Bob Dylan Net Worth

How much is Bob Dylan worth?

About Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is a music legend and a pioneer in the genre of folk music, and he is best known for popularising protest songs. The songwriter is one of the most respected musicians in the world with dozens of classics that still rack up hundreds of millions of plays on streaming services today, and he continues to spit out modern classics 50 years later.

Thanks to his poetic lyrics that contain social commentaries, Dylan is one of the few songwriters to be awarded a Nobel Prize, which is generally reserved for literary artists. Dylan’s biggest songs include “Like A Rolling Stone”, “Hurricane”, and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”.

After playing in tiny taverns in New York where folk music was still a niche type of music that hadn’t yet become mainstream, Dylan was the breakout star and led the way for other folk artists to garner recognition. But none would reach the heights of Dylan’s fame, as he quickly became world-known despite being somewhat of a recluse. Dylan’s early hits “The Times They Are A Changing” and “Blowing In The Wind” became anthems for Civil Rights and anti-war movements and are now used endlessly in movies soundtracks.

Dylan became known for being a renegade and subverting the expectations of his fans, for better or worse. As he became a folk music icon overnight, he started playing gigs with an electric guitar, which was a big no-no in the folk community, and fans even stormed the stage in anger. But that’s when it became clear that Dylan really was a trendsetter, as many other folk groups followed in his footsteps.

He was such an Enfant terrible that critics adored him for sticking up his middle finger to both the political and musical system. The biggest music publication in the world, Rolling Stone, even named the magazine after Dylan’s most famous song.

Though he has never reached number one on the Billboard Hit 100 (but he has reached number two a coupled of times), five of his albums have peaked at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart, with many of them, along with several compilation albums, being certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits sold an astonishing five million copies worldwide, and Blonde on Blonde is his best selling album of original material, going double platinum and selling more than two million units. In total, the singer has sold close to 50 million copies globally.

Most recently, Dylan saw somewhat of a comeback after he released Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first album of completely original material in more than 10 years. Having not a care in the world for radio play, Dylan’s first single from the new album was “Murder Most Foul”, a 17 minute piano ballad that took the form of a eulogy to John F. Kennedy. Despite the lack of radio play for its singles, the album was popular with both seasoned fans and millennials, and the success the record had makes the 80 year old one of the most ageless musicians in history.

Few people have been through the trials and tribulations that Dylan has, especially early is his career and his divorce from Sarah Lownds, which reportedly cost the poet $36 million. However, through ups and downs, Dylan has found himself as one of the richest living rockstars in the world, and he reached that stature though not only his sales figures, but mostly through royalties and live performances.

Dylan owns the publishing rights to all of his music, which means he has the final say on where his music gets played, and he gets 100% of the profit too.

Dylan is surprisingly very open to his music being used in TV and movies, as his songs have over 500 credits on those mediums. Though it isn’t exactly clear exactly how much it costs to use a Dylan song in TV or a movie, they are reported to be the most expensive songs that aren’t by The Rolling Stones, they net Dylan an estimated $4 million per year.

When it comes to playing live, it’s rumored that Dylan makes an estimated $250,000 to $350,000 on average for one performance. However, when the group behind Coachella expanded and created the new Desert Trip festival, which featured a legendary line-up of The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and the lizard tongued folk singer himself, it has been estimated that Dylan could be earning upwards of $7 million for that one festival.

In 2016, the songwriter won one of the most celebrated awards an artist can ever receive, a Nobel Prize. He won it for “creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Upon winning the Nobel Prize in 2016, Dylan’s sales boosted significantly, as winners of the literary award usually see a massive spike in sales figures.

Though smoking has not impacted the health of anyone positively, Dylan’s croaky voice, which has been that way since his twenties and only continues to get croakier, is thanks largely to his smoking habit. Dylan’s throaty lyrical delivery is one of the greatest and most alluring parts of his music, and he oddly enough has smoking to thank for the record sales he has amassed over the past 50 years. On his newer music, it literally sounds like Dylan has physically turned in to a burning cigarette.

In an era when most folk music was made up of songs of love and loss, and Dylan was admittedly no stranger to that too, the singer was pursuing much more relevant lyrical content than his peers. Dylan might have been the very first socially conscious mainstream musician. He sang about the death of the boxer Rubin Carter in “Hurricane”, and he sang about the civil rights movement in “The Times They Are A Changin’”. To this day he is still following this same style of storytelling and poetry in his music.

Summing-Up

Thanks to Dylan’s poetic lyricism that is rarely heard in music, and especially not today, they became world anthems that millions of people can scream along to. The singer was a voice of a generation and continues to inspire other musicians more than 50 years in to his career. It won’t stop there, as Dylan has licensed his songs to Amazon, which is creating a TV show called Time Out Of Mind, named after Dylan’s 1997 album with each episode being about one of Dylan’s songs in his discography.