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In early December 2020, Bob Dylan sold the rights to his entire catalog for 300 million dollars. An agreement whereby he transferred the intellectual property and management of more than 600 songs to Universal Music Publishing Group. Now we know that the record company paid a lot more.
$ 300 million was the largest amount paid to a single artist to date for a music catalog. Triple what Steve Nicks got for an 80% share of his discography just days before, and double what Neil Young got a month later
Shortly after the sale was confirmed, sources confirmed by the magazine Rolling Stone They claimed that the final price of the business was 300 million dollars. However, one of them claimed that in the agreement, Bob Dylan himself, turned down an offer of $ 400 million from a music publishing company called the Hipgnosis Song Fund, 100 million more than what Universal supposedly paid the Nobel laureate.
Precisely in early February, the founder of Hipgnosis Song Fund Merck Mercuriadis confirmed in an interview with The Guardian that his company offered, indeed, 400 million dollars after two years of negotiations with the artist.
We were ready to make a deal and then Universal made an offer that we couldn’t compete with. It would have to be a company of that size to absorb the price they paid… Which was much higher than the 300 million dollars that was reported at the time, ”Mercuriadis declared.
It’s not the only one
The Hipgnosis Songs Found fund was made in January with 1,180 lyrics written by the Canadian musician Neil Young. For the agreement, the company paid $ 150 million
Not only Young has sold the rights to his music to this company. Lindsey Buckingham has also taken the step to give up her songs, this time for an undisclosed amount.
Apparently the sale of song catalogs has become a booming business during covid-19 pandemic as investors view music as a relatively stable asset. In the words of the president of the Hipgnosis Songs Fund: “songs are as invertible as gold or oil.”
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