In the end, as planned, Joan tells her lover that she is leaving him for Ravik and meets Ravik at a restaurant. They cautiously try to mend their broken affair as international events spin out of control around them. With no communication possible between them, they each try to manage under difficult circumstances and, when they finally meet up again after six months of unexplained absence, there are shadows hanging over their relationship.
He is separated from Joan after being discovered as refugee without papers. But the prickly Ravic has unfinished business with the Nazis, and in particular Haake the Gestapo chief who had sent him to the concentration camp after spotting him in the street. At night, on one of Paris' bridges over the Seine, Ravic meets Joan Madou, a woman about to (possibly) attempt suicide, and helps her. In 1939 he is living in Paris, under a false name and without any documents, constantly aware of the risk of being arrested. (Elsewhere around the world, his catalog has been administered by Sony/ATV, which will continue to do so until the expiration of its contract in a few years.Ravic is an Austrian doctor who helped Jews escape from the Nazi regime. The songs he recorded with the Band in 1967, for example, which were widely bootlegged at the time and later collected in Dylan’s 1975 album “The Basement Tapes,” were intended as demos to be shopped to other recording artists.Īnd much of Dylan’s business empire is operated through the Bob Dylan Music Company, a small office in New York that administers his publishing rights in the United States. Music publishing has been a little-known cornerstone of much of Dylan’s career. In exchange for its payment to Dylan, Universal, a division of the French media conglomerate Vivendi, will collect all future income from the songs. Streaming has helped lift the entire music market - publishers in the United States collected $3.7 billion in 2019, according to the National Music Publishers’ Association - which has drawn new investors attracted to the steady and growing income generated by music rights.ĭylan’s deal includes 100 percent of his rights for all the songs of his catalog, including both the income he receives as a songwriter and his control of each song’s copyright. Swift signed a separate publishing deal with Universal in February.)
(The recent sale of Taylor Swift’s first six albums covered only that material’s recording rights. Publishers and writers collect royalties and licensing fees any time their work is sold, streamed, broadcast on the radio or used in a movie or commercial. Music publishing is the side of the business that deals in the copyrights for songwriting and composition - the lyrics and melodies of songs, in their most fundamental form - which are distinct from those for a recording. According to Universal, Dylan’s songs have been recorded more than 6,000 times. Not only has it stood the test of time, but most of his songs were written by Dylan alone and have been frequently covered by other artists - with each use generating royalties. Jody Gerson, the chief executive of Universal’s publishing division, said, “To represent the body of work of one of the greatest songwriters of all time - whose cultural importance can’t be overstated - is both a privilege and a responsibility.”ĭylan is the kind of writer whose work music publishers tend to salivate over.
Still, Universal insisted it would be tasteful in its use of Dylan’s work. “Tangled Up in Blue Cross/Blue Shield,” wrote another. After the deal was announced early Monday, users on Twitter had a field day with corny puns suggesting how Dylan’s work could be exploited. Since Universal now controls his work, Dylan will no longer have veto power over how his songs will be used. Two years ago, he launched a high-end whiskey brand, Heaven’s Door.
#SOUNDTRACK FOR THE MOVIE WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS TV#
The Coopers & Lybrand spot was far from Dylan’s last commercial license: He did a prominent deal for a Victoria’s Secret TV spot in 2004, and later worked with Apple, Cadillac, Pepsi and IBM. Fans, media commentators and even other artists reacted in horror Time magazine wrote about the controversy with the headline “ Just in Case You Hadn’t Heard - The ’60s Are Over.” In 1994, Dylan let the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand - predecessor of the current giant PricewaterhouseCoopers - use Richie Havens’s rendition of his 1964 protest anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in a TV spot. Yet to a degree that still surprises and shocks his audience, Dylan has long been aggressive about marketing his music, including pursuing licensing deals to place his songs in television commercials.