Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears
December 7, 2020 9:22 AM Subscribe

Bob Dylan Sells Songwriting Catalog In Nine-Figure Deal [NPR]

Bob Dylan Sells His Songwriting Catalog in Blockbuster Deal [NYT] [TRIM version]

Related: Bowie Bonds and Scooter Braun Sells Taylor Swift’s Big Machine Masters for Big Payday

posted by chavenet (169 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

low interest rates boost all asset prices, and the more money in the system, the lower interest rates go (who knew??)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:26 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

So...what no one has posited in the news I've seen...why?
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:26 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

So how does it feel, to make such a deal? Dylan’s WP bio and song list.
posted by cenoxo at 9:31 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Can we make sure the master tapes are slightly better protected this time around?
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:32 AM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

groups with guitars are on the way out!
posted by thelonius at 9:33 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

tiny frying pan: "So...what no one has posited in the news I've seen...why?"

Bob Dylan's rights sale all part of his freewheelin' approach to business
posted by chavenet at 9:35 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

In April 2016, he struck a rights deal with Amazon, allowing the company to base a TV drama series on lyrics from his catalogue.

I unironically love this dedication to finding novel ways to extract value from your work. Bob Dylan the t-shirt. Bob Dylan the TV show. Bob Dylan the flamethrower.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:39 AM on December 7, 2020 [22 favorites]

Wish we could see Bob Dylan the revolutionary putting his money where his mouth used to be
posted by sophrontic at 9:45 AM on December 7, 2020 [29 favorites]

Times change, eh?
posted by Meatbomb at 9:49 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

To be sure, he was an enormous talent but, as much as many other people wanted him to be one, he was never a revolutionary in any political sense.
posted by y2karl at 9:51 AM on December 7, 2020 [52 favorites]

The times they are a cha-chingin'.
posted by SPrintF at 9:51 AM on December 7, 2020 [47 favorites]

A world that contains folksinger-billionaires is a world utterly corrupted.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:54 AM on December 7, 2020 [30 favorites]

I never hear any of his stuff on the radio, and his fanbase is pretty much all Boomers and is dying off, and most of them have his stuff already. This really seems like a poor idea on Universal’s part. The article about this on Rolling Stone’s website has a bunch of comments at the bottom about what a great pickup this is, but I really don’t agree in any way.
posted by Slinga at 9:55 AM on December 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

Does he have a song about Got Mine, Fuck You?
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:56 AM on December 7, 2020 [9 favorites]

A world that contains folksinger-billionaires is a world utterly corrupted.

Well, then it's a good thing NPR reports the deal only closed at 300 mil then.
posted by pwnguin at 9:57 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

HOW DOES IT FEEL
posted by clavdivs at 9:58 AM on December 7, 2020 [14 favorites]

I reckon it feels pretty damn good.
posted by zzazazz at 10:00 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

Being able to control, and sell, songs you wrote is hardly a nefarious application of monopoly rights.
posted by Spacelegoman at 10:07 AM on December 7, 2020 [37 favorites]

He not busy billionairin' is busy dyin'...
posted by gwint at 10:08 AM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I came in here to make the same joke SPrintF did, but while I'm here I might as well say that in theory I don't really have a problem with any artist doing what they have to do to make a living, no matter how personally aesthetically distasteful I find the results, and even in cases like this where presumably Dylan doesn't need the extra 300 million for his retirement or because he got ripped off by his manager or accountant or whatever. But it's still kind of sad to see the life's work of someone like Dylan - who was once considered by many, rightly or not, a revolutionary voice - wind up as just another line item on a media giant's spreadsheet.

I work in a library which includes an extensive collection of protest/political activism street posters from the late '50s to the early '90s, the vast majority of which are in support of left/liberal/progressive causes and it's been a melancholy experience going through them and seeing that in almost every case the end result of all the passion and organizing and effort was...nothing. Capitalism and its attendant military-industrial complex can just engulf or co-opt or ignore or buy pretty much anything as it sees fit. The times, they have not changed at all.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:08 AM on December 7, 2020 [56 favorites]

he was never a revolutionary in any political sense

He could be now. He could overthrow the government of a small country. 300 million dollars is enough to literally hire an army of mercenaries.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:08 AM on December 7, 2020 [13 favorites]

"I never hear any of his stuff on the radio, and his fanbase is pretty much all Boomers and is dying off, and most of them have his stuff already. This really seems like a poor idea on Universal’s part. "

Indeed. This seems like a far better deal for Dylan than Universal. Licensing for commercials could be the goal, but brands generally want lyrics that connect with the message of the commercial, and with Dylan's stuff, you can't tell what he's singing most of the time, so it would be really tough to tie that in to anything.

Note: I'm kind of joking, but not really (probably not even half joking (more like 25% joking, 75% not joking)).
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:09 AM on December 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

So we live in a world where Jon Bon Jovi, a "rock singer" runs JBJ Soul Kitchen for the poor, and a supposedly revolutionary folk singer makes millions selling their collection.
posted by greenhornet at 10:10 AM on December 7, 2020 [14 favorites]

> So...what no one has posited in the news I've seen...why?

He's 79 years old. A one-time cash payout puts a hell of a lot more money in his pocket than the royalties and merchandising will earn him in the time he has left on the earth. Universal gets a deep catalog with dozens of songs that can earn them a steady drip of money in perpetuity.

200 years from now, people will still have to pay Universal (or whatever media mega-entity exists in its stead by that time) royalties for busking "Blowin' in the Wind".
posted by ardgedee at 10:12 AM on December 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

Meh. Half of all Super Bowl commercials have a Dylan song in them now.
posted by NoMich at 10:14 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

He's 79 years old. A one-time cash payout puts a hell of a lot more money in his pocket than the royalties and merchandising will earn him in the time he has left on the earth.

Not only in his pocket but those of his children, grandchildren and so on. I suspect that was part of the equation for him.
posted by y2karl at 10:16 AM on December 7, 2020 [15 favorites]

Seriously though, what is he going to do with the money? He turns 80 next year, and he doesn't seem like the cocaine-and-whores type... What does a folk hero do with the wealth of a nation?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:18 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Dylan does give generously to various causes—he’s not just blasting the information to the media.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:18 AM on December 7, 2020 [16 favorites]

A world that contains folksinger-billionaires is a world utterly corrupted.

He could be now. He could overthrow the government of a small country. 300 million dollars is enough to literally hire an army of mercenaries.

So ex-Millionaire-folksinger-warloard then?
posted by some loser at 10:21 AM on December 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

And personally, The Times They Are a-Changing is one of my least favorite of his songs. Just way too ham handed.
posted by y2karl at 10:24 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I never hear any of his stuff on the radio, and his fanbase is pretty much all Boomers and is dying off

Radio's not much of a bellwether anymore, but in some ways I suspect the first of these things may be related to the other. Dylan's recordings and performances have been more locked down than most other household-name performers of his generation, especially online. It's been a while since I've looked but Dylan's presence on YouTube is pretty much a bunch of earnest neckbeards covering "Blowin' in the Wind." That may have kept him profitable, but it probably hasn't done much to keep him listened to.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:25 AM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

The guy wrote and performed some amazing songs. He pursued a career in the music BUSINESS. An artist, a successful artist is not allowed to cash in? $300 million is real money. He EARNED it. Actually, I think he sold his catalogue cheap. His stuff is still on the radio. Listen to the right stations. Listen to Sirius. Check out his streams. Think about all the covers of his song. Watchtower alone has hundreds of commercial covers. Hendrix. The Dead. The commercial potential of his catalogue is huge. He proved it with his IBM Watson commercial a few years back. His merch sales are probably pretty large. Universal knows exactly what it is buying and the risk in paying that much.

I have a former college roommate that works in the music business. He tells me about 360 deals and that most of them work out for both sides. Artist gets paid an amount they want or need and the new owner makes money monetizing the art.
posted by AugustWest at 10:26 AM on December 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say: Do you want to make a deal?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:29 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

> Unlike most big-name artists, who are locked into deals giving up publishing rights early in their career, Dylan owned the rights to his own music

One difference between this outcome and how it plays out for other artists, is that the spoils are going to the artist, not to the labels. If the labels were keeping the profits, it wouldn't be newsworthy, would it?
posted by are-coral-made at 10:29 AM on December 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

Just a reminder that one reason there is so much inequality today is that awarding of monopoly rights enforced by the government. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc wouldn't be the dominating corporations they are today without government monopolies

I've heard lots of arguments for reasons why copyright is bad, but "artists should be entitled literally $0 for their labor" is a new one.
posted by sideshow at 10:40 AM on December 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

The good thing is that now commercials will be backed with quality, classical folk, protest, etc music. How many roads must a man walk down, before he needs new Scholl's inserts?
posted by njohnson23 at 10:41 AM on December 7, 2020 [38 favorites]

I've heard lots of arguments for reasons why copyright is bad, but "artists should be entitled literally $0 for their labor" is a new one.

Bullshit. Nobody said that. But using government force, including people with guns coming to fine you or put you in jail, to enforce a government awarded monopoly on intellectual "property" is certainly not a progressive position.
posted by JackFlash at 10:45 AM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

The good thing is that now commercials will be backed with quality, classical folk, protest, etc music. How many roads must a man walk down, before he needs new Scholl's inserts?

Ladies' garments
posted by BungaDunga at 10:47 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

And just to put a number on it, Dylan's catalogue consists of 600 songs for which he is getting $300 million. Did Dylan put $500,000 worth of labor into each song? That's more than most households make in a decade of sweat labor.
posted by JackFlash at 10:48 AM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

While we all argue over an iconic artist getting paid $300 million for his life's work, Trump raises $495 million since mid-October, including a massive haul fueled by misleading appeals about election fraud
posted by niicholas at 10:49 AM on December 7, 2020 [24 favorites]

David Bowie did that thing where he securitized his song royalties, but it seems like consensus is that it shows how cool and smart he was, still on the cutting edge, not that he was a sellout.

Dylan and Bowie often are compared with each other (constantly reinventing themselves and so on) but it's interesting how people have different expectations of Dylan for some reason.

Even his protest songs are not particularly radical -- he had the anti-war and civil rights views of a 20th century liberal American. He was never like a Communist organizer or a DIY punk guy.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:49 AM on December 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

He tells me about 360 deals and that most of them work out for both sides.

Welllll, maybe for the Bob Dylans. And it really depends on who the artist has their deal with.

A "360" means the artists just hand off all decisions for practically everything so they can sit back and collect a check. And if you've handed it off to uncreative morons, well....

Every see a piece of band merch that looked like complete dog shit, or seen an a marketing campaign that was likely to get the the public to hate the artist more than anything? That was probably the result of a 360 deal.

See, the band/artist/whatever gets 30% of the sale of the terrible t-shirt you saw, but they likely didn't even have final approval with it. Some other merch company had the license and they might have had complete control over it, or perhaps somebody at the label has some sort of input. What definitely didn't happen is that the artist put their artistic vision into it.

Yeah, with literally minimal effort a check shows up in the mail every month or whatever. Which is great if your body is so good that the Brinks truck is going to backup to your house no matter what idiots at the label are making decisions for you. But if you are an artist that needs to nail the execution of every decision over and over? Might not work out so well for you in the long run.
posted by sideshow at 10:50 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

How many roads must a man walk down, before he needs new Scholl's inserts?

Hey Mr. Michelin Man, sing a song for me
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:51 AM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

He could be now. He could overthrow the government of a small country. 300 million dollars is enough to literally hire an army of mercenaries.

The Republic of Dylan. Bobistan? Dylantopia?

Anyway, this is $300 million that is going to Dylan instead of some label, or some dick who bought the master tapes for $20 in 1975. Bob's not going to live forever so he might as well do this now, and decide where this $300m goes rather than his heirs. Someone was always going to make a billion dollars off his back catalog, why not capture some of that while you're still breathing?
posted by BungaDunga at 10:52 AM on December 7, 2020 [13 favorites]

The couple of brief articles I found quickly (one, two) suggest that he has given substantial amounts to worthwhile charities, but they are not radical (e.g., children's hospital, food banks), and the articles don't say what portion of his assets he has given away.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:52 AM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Nobody needs that kind of money. No one. Period, stop, end of sentence. Even 10% of that kind of money. We could argue about 1% of that money, but in a reasonably just society, no one even needs a million dollars.

And doesn't Bezos have like 1000x that much? Fuck THAT guy for sure.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:56 AM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

Bullshit. Nobody said that. But using government force, including people with guns coming to fine you or put you in jail, to enforce a government awarded monopoly on intellectual "property" is certainly not a progressive position.

I guess I'm just a dirty centrist, but I was under the impression that compensating a worker for their labor was a tenant of progressive politics, didn't realize it was actually "all corporations use what you make, for free, sucker!"
posted by sideshow at 10:57 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

In fairness to artists over the last 300-400 years, much of their work has ended up being turned into copyrighted jingles or movies etc. that are Bono'ed well beyond any time that makes sense. So I'm happy for Dylan, in that he actually got paid while he is alive. I hope he gets to enjoy some of his newfound wealth in his dotage. It's never too late for a rock star to die in a glorious pile of cocaine.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:00 AM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

David Bowie did that thing where he securitized his song royalties, but it seems like consensus is that it shows how cool and smart he was, still on the cutting edge, not that he was a sellout.

The Bowie Bonds were cool and smart though. They securitised income from his back catalog for a time-limited period, just before streaming really came into its own, and at the tail end of the massive stupid sums of money for actual physical pieces of media. It was a smart move for the corporate investors.

The bonds were issued for a specific time period (ten years), only for his back catalog, and Bowie used the money to purchase back the rest of his rights for said back catalog from his old manager. It was a smart move for the artist.

Interestingly, in the article linked above, all other examples of such bonds are for Black recording artists such as "James Brown, Ashford & Simpson, the Isley Brothers, and the Holland-Dozier-Holland catalog," which inclines me to think that the future of such bonds are for heavily-sampled catalogs, which is NOT as common for rock and roll.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 11:09 AM on December 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

The alternative is leaving the rights to your successors, and even with a tight family unit like Zappa's it eventually led to feuding. He could public domain everything, but I never pegged Dylan as a CC0 Rider.

Well the most valuable part of his catalog is pre-1978 so it’s “only” covered by copyright until the 2060s or so... right? Or is that not even how it works now, I forget? Regardless, to me this seems like a pretty good deal for Bob/his heirs. I’d rather have $300 million in the market starting today than in Bob Dylan songs.
posted by atoxyl at 11:14 AM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Be nice if he sent some of that cash up to Hibbing, maybe invest in efforts to fend off those gross copper sulfate mines.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:18 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

→ Dylan's presence on YouTube is pretty much a bunch of earnest neckbeards covering "Blowin' in the Wind."

I wouldn't call Emma Swift a neckbeard for releasing Blonde On The Tracks
posted by scruss at 11:35 AM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Well the most valuable part of his catalog is pre-1978 so it’s “only” covered by copyright until the 2060s or so... right? Or is that not even how it works now, I forget?

In the US it's currently life of the writer plus 70 years. Dylan's not dead yet.
posted by soundguy99 at 11:37 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

chavenet — The Variety “Scooter Braun Sells Taylor Swift’s Big Machine Masters for Big Payday” headline link in your FPP is borked: the URL should be https://variety.com/2020/music/news/scooter-braun-sells-taylor-swift-big-machine-masters-1234832080/. The mods can fix this.
posted by cenoxo at 11:38 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

but in a reasonably just society, no one even needs a million dollars.

We are not in a reasonable just society, we're in this one. A million dollars is a lot of money, but it's not a ridiculous amount -- especially depending on where you live. At Dylan's age you could retire on it pretty comfortably, assuming no major medical emergencies in the U.S...

No, nobody needs $300m. Also, I don't really begrudge Dylan that payday, though it's probably too much to hope his lawyers / finance folks won't look for every loophole they can find to avoid paying taxes on it.

It's not like the money was earmarked for orphaned children and Dylan swept in and took it from them. I wish we lived in a socialist utopia where everything was fair and all that, but since we're living in this world right now I don't see any point in singling Dylan out for selling something he actually created. At least Dylan's path to riches involved creating art.
posted by jzb at 11:39 AM on December 7, 2020 [20 favorites]

David Bowie did that thing where he securitized his song royalties, but it seems like consensus is that it shows how cool and smart he was, still on the cutting edge, not that he was a sellout.

Perhaps is it is because Bowie is considered cooler than most, and it pleases us interpret the actions to match our assessment of the parties involved. It may be related to the way that a musician or filmmaker who pays for their own production and distribution is independent and had tremendous credibility, but an author who pays to have a book published is a sucker taken for a ride by a vanity press.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:39 AM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

It may be related to the way that a musician or filmmaker who pays for their own production and distribution is independent and had tremendous credibility, but an author who pays to have a book published is a sucker taken for a ride by a vanity press.

That's... really not a good analogy. An author who self-pubs either online or via a print-on-demand service is just a self-published author, and there are lots of them and there are perfectly good reasons to do it that way. There are, however, predatory vanity presses who charge the author absurd amounts of money and then don't provide any of the services one would expect of a publisher - it's a straight-up scam and it's relatively easy to fall for. I'm not aware of any predatory recording studios or scam CD pressing services, although it's entirely possible they exist.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:43 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Being able to control, and sell, songs you wrote is hardly a nefarious application of monopoly rights.

Artistic works not entering the public domain for a century after an artist’s death definitely is.
posted by mhoye at 11:45 AM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

Being able to control, and sell, songs you wrote is hardly a nefarious application of monopoly rights.
Artistic works not entering the public domain for a century after an artist’s death definitely is.

So do something about it then.
Hate the game, not the player.
posted by aramaic at 11:48 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Bob Dylan's rights sale all part of his freewheelin' approach to business

Shocked that this is a Guardian headline and not The Hard Times.
posted by rodlymight at 11:49 AM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Stevie Nicks also sold most of her music rights last week for an estimated $100 million.
posted by mogget at 11:59 AM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I can think of many reasons why Dylan did this. Of course there are the 300 million reasons. Bob Dylan is a funnyinterestingoddunusual guy. He went electric against the prevailing wishes. He rearranged all of his classic songs in the 90s so much so that when I saw him in concert I did not recognize the songs. He may have just played the shit out of his songs and decided he no longer needed them. I don't think he should feel guilty about all the money he is being paid. If anything, it is the people who can afford to pay him this amount that have too much money or access to money.

Bob Dylan has been a business man his entire career. Capitalizing on his art is not something new. He capitalizes his name all the time. Have some Heaven's Door whisky. Part owner and they use his name. Clooney made 100s of millions on his tequila. The Guardian article does a good job of summing it up.
posted by AugustWest at 12:03 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

The argument for Stevie Nicks selling is different than for Dylan. Nicks has no heirs and no spouse. The estate of Jerry Garcia makes over a million a year. But he has heirs who get that money. Stevie can spend her money now and leave any remainder to a charity or to whomever she wants. Leaving a charity a revenue stream that needs to be managed and commercialized is almost a burden. Dylan has Jacob that I know of.
posted by AugustWest at 12:05 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

but in a reasonably just society, no one even needs a million dollars

Going further back: in a reasonably just society, could he have written some of the songs that he is known for?

let the full circle be unbroken
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:06 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

It's been a while since I've looked but Dylan's presence on YouTube is pretty much a bunch of earnest neckbeards covering "Blowin' in the Wind." That may have kept him profitable, but it probably hasn't done much to keep him listened to.

Oh, really...

It never hurts, before one makes such a bold assertion, to check to make sure -- and that link, by the way, was to Swinging Pig's listings: Bob Dylan, officially, is all over YouTube. And has been for years.
posted by y2karl at 12:07 PM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

Heck, we're lucky he didn't issue a catalog-backed cryptocurrency. MaggiesCoin?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:08 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Wow, the indignation.

I know one thing for certain, he ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 12:08 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

RobotVoodooPower: "Heck, we're lucky he didn't issue a catalog-backed cryptocurrency. MaggiesCoin?"

BobCoin, surely.
posted by chavenet at 12:09 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Backed by BobChain™ technology.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:11 PM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

I guess he can afford to pay off his mortgage on that house in Malibu now.
posted by DJZouke at 12:20 PM on December 7, 2020

folks who are indignant and/or outraged at this news.. you know Dylan failed your purity test before he reached his 30s, right?

enjoy his music. or not. if this is Such a Big Deal for you, well.. "it ain't dark yet but it's gettin there" and that has been the way of it for some time. this news will not diminish my enjoyment of "Love and Theft" or any number of earlier records, and my first exposure to his radio show playlist was nothing short of revelatory.
posted by elkevelvet at 12:23 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Always been a Phil Ochs guy myself
posted by zenon at 12:26 PM on December 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

That's... really not a good analogy.

Possibly not. It first occurred to me before POD was really a thing, so the world may have moved on without me.

Do I dare to eat a peach?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:28 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Bob Dylan moved to New York in 1961 and recorded an album with Columbia Records that year. Columbia Records was to the music industry what Google is now to the tech industry. He was never a penniless troubadour by the time any appreciable fraction of the listening public had ever heard him. But I guess I don't see a conflict that he got paid to perform songs about social justice.

The one thing that doesn't make sense, to me, is that he kept touring well after it made any difference to him financially. You've got a mansion in Malibu, royalties coming in, what else is there to spend money on unless you want to play in the world of the billionaires? It's not like he was in the gossip columns anymore.
posted by wnissen at 12:31 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

And after all, it's not like he didn't tell ya ....

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken
posted by thecincinnatikid at 12:34 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Dylan was and is no fool when it comes to finances. He didn't wind up like Leonard Cohen who had to go on the road again because he was taken for a most of his money.
posted by DJZouke at 12:39 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

The argument for Stevie Nicks selling is different than for Dylan. Nicks has no heirs ...

IIRC, Nicks has nieces, at least one nephew, and several godchildren, and has contributed financial support throughout their lives. Her reasons may be the same as Dylan's, though he sold his entire songwriting catalog while Nicks sold an 80% stake in hers.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:43 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

♫ To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears ♩
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 12:44 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

After Dylan did the super creepy Victoria's Secret commercial, nothing this man could do would surprise me.
posted by bluesky43 at 12:46 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

We used to go see Earnest and The Neckbeards out at that place on Highway 54
posted by thelonius at 12:53 PM on December 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

The argument for Stevie Nicks selling is different than for Dylan. Nicks has no heirs and no spouse.

This might be unfair but it's not hard for me to imagine a few extra tens of millions of dollars might come in handy for Stevie Nicks. Harder to picture for Bob Dylan. As I said it seems like a great deal for him in purely monetary terms, though. The downside is just that he presumably loses a say in licensing. Which, if you're not the kind of guy who can tell the difference between having $100 million and having $400 million, might be something to take a stand on.
posted by atoxyl at 1:20 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Oh, wait, right, I see what you meant by "pre-1978" - that was when the law changed. AFACIT (copyright basics from stanford.edu), his pre-78 work is covered for 95 years from date of publication. So . . . yeah, 2060 or so.

That's what I meant, but I also thought I could easily be out of date on that at this point (given that they have extended the terms retroactively).
posted by atoxyl at 1:21 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

The one thing that doesn't make sense, to me, is that he kept touring well after it made any difference to him financially.

Playing music with other people is fun.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:28 PM on December 7, 2020 [35 favorites]

>>>Heck, we're lucky he didn't issue a catalog-backed cryptocurrency. MaggiesCoin?"
>>BobCoin, surely.
>Backed by BobChain™ technology.
Really, it's not "Dylan's gone Blockchain."
It's "Dylan's gone pension-fund."
posted by k3ninho at 2:00 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is so interesting. My one brush with Dylan fame is that I went to college with and graduated with his son (not Jakob) and Dylan was at my graduation, showed up in a helicopter and was kind of a weird hoodie-pulled-tight-around-his-head guy the whole time. My father, who had vaguely known him in the Cambridge days of the 60s, didn't even try to say hi. Dylan has six kids and maybe it's easier to cash out and not have to manage the IP estate nonsense that comes with estate planning as an older musician? I agree these amounts of money are bonkers, and at the same time, it's just highlighting that it is, and always has been, a musician who was also a businessman. I saw him with the Dead in 1986 and he brought it. He was playing with Petty and both of those guys, and The Dead really, toured when they no longer "had to."
posted by jessamyn at 2:45 PM on December 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

The Bob Dylan lyric search engine, which is pretty glorious if you're into that kind of thing, notes 66 songs with the word 'money' in them. If that 600-songs figure is correct, that's about 10% of his songs (well, songs he ever recorded or played live) mentioning money. Which I'm sure is nowhere near the percentage for, like, Lil Wayne. Still, a lot of songs to choose from.

Because I stan pre-born-again Bob, I'm going to go with the Bootleg Series obscurity 'Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie,' a song which he never played live:

Make your money while you can, before you have to stop
For when you pull that dead man’s hand, your gamblin’ days are up

The central point is about the same, but the wording seems a little bit cheerier than the second-to-last verse of 'Masters of War':

I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

posted by box at 2:52 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

why you would pay so much money for music by a guy who can't sing is beyond me
posted by OverlappingElvis at 2:55 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thing about the singer-songwriter genre is, you'll find a lot of singers who can't really write and songwriters who can't really sing, but who are damn good at whichever half of the skillset they do have.

Cryin' out loud, Tom Waits sounds like he's barfing through a tuba half the time, but he can turn a phrase like none other.
posted by armeowda at 3:06 PM on December 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

The one thing that doesn't make sense, to me, is that he kept touring well after it made any difference to him financially.

On some podcast or another Paul F. Tompkins surmised, correctly I think, that he simply loves the sound of his own voice. He hears the playback on his take of Jingle Bells or whatever and thinks, yes, the world needs to hear this.

Anyway, I'm a fan. I'm glad he kept going. His latest album (Rough and Rowdy Ways) is amazing. One of this best in the last 40 years or so.
posted by Lorin at 3:09 PM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

The one thing that doesn't make sense, to me, is that he kept touring well after it made any difference to him financially.

Playing music with other people is fun.

He had an epiphany onstage in Locarno, Switzerland while playing with the Tom Petty Group on October 10th, 1987. Performance has been his destiny since. And, as noted above, he is not alone in this but rather is one in a long tradition of such. Duke Ellington, for one, comes to mind.
posted by y2karl at 3:12 PM on December 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

Referencing Dylan’s nine-figure catalog sale, singer/songwriter Crosby tweeted today (December 7): “I am selling mine also… I can’t work …and streaming stole my record money.”

He added: “I have a family and a mortgage and I have to take care of them so it’s my only option… I’m sure the others feel the same.”

posted by General Malaise at 3:15 PM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

TIL. Last time I looked for Dylan on YouTube there really wasn't much
posted by aspersioncast at 3:32 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Bob Dylan is a funnyinterestingoddunusual guy. He went electric against the prevailing wishes.

of a few folk purists - most young people wanted rock and roll back then and dylan knew it - he also knew there wasn't much future financially or artistically in the music he had been doing, he'd taken that as far as it would go

who of his fellow folkies managed a major career after 1965 without plugging in?
posted by pyramid termite at 3:45 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

(It looks like Dylan has been on YouTube since a vevo deal in 2013, which means the last time I looked for Dylan there was before then.)
posted by aspersioncast at 3:48 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I stopped reading after about a third of the comments in this thread because it reads like so many threads where one is warned not to read the comments. So.much.ignorance.

Bob Dylan contains multitudes. He was never a revolutionary, nor the voice of a generation, the press, his fellow musicians and even close friends like Joan Baez wanted him to be, but he never was. Woodstock was held in woodstock just to tempt him out of seclusion and guess what, he didn't show.

He toys with the press, reinvents himself, makes his own mistakes, and is unapologetic. Don't like it? He doesn't care.

Bottom line: the only person who's ever gonna know why Dylan does what he does is Dylan. That takes nothing away from his contributions as a poet and songwriter. He deserves every penny.
posted by OHenryPacey at 3:51 PM on December 7, 2020 [18 favorites]

Although I suspect the WSJ’s take on this was always going to be “it’s about taxes,” it could (partially) be about estate taxes and not having to have his estate tied up in the valuation of the catalog, as the article excerpted in this tweet mentions.
posted by dismas at 3:57 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

While there is a non-zero chance that Dylan will, before he dies, claim that Masters of War is about folk musicians, rather than the military-industrial complex, I'm not sure that many people would regard it as a particularly affecting (or indeed coherent) song if that were the commonly understood reading.

Dylan is a weird, self-centred guy seemingly driven only by his own shifting obsessions, which have never had anything to do with a coherent view of politics or the world. He may have perfectly decent, entirely indecent or absolutely no motivation for this decision.

Whoever Dylan might be morally, he's certainly never given any public impression of being an unusually kind or generous person. Unless you were, for some unknown reason, expecting him to put his work into the public domain, getting outraged by this is like getting outraged by the fact that it rains.
posted by howfar at 4:02 PM on December 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

who of his fellow folkies managed a major career after 1965 without plugging in?

I think the key really is MAJOR career. A lot of his fellow folkies have small lifestyle-supporting boutiquey careers and are doing just fine for themselves (Bok, Rush, Marie, Baez) but Dylan was always shrewd and out for a bigger impact and I think he got that.
posted by jessamyn at 4:03 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Why is anyone confused about this? Either he makes this money off his music before he dies or he doesn't and someone else gets the rights and uses them for whatever after he's gone.

Good for him, he made his music this valuable.
posted by Liquidwolf at 4:04 PM on December 7, 2020 [9 favorites]

He toys with the press, reinvents himself, makes his own mistakes, and is unapologetic. Don't like it? He doesn't care.

As does everyone. Dylan's not special. Just covered a lot.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 4:04 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Referencing Dylan’s nine-figure catalog sale, singer/songwriter Crosby tweeted today (December 7): “I am selling mine also… I can’t work …and streaming stole my record money.”

Christ, having alienated everyone who ever GAF - and there were legions - of course Crosby will try to leverage Dylan's good fortune in a parasitic attempt to reinforce his long-time-fading relevance.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:05 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Well, after checking, I found that Dylan's up to today net worth was valued at $200,000,000, so now he's a half billionaire -- right up there with Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, $100,000,000 behind Jimmy Buffett, $200,000,000 behind Bono and $700,000,000 behind Paul McCartney. In terms of rock star wealth Dylan is fair to middling.

Nevertheless, I hereby nominate Cortex to ask these individuals for a $5000 scholarship per each and every member here as a reward for our individual internet influencer status thereby. And then add two zeros to the price of membership so as to avoid the little people from joining our now more exclusive collective cultural entity.
posted by y2karl at 4:11 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

both of those guys, and The Dead really, toured when they no longer "had to."

completely a tangent, but my understanding is that the Dead did sort of have to, because although their cash inflow from tours was enormous, their outflow was, too

post-Jerry, maybe less so, but playing live is also those guys' whole deal and now they can make tons of money just doing it occasionally
posted by atoxyl at 4:13 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

who of his fellow folkies managed a major career after 1965 without plugging in?

Joni Mitchell is not really a counter-example, as there was plenty of rock instrumentation and production on her records, but did she ever play electric guitar herself?
posted by thelonius at 4:14 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

of course Crosby will try to leverage Dylan's good fortune in a parasitic attempt to reinforce his long-time-fading relevance.

Do people still hate David Crosby? People seem to like him on Twitter. His former bandmates, maybe not.
posted by atoxyl at 4:17 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I found that Dylan's up to today net worth was valued at $200,000,000

Actually one thing Crosby said that I can believe is that estimates of his net worth include the estimated value of his catalog.
posted by atoxyl at 4:20 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Bob Dylan Sells Rights to Entire Song Catalog, Doubling Net Worth Overnight.
Not to quibble but what's $100,000,000 between friends?
posted by y2karl at 4:34 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Do people still hate David Crosby? People seem to like him on Twitter. His former bandmates, maybe not.

Not like I try to keep up on it, but it seems ages that I've seen anyone who's been an intimate part of Crosby's life who still speaks to him - I mean they all abandoned him in his crackhead phase only to rescue him and he's since alienated them all again. So guess he'll live 'n die with his Twitter - sad fuckin' fate, that.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:36 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

a guy who can't sing

At first, Cohen didn’t want to sing. Even after he had signed a record real with Columbia, he was afraid to open his mouth. He told his lawyer Marty Machat, who represented a whole host of Greenwich Village folk singers, that people had told him outright that he couldn’t sing. “None of you can sing,” Machat replied flatly. “When I want to hear singing, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.”
posted by thelonius at 4:38 PM on December 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

Joni Mitchell is not really a counter-example

Among the myriad reasons Joni isn’t a counter-example, she was only barely a '60s artist. Her debut album didn’t come out until 1968, and she never really adhered to the tenets of “folk” to begin with, certainly not as they existed before her. Also, she has played electric guitar on albums and onstage since 1979.
posted by mykescipark at 5:08 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Maybe it's a generational thing, given I'm too young to have had any strong opinions on Dylan as some sort of cultural change figure. So he's just a pretty good songwriter, songs best sung by other people, kind of a dick on a personal level, at least going by his treatment of Joan Baez. But I can't get worked up about him getting a lot of money for things he made. At least he did the work, unlike the great majority of vampire capitalists these days.
posted by tavella at 5:15 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Although I suspect the WSJ’s take on this was always going to be “it’s about taxes ...

And they would be right. You see, unlike in the whine above "I was under the impression that compensating a worker for their labor was a tenant of progressive politics," a sale of musical composition copyrights is not taxed as labor, they are taxed as capital gains.

So if Dylan continued to receive royalties for his songs each year, he would be taxed at the highest income tax rate of 37% (plus state taxes) for his labor. But if he sells the copyrights to his songs, due to a narrow loophole in the tax code, he is taxed only 20% capital gains rate. The difference is 17% or a cool tax savings of $50 million. Even more savings if you consider state taxes.

There are always special tax loopholes for the rich. And quite contrary to their claims of wanting to receive credit for their labor, when it comes time to pay taxes they vehemently deny that it is labor at all but instead tax favorable capital gains.
posted by JackFlash at 5:24 PM on December 7, 2020 [9 favorites]

This is so totally Bob. Back in the 60's when the Columbia records money started flowing in, he had his then manager Albert Grossman buy a Las Vegas casino. He's always been more Donald Trump than Woody Guthrie. In my life I've always looked to his work for inspiration, he is a genius, but not to him personally for any kind of humility or satyagraha. Nasty, mean-spirited little man, I think. I wouldn't begrudge him this windfall, however. What, like they'll give ME the money if he doesn't get it?
posted by Chitownfats at 5:32 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Bob's given me a lot of happiness over the years and some of his music has pulled me out of dark places when I needed it most. Probably in a just world, no one needs a third of a billion dollars but if anyone's going to have it, I'd rather him than Mitt Romney or Kelly Loeffler.
posted by octothorpe at 5:39 PM on December 7, 2020 [9 favorites]

Dylan is a weird, self-centred guy seemingly driven only by his own shifting obsessions, which have never had anything to do with a coherent view of politics or the world.

Well, for what it is worth, his favorite books of the Bible are Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
posted by y2karl at 5:48 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

There are always special tax loopholes for the rich

Yes, and?

You keep doing that "argue about copyright on the internet" thing where you conflate the current practices of late-capitalism copyright, with its media conglomerate mega-corporations and regulatory capture and capital gains tax benefits, with the history and legal and moral purpose of copyright - which. yes, is to ensure that creative workers are compensated for their labor.

Complain all you want about Dylan's ability to be just another rich person loopholing the capital gains tax laws, and I probably wouldn't disagree with you, but it's copyright that forced Columbia Records and radio stations and companies that want to use his music in commercials to pay him. Without copyright it's "Thanks for the tunes, buddy, fuck you very much."

Until we reach Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, copyright is the thing that requires creative laborers to be compensated for their labor - and on the road to FALGSC, there are a hell of a lot of laws and practices to be eliminated long before the total elimination of copyright. So get off your high horse, and quit telling people they're whining.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:54 PM on December 7, 2020 [14 favorites]

Of course, and I must have forgotten watching the Shadows and Light concert video
posted by thelonius at 5:58 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is he the wealthiest literature Nobel Prize winner ever?
posted by Omon Ra at 6:01 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

He can't help it if he's lucky
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 6:01 PM on December 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

Good for him, he made his music this valuable.

Agreed, imo this is a case of hate the game (capitalism) not the player. I'm saving my enmity for Morrissey and the likes.
posted by Lyme Drop at 6:13 PM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

copyright is the thing that requires creative laborers to be compensated for their labor .

Let people be compensated for their labor. But that hardly justifies using the government powers to force people to continue paying them for their labor for their entire lives and 70 years after they are dead. I'm sure the guy fixing the brakes on your car and perhaps saving your life would certainly prefer to have you continue to pay him for the rest of his life instead of having to get up and go work the next day and fix more brakes.
posted by JackFlash at 6:36 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Man internet libertarians took a weird turn this year.
posted by pwnguin at 6:54 PM on December 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

• He deserves every penny.
• folks who are indignant and/or outraged at this news.. you know Dylan failed your purity test before he reached his 30s, right?
• It's not like the money was earmarked for orphaned children and Dylan swept in and took it from them. I wish we lived in a socialist utopia where everything was fair and all that, but since we're living in this world right now I don't see any point in singling Dylan out for selling something he actually created.
• We are not in a reasonable just society, we're in this one.
• I guess I'm just a dirty centrist, but I was under the impression that compensating a worker for their labor was a tenant of progressive politics,
• He pursued a career in the music BUSINESS. An artist, a successful artist is not allowed to cash in? $300 million is real money. He EARNED it.
• Being able to control, and sell, songs you wrote is hardly a nefarious application of monopoly rights.

Almost no one here is arguing he shouldn't get rich. But the numbers actually matter. There's a difference between 300,000,000; 30,000,000; 3,000,000 or 3,000,000,000 or 30,000,000,000. They may all seem like just piles of zeros, but every reasonable person draws the line at some point and says no, 30 billion is too much. So all the abstract arguments about desert or copyright or whatever are largely immaterial; the question is how much can be deserved. Almost everyone agrees it's not 30 billion, and most reasonable people when they work out the math agree that 300 million is also too much. But regardless of where you personally draw the line, the question is where the line should be drawn, not whether someone deserves as much they can legally get. I suppose a few right-wingers or libertarians truly believe that, however many zeroes you add, but for reasonable societies, there is a number that is too much, and I myself think there are at least two zeroes too many in $300,000,000. But in any case, if you want to defend Dylan, you need to defend the idea that someone can deserve a billion dollars, not the abstract ideas of intellectual property rights or fair pay for hard work or whatever.
posted by chortly at 6:57 PM on December 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

you need to defend the idea that someone can deserve a billion dollars, not the abstract ideas of intellectual property rights or fair pay for hard work or whatever.

No, we don't.

Because intellectual property rights are very concretely about fair pay for hard work, whether it's Bob Dylan doing that hard work or some random person throwing their songs up on Bandcamp or your favorite webcomic writer or Stephen King or Richard Russo or the guy selling prints of his photos at the local craft fair. It's pretty literally labor laws for people whose labor is not compensated for with wages. It's not a fucking "abstract idea."

Whether Bob Dylan should be able to keep piles of zeros money that results from having intellectual property rights is a question of taxation policy and politics as a measure of creating and encouraging social equity. Defending the existence of intellectual property rights is not at all the same thing as defending the rights of people to accumulate and keep as much money as they possibly can.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:16 PM on December 7, 2020 [15 favorites]

But in any case, if you want to defend Dylan, you need to defend the idea that someone can deserve a billion dollars,

But he didn't get a billion. A billion is pretty unjustifiable unless you're goign to feed a nation with it. It's more like 300-400 million, which is a massive amount obviously but different than a billion, like you said. And it's still much less than some other entertainers are worth.
posted by Liquidwolf at 7:17 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Dylan's always been a wacky and complicated person who often takes himself less seriously than other people do. I have no idea why he does anything, including selling his catalog. But some of the comments on this thread are breathtakingly trolling. Saying Dylan wrote some pretty good songs is like saying Monet or van Gogh painted a few pretty good pictures, or that Shakespeare had a pretty good way with words. Dylan is the main reason that rock music isn't still "womp bomp a loo bomp" or "we will rockity rock your face". Not that those things are bad, but just as Dylan was influenced by (and imitated) people like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, Dylan enabled more adult-themed and serious songs by the Beatles, the Byrds, the Band, Bowie (a lot of B bands, apparently), Patti Smith and all that sort of art/poetry/rock punk fusion-y stuff, and who knows what else. He certainly has a lot of Boomer fans, but he's destined to be discovered and rediscovered by every generation for a good long time. It doesn't matter if he has a weird voice, or did a dumb Christmas album, or wrote some songs with gobbledydook mockable bits about clowns and undertakers. People around him recognized when they first heard him go electric that he had blown rock music wide open and that there was now a doorway to something more lasting. He also revealed the pomposity of some of the white 1960s folk purists who were decrying him even as they sang scholarly ballads about the plight of the railroad worker. (I have a friend whose parents hosted Pete Seeger and some other folkies back in the day. His take: "they were a bunch of dicks.") Any piece of rock music, or all music, can mean everything to one person and nothing to the next. People love and hate classical, experimental, country, opera, EDM, dubstep, rap, and every other kind of music. I get it. But within the folk/rock/popular music genre of the past century it's hard to think of anyone who has been more titanic than Dylan except maybe Elvis and the Beatles. And for me at least, having listened to and played indie/rock/blues/death metal/math rock/everything, it's because individual songs grab me on every listen and don't let go. I just don't find too much other stuff that goes that deep for me.

However, I must tell a story about Dylan rehearsing in a big warehouse room in the early 1990s, I think. This was told to me by an engineer who was there. Dylan had been in there rehearsing with just boxers or something on his lower half (he's weird). When some important guests arrived, he just held out his arm towards an assistant and said in full Dylan voice "PANTS!" Pants were then supplied.
posted by freecellwizard at 7:17 PM on December 7, 2020 [19 favorites]

This posting isn't an obituary. It's literally a posting about a business transaction. Kinda seems that the circumstances facilitating that business transaction are fair game.
posted by JackFlash at 7:30 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Getting upset at Dylan making millions instead of about Universal making billions is dumb for exactly the same reason that fussing about athletes making millions rather than about the owners sitting on their butts making billions off of their work.

Universal clearly believes someone was gonna make at least $300 million off of this music. Surely Dylan deserves that money as much or more than anyone else?
posted by straight at 7:31 PM on December 7, 2020 [13 favorites]

I'm far less concerned with how much money Mr. Zimmerman will be making off this deal than the fact that his songbook is now going to be in the hands of Universal Music Group (UMG). Trust that whatever decisions are made, the shareholders will be the primary beneficiaries.
posted by philip-random at 7:33 PM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Universal clearly believes someone was gonna make at least $300 million off of this music. Surely Dylan deserves that money as much or more than anyone else?

See also what Spinal Tap had to do to finally get more than $98 in soundtrack royalties from the parasites at Vivendi/UMG over the course of decades.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:54 PM on December 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

A work of art is worth exactly what someone will pay you for it. In a world where that amount for most musicians is ZERO, I’m personally glad to see a musician get a goddam payday.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:04 PM on December 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

Bob Dylan's rights sale all part of his freewheelin' approach to business

Bob Dylan's freewheelin' house hunting.
posted by fairmettle at 11:04 PM on December 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

A few weeks ago I was listening to the song Isis, and realized that it was about a guy who started into stealing from graves, and something inside of him died...
posted by kaibutsu at 11:38 PM on December 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Being able to control, and sell, songs you wrote is hardly a nefarious application of monopoly rights.

Neither would it be heinous if that control didn't last for an entire lifetime plus what amounts to another lifetime. 17 years, which was the term in the first copyright act, plus one renewal for a fee dependent on the demonstrated market value of the work would be perfectly fine by me.

Hell, I'd even be fine with the current length if it had to be renewed with escalating fees at each renewal to discourage holding on to (most) works for so damn long or even compulsory licensing of some kind after a certain period. Or perhaps differentiating between noncommercial (and perhaps small scale commercial) uses and commercial uses that could be abused by megacorps.
posted by wierdo at 4:37 AM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Or perhaps differentiating between noncommercial (and perhaps small scale commercial) uses and commercial uses that could be abused by megacorps.

There's at least a theoretical basis for this already, in that (unlike trademarks), you don't lose copyright if you don't strictly enforce it. So whoever owns Billy Joel's copyrights could choose to ignore kids in their bedroom making YouTube videos while still retaining the rights to go after after bootleg CD pressings and make Kanye pay to use a sample from "Miami 2017" & etc.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:01 AM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

So I guess those "wussies and pussies" will have to wait for Junichi Saga and Henry Timrod from whom Dylan plagiarized to get a cut.

I know I am in the minority, but I agree with Joni Mitchell.
posted by terrapin at 5:02 AM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Why Rock’s Biggest Stars Are Selling Away Their Publishing Rights
posted by soundguy99 at 5:06 AM on December 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

I wonder if the nostalgia cash-in will bump into a brick wall, or whether it is as reliable a source of cash flow as these buyers of rights are betting it is. It seems like the last few years has been a turning point in the cultural power of a generation that was dominant for a long time, and as that pull wanes, the pendulum swings.

I think of this regarding vintage guitar prices too, as the cultural cache of the guitar shifts. In that light, maybe Dylan made out like a bandit because these songs have an expiration date that is sooner than often imagined.
posted by umbú at 5:51 AM on December 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

why you would pay so much money for music by a guy who can't sing is beyond me

These are publishing rights to the songs, not performance rights to the recordings, so it doesn't matter if Dylan can sing, it matters if Dylan can write songs. Other people can sing them, and the owners of these rights will still get paid.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:33 AM on December 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm far less concerned with how much money Mr. Zimmerman will be making off this deal than the fact that his songbook is now going to be in the hands of Universal Music Group (UMG).

It mostly means you'll get to hear Billie Eilish covering Mr. Tambourine Man in Trolls 4.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:35 AM on December 8, 2020 [8 favorites]

meanwhile over at the Dylanology F***book group, you're supposed to have a drink every time somebody posts about Bob having sold his catalogue.
posted by philip-random at 8:00 AM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

WWZD

What Would Zappa Do
posted by elkevelvet at 9:11 AM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Dear the internet:

Jerry Jeff Walker wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man"

That is all

Sorry, wait I'm confused with another number and it's too late to delete, carry on.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 9:25 AM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Oh, by the way, for the 'he can't sing' section there is this:

Bob Dylan -- Moonshiner

An outtake from The Times They are a-Changing sessions, it was released in 1991 on The Bootleg Sessions. I first heard it on a reel-to-reel tape I got from John Cunnick* in 1969.

So Dylan could sing when he wanted. At least for awhile. But his recent voice is a ravaged hulk from decades of screaming improperly. There is a way one can do so and on pitch -- Al Green and Wilson Pickett come to mind -- but not Dylan. But once he did have a voice and range. And, too, opera aside, singing is about delivery. Dylan was a master of the incantatory.

*In my opinion, had he not died far too young in an automobile accident in 1976, John Cunnick is a name you would have heard or read.
posted by y2karl at 9:28 AM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

his recent voice is fine on his most recent album -- Rough and Rowdy Ways. He's no Michael Bolton but who the hell would want that on a track like False Prophet?

who the hell would want that period?
posted by philip-random at 9:55 AM on December 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

One of the first issues of Rolling Stone Magazine back in the 60s had a review of Bob Dylan in which they likened his singing voice to "a dog with his hind leg caught in a barbed wire fence."
posted by JackFlash at 10:18 AM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

OK, OK, I stand corrected. Somewhat -- I saw him a number of times around the turn of the century and then live he was croaking. But, all the same, the way he sang on his 1966 tour did his voice no favors. But, then again, there was Nashville Skyline, so what was I thinking?
posted by y2karl at 10:18 AM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

A world that contains folksinger-billionaires is a world utterly corrupted.

So ordinary billionaires are fine? Like a few others, I am happy when the artists get some money. And why shouldn’t the guy be a business person? I just don’t get all the fuss about this in particular.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:46 AM on December 8, 2020 [6 favorites]

Some corruption is good, if you like art. Maybe even necessary. Do protest songs exist in a utopia?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:26 AM on December 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

It'll be so fine and laid back and mellow and profitable....
posted by kaibutsu at 11:30 AM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

One of the first issues of Rolling Stone Magazine back in the 60s had a review of Bob Dylan in which they likened his singing voice to "a dog with his hind leg caught in a barbed wire fence."

That was first said in the early 60s by Mitch Jayne of the bluegrass group The Dillards. He was known as an onstage wit. I remember reading that quote somewhere when I was in high school some years before Rolling Stone was first published. But it was oft quoted and repeated until it had a life of its own eventually -- so indeed you may have seen it in Rolling Stone.
posted by y2karl at 12:09 PM on December 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Dylan's body of work is transcendent, and, if the word means anything at all, priceless. As such, it doesn't make a great springboard for discussions of capitalism and copyright law.

Me, I don't begrudge him a penny. If anything, Universal underpaid. From a karmic perspective, I score this as a win for Vincent van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, and all the rest.
posted by lumpy at 12:35 PM on December 8, 2020 [6 favorites]

Jerry Jeff Walker wrote Mr Bojangles.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:29 PM on December 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Jeez, where was all this revolutionary fighting spirit (>150 comments) over in the homelessness thread (<30 comments)?
Is it the low stakes? The penchant to pounce on 'Your favorite band sucks, actually' threads?
posted by bartleby at 1:46 PM on December 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

"Well they'll choose a man for you to meet tonight
You'll play the fool and learn how to walk through doors
How to enter into the gates of paradise
No, how to carry a burden too heavy to be yours
Yeah, from the stage they'll be tryin' to get water outta rocks
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand and say thanks
They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in
Sing "Amazing Grace" all the way to the Swiss banks
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back..."

--- Foot of Pride.
posted by storybored at 1:59 PM on December 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: The penchant to pounce on 'Your favorite band sucks, actually' threads
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:02 PM on December 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

Dylan could sing when he wanted. At least for awhile

It's very unclear exactly what has happened to Dylan's voice over the years, and to what extent this is mechanical change and what extent artistic choice. There are at least 7 "Dylan voices" (early pseudo-Okie/fake old man, going electric era sneer, Nashville Skyline, 70s building to up to Desire/Rolling Thunder, Street Legal through most of the 80s and early 90s, Never Ending Tourcramitallattheendoftheline, Time Out of Mind/Love and Theft (arguably distinguished from the late-period album voice)). The conventional wisdom was that Dylan "blew his voice out" around Rolling Thunder, but there are also bootleg recordings that seem to suggest that the change was never really that clear-cut.

Dylan's vocal apparatus does, evidently, have some severe technical limitations, which seem to have (by and large) increased and changed over the years. But what is choice, what necessity, to what extent these two factors influence each other and in what direction is just unknowable.

And this is what is interesting about Dylan: his music, not his morals or the idea that he should represent some countercultural ideal or other. He's a profound artistic talent in ways that track closely to things that clearly make him a very difficult, and quite possibly also an unpleasant, person on a more quotidian level. I don't know what to tell people who are outraged about this in particular. Yeah, it's shitty we live in an unequal world, and yes, of course we should change it. But Dylan, of all people, seems totally irrelevant to issues of that kind. Of course we want to feel a human connection to great artists, but the reality is that certain types of great art are made by establishing an enormous distance between the human and the artistic, and there's just nothing I can do but shrug.
posted by howfar at 2:31 AM on December 9, 2020 [9 favorites]

There are at least 7 "Dylan voices" (early pseudo-Okie/fake old man, going electric era sneer, Nashville Skyline, 70s building to up to Desire/Rolling Thunder, Street Legal through most of the 80s and early 90s, Never Ending Tourcramitallattheendoftheline, Time Out of Mind/Love and Theft (arguably distinguished from the late-period album voice)).

In between going electric era sneer and Nashville Skyline, I would add Big Pink/Basement Tapes.
posted by box at 4:50 AM on December 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Come now, folks. With $300 million he can finally afford harmonica lessons.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:59 AM on December 9, 2020 [8 favorites]

> But in any case, if you want to defend Dylan, you need to defend the idea that someone can deserve a billion dollars, not the abstract ideas of intellectual property rights or fair pay for hard work or whatever.

I don't have to do that at all, because my preferred solution of absurdly high tax rates and very short copyright periods is not on the table, so the choices for the foreseeable future are "Bob Dylan's estate gets the money and it gets taxed at depressingly low rates as it trickles through the accountants hired by people in his family tree" or "Bob Dylan's estate gets the catalog and a faceless corporation ends up picking pieces of it off over time, redirecting the proceeds to a corporate tax haven, with whatever is taxed also being taxed at an even more depressingly low rate. We've seen the total shitshows that happen when artist estates try to hold onto and micromanage the sale of music catalogs, and it pretty much ends the same way, but with the death of a thousand cuts. This way, Dylan gets more control for as long as he's alive, and yeah, he deserves that. Anyone who disagrees on the basis of some theoretical Scandinavian social democratic takeover of the US Government within whatever the remainder of Dylan's lifespan is can be safely ignored.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:29 AM on December 9, 2020 [9 favorites]

harmonica lessons

You know, I was really excited to hear that Blood On The Tracks alternate version that they released on the Bootleg Series. But when I listened to it, I was surprised by how much that damn harmonica slathered all over every song annoyed me. Then, when I got to "Shelter From The Storm", I had another weird adverse reaction, to "give ya". Ya. YA. GIVE YA. He just does not relent with the YA.

This was a weird experience. Have always liked Dylan, I'm no superfan but I listen to him fairly often, and I suddenly understood the POV of people who can't stand him.

I'll have to go back and see if that stuff still bothers me. Maybe I was stretched a little thin that day.
posted by thelonius at 7:33 AM on December 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

METAFILTER: Anyone who disagrees on the basis of some theoretical Scandinavian social democratic takeover of the US Government within whatever the remainder of Dylan's lifespan is can be safely ignored.
posted by philip-random at 8:36 AM on December 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

Come to think of it, "His Dreadful Harmonica" would be a good Phillip Pullman novel title
posted by thelonius at 8:37 AM on December 9, 2020 [4 favorites]

Jimmy Fallon has a very good Bob Dylan impression.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:09 AM on December 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

There is a lot of apocalyptic sentiment in ''Murder Most Foul.'' Are you worried that in 2020 we’re past the point of no return? That technology and hyper-industrialization are going to work against human life on Earth?

Sure, there’s a lot of reasons to be apprehensive about that. There’s definitely a lot more anxiety and nervousness around now than there used to be. But that only applies to people of a certain age like me and you, Doug. We have a tendency to live in the past, but that’s only us. Youngsters don’t have that tendency. They have no past, so all they know is what they see and hear, and they’ll believe anything. In 20 or 30 years from now, they’ll be at the forefront. When you see somebody that is 10 years old, he’s going to be in control in 20 or 30 years, and he won’t have a clue about the world we knew. Young people who are in their teens now have no memory lane to remember. So it’s probably best to get into that mind-set as soon as we can, because that’s going to be the reality.

As far as technology goes, it makes everybody vulnerable. But young people don’t think like that. They could care less. Telecommunications and advanced technology is the world they were born into. Our world is already obsolete.

Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind
posted by y2karl at 11:46 AM on December 9, 2020 [4 favorites]

Some more from that interview:

Why didn’t more people pay attention to Little Richard’s gospel music?

Probably because gospel music is the music of good news and in these days there just isn’t any. Good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news. And we have to thank the media industry for that. It stirs people up. Gossip and dirty laundry. Dark news that depresses and horrifies you.

On the other hand, gospel news is exemplary. It can give you courage. You can pace your life accordingly, or try to, anyway. And you can do it with honor and principles. There are theories of truth in gospel but to most people it’s unimportant. Their lives are lived out too fast. Too many bad influences. Sex and politics and murder is the way to go if you want to get people’s attention. It excites us, that’s our problem.
posted by philip-random at 5:12 PM on December 19, 2020

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