Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your Zoom fiduciary of music news and criticism.

I'm your host John Caramonica. down before they call him a man.

How many seas must have

many seas must have seen?

You may recognize that song, kind of, sorta.

That is a cover of Bob Dylan's Blown in the Wind, covered by Yes, Share.

Bob Dylan songs are covered umpteen times and have been throughout the decades.

If you are a dedicated reader of the Times music coverage,

you will know Bob Dylan recently sold his songwriting catalog to Universal for 300 million dollars, which is a lot of cover

recordings that are going to have to be done of Bob Dylan's songs and that subsequent decades to earn that back.

But it is one interesting piece of a part of the music business that has been getting a lot of attention in the last year or two, which is song publishing rights and essentially

companies that are treating song publishing rights as more of an asset class, really putting down heavy investments in various songwriting

catalogs.

We're going to talk to Ben Cessario today.

Early Popcast hosts many, many, many years ago, Ben Cessario. I don't think we've talked about it before.

Anyway Ben as you know is our music business reporter at the times who has reported extensively on this

so we're going to talk to him about the Dylan sale and also a hypnosis, which is a fund started by Merkuriatis, who has been buying up some catalogs recently at absurd multiples. We're going to talk about that and we are going to talk about what the

value in owning songwriting catalogs is. I feel like there's a lot of conversation about

master recordings. We could do a whole separate episode on that. Taylor,

Kanye, etc. Jay-Z obviously, but songwriting is a little bit less sexy, but

there is a tremendous amount of money that is changing hands.

So we are going to talk today about who's making it, what it's really worth, and what the future of it is.

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