Universal Music buying Bob Dylan’s entire song catalog
Musician Bob Dylan performs with The Band at the Forum in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, 1974.[AP/ Jeff Robbins]
Bob Dylan’s entire catalog of songs, which reaches back 60 years and is among the most prized next to that of the Beatles, is being acquired by Universal Music Publishing Group.
The deal covers 600 song copyrights including “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Tangled Up In Blue."
“Brilliant and moving, inspiring and beautiful, insightful and provocative, his songs are timeless—whether they were written more than half a century ago or yesterday," Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group Sir Lucian Grainge said in a prepared statement on Monday.
The transaction’s announcement comes a few weeks after the singer-songwriter’s musings about anti-Semitism and unpublished song lyrics sold at auction for a total of $495,000.
Dylan, who first came into the public’s consciousness via New York City’s Greenwich Village folk music scene in the early 1960s, has sold more than 125 million records globally. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, the first songwriter to receive such a distinction.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.