it gives Bob there way more options and probably makes his family a little more at ease knowing that they don't have to... Continually to knock on anyone's door to try and get royalties every quarter.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Stevie Nicks the fame singer from Fleetwood Mac sold her back catalog as well, some estimates say that was an 80 million sale for all of the hits that she has also something worth mentioning, there's a company, England called Hypnosis that has been buying up back catalogs to the tune of over 600 million worth for a variety of artists such as Rick James, Barry, Manilow, Blondie, the pretenders and others. So it's very interesting, all of these artists are sort of on the arc of their career, they're getting towards a later parts in their life, and people are realizing that their music is going to live on beyond their life, I feel like so much music that has happened in the past, maybe hasn't lived on to the same way, but a band like Fleetwood Mac, who just hit the charts because of a guy who got on tiktok and rode a skateboard with an Ocean Spray in his hand, made Dreams chart again for the first time in I don't know how long, 40 years, I think. So this classic material is still very, very valuable and people are paying top dollar for it.