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

The estimated figure is pretty mind-blowing – at over $300m (£225m), it dwarfs the $22m he got for extending his publishing contract in 2010 – but it comes as little surprise that Bob Dylan has sold the rights to his back catalogue. For one thing, selling your publishing rights or your master recordings is commonplace among artists of a certain stature, netting them huge lump sums in the process and giving the buyer ownership of the kind of songs that people are clearly going to be playing and recording cover versions of for the rest of eternity: everyone from Elton John to Stevie Nicks has done it.

And for another, it’s a move very much in keeping with Dylan’s sharp business sense. The fact that he’s ceded control of how the songs are used might cause a certain kind of Dylan nut palpitations. Will this Nobel prize winner’s hallowed oeuvre now be allowed to play on the soundtrack of anything, no matter how inappropriate, so long as someone stumps up the requisite cash? But, in fairness, it’s hard to see how his catalogue’s new owners might exploit his songs in a way that the man himself hasn’t already done in recent years. A 2015 article in Variety claimed Dylan’s songs had already appeared more than 500 times in films and on television, a state of affairs that may have had something to do with the fact that Dylan himself, in contrast to some of his peers, was apparently highly amenable to their use. “To me there’s literally nothing more simple than clearing a Bob Dylan song,” said Thomas Golubić, a music supervisor known for his work on Breaking Bad.

The same seems to be true of advertising. Not for Dylan the ardent beliefs famously expressed by his contemporary Neil Young: “Ain’t singing for Pepsi, ain’t singing for Coke,” he sang on his 1988 single This Note’s For You, an ethos he has stuck to ever since. Dylan, on the other hand, has proved exceptionally open to what the music industry calls “fresh revenue streams”, not merely regularly flogging his songs to adverts – I Want You featured on a commercial for Greek yoghurt, Subterranean Homesick Blues on an ad for Google, Blowin’ in the Wind was repurposed for both the Co-op and a Budweiser commercial “starring an adorable dalmatian” – but actually appearing in them as well. In recent years, he’s shilled everything from Chrysler cars and Cadillac SUVs to Pepsi, iPods, IBM computers and Victoria’s Secret underwear.

If you look online, you can find Dylan fans tying themselves in knots attempting to square his fondness for adverts with their image of him as an artist above petty materialistic concerns, but in truth, after a tricky start – he dissolved his relationship with his 1960s manager Albert Grossman after discovering that his hastily signed contract entitled Grossman to 50% of his song publishing rights – he’s become impressively savvy when it comes to business.

In April 2016, he struck a rights deal with Amazon, allowing the company to base a TV drama series on lyrics from his catalogue. His official merchandise range goes far beyond the usual T-shirts, stickers and mugs: New York-based brand Barking Irons signed a deal to market an entire range of clothing based on items Dylan wore over the years, from the jacket he sported on the cover of his eponymous 1962 debut album to the shawl cardigan featured on the sleeve of 1976’s Desire. He has his own range of whiskeys, Heaven’s Door, the most expensive of which comes in a bottle featuring one of his paintings and sells for $500. No stranger to cross-platform promotion, Dylan recently reactivated his radio show, the Theme Time Radio Hour, for the first time in over a decade, for a “whiskey special” advertised with a photo of the artist with a bottle of Heaven’s Door prominently placed.

Then there’s his visual art: a hand-signed print of one of his lyrics accompanied by a pencil drawing from the “Mondo Scripto” portfolio will set you back £2,250. These are not the actions of a man above petty materialistic concerns: they’re the actions of a smart operator – with a trusted and longstanding manager in Jeff Rosen – who’s now enjoying the payday of his career.