Dylan previously sold all his copyrights to Universal Music, Sony’s major competitor. That deal was about the rights of his lyrics and compositions. Sony has now managed to preserve the rights to exploit Dylan’s recordings.
The deal includes all albums from the early 1960s up to and including his most recent record Rough And Rowdy Ways from 2020. It concerns 39 studio albums, sixteen bootlegcompilations of outtakes and previously unreleased material that could be edited and released in the future.
Valuable
Dylan’s compositions are so valuable in part because of the thousands of covers that have been made over the years – and probably will be made for a long time to come. The 80-year-old music icon has indicated that he wants to make a number of albums for Columbia Records, a subsidiary of Sony.
And although Dylan – who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 – has sold his copyrights to Universal Music, he is still very pleased with his long-standing association with Sony Music. “Columbia Records has only been good for me,” he said in a statement. “I’m glad all my recordings can stay where they belong.”