"Terms were not disclosed, but a source tells Variety that the deal was easily in nine figures. Since 80% of Stevie Nicks’ publishing catalog was acquired by Primary Wave last week for a reported $100 million, the Dylan catalog probably drew a number well above that."
Most importantly, he most likely carefully chose the contractual terms, controlling the use of his legacy how he wishes. And presumably prevents potential problems with disagreements between his descendants about something they all would have differing personal opinions about.
How many times have you seen an artist's oeuvre or author's written works be misused by his or or her descendants?
This was my first thought as well. The likelihood of those who inherit his copyrights to either squander them or being taken for a ride by the music industry is very high.
So him selling them himself allows him to negotiate better conditions and more money, which will do more to protect his legacy than just holding on to them until his death.
The Grammy-winning Las Vegas-based act is one of the most successful rock bands of the past decade, with hits like “Radioactive,” “Demons,” “Believer,” “Thunder” and “Whatever It Takes” from albums band made their mark with their global smash hits from their album “Night Visions,” “Smoke + Mirrors,” “Evolve” and “Origins.”
I've never even heard of these guys, so the fact that their catalog is apparently worth $100M is making me feel old and out of touch. Oh, well.
I know the name of the band but not their music. I checked that song and I don't think I've ever heard it but it has 1.2 billion views on Youtube so ...
Haha I first learned of them from YouTube (when they tried to appeal to the hipster crowd) but now only hear them because of the TV (football commercials) and the rare cases I'm directly exposed to commercial FM radio. That is, when it isn't a classic rock (The Doors and Warrant) or "new" classic rock (RHCP and Linkin Park) station that some gas station or family-friendly bar/grill least-common-denomitored their way to putting on the speakers.
My Mom is the only person I know who admits to liking them. We tried to get her Spotify but she wasn't interested.
One day, very soon, the Imagine Dragons will be considered classic rock, but commercial radio will have long bit the dust and there won't be any classic rock stations left to call them it.
I consider Tom Petty to be a vastly superior artist to Britney Spears. She has far greater commercial appeal however and her music is worth more today if you're selling a catalog. The same would factor in to selling the Dylan catalog. Dylan's music is not very popular with young people and will not be very popular in the future (see: Elvis, Cher, Neil Diamond, Clapton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Rod Stewart, Chicago, etc; their music doesn't sell at all like it used to), although I'm sure it'll be redone endlessly. Do young people care about Simon & Garfunkel? Not in the least and they won't tomorrow either. That music will all fade by the year, relegated to a small fraction of the interest it once had, as the primary generation or two that listened to it die.
After 60 years Dylan has sold less than the Backstreet Boys. He produced relatively few hits compared to other renowned, popular artists. His style of music doesn't lend itself to vast commercial success. Someone will pay a premium to acquire his catalog because he's such a great artist and it's a large & influential catalog, however there is a practical limit to that.
You don't seem to be accounting for how widely covered Dylan material has historically been. There are plenty of Dylan songs that as far back as the 1960s brought more sales for others than for him. This has continued throughout his career. For example, one 1997 Dylan song was in the top 50 UK sales in 2010 and all told has been covered by more than 450 other artists. In the last five years, official releases of past Grateful Dead concerts have contained at least 30 Dylan songs. It's 600 Dylan songs and at least 10 times that in cover versions which continue earning money.
A quick google search shows tom petty has sold 80 million records and Britney Spears 100 million.
I think you are mis-gauging what happens to music over the course of decades. Bubble gum pop and similarly positioned types of hip-hop etc do very well when they are in fashion, but don’t earn as much consistently over the long haul.
Dylan’s catalogue could plausibly still earn 50 years from now.
There is also musical licensing, where a lot of money is made after the initial popularity. Technically, I have seen more bob dylan songs in commercials and movies than I have on the radio. Hey also has a ton of unreleased stuff in there two, which they probably can make a lot of money off of, especially/sadly when he dies.
The only way to justify these prices is movie/TV/advertising licensing which is negotiated for each specific instance. Streaming brings in a fraction of cent per play so his catalog can't be generating more than a million dollars per year at best. Using his music to sell prescription drugs to nostalgic baby boomers watching Fox News is likely the plan.
> Streaming brings in a fraction of cent per play so his catalog can't be generating more than a million dollars per year at best.
Wow, I think that's wildly off the mark. Bob Dylan probably has several billion streams per year, if not more. On Spotify right now, his top 10 songs have a billion streams. Obviously those did not all occur in a single year, but Dylan's catalogue is deep, and Spotify is hardly the only platform.
One billion streams per year is about $4 million on Spotify.
I would assume other people have commercial rights percentages within Dylan's organization, management and past agreements, the sale price is highly unlikely to all go into Dylan's pockets.
The big revenue comes from film and advertising licensing, we saw this when Michael Jackson (who owned the Beatles back catalog along with Sony who he was in a vicious battle with).
I was estimating a few hundred million streams per year (including All Along the Watchtower by Hendrix). The $4 million/billion streams gets split a few ways and the songwriter only gets a portion of that. Radio was more lucrative for songwriters since the songwriters got the bulk of the revenue (no payments to performers).
A lawyer might call this "cold hand" control. He, like every other rich old person, is probably setting up a complex will to control how his wealth functions after his death (the cold hand from the grave). If he gives a song to someone, that person can do what they want with it. They could keep the money. Sell the song. Or just sit on it and let it never be played again. The dead man would not be in control. But if he convert that song into a pile of cash, and inserts that cash into a trust, then the dead man can exercise more direct/itemized control for many years to come.
Give your house to your son and the day after you die he can sell it. But fund a trust to "administer" the house and you can tell the kid he can live in it but never sell it. Even decades later, the dead hand still controls the house and behavior of the child. Rich people do these things. When I was a law student working at a legal clinic, maybe 1/4 of the clients were old people who wanted to leave their house to their daughter but didn't want her to sell the day after they died. My advice was always to not do this because it burdened the daughter immensely. They didn't care. They wanted the house to continue in the family forever regardless.
(Generic situation, not an ethics violation): One couple I talked to wanted to give their house to their infant grandson. So long as Billy lived in the house his parents could stay too. (Parents effectively passed over, avoiding some taxation issue.) I had a standard approach to this:
So you don't want Billy to join the army? What if Billy wants to be a fighter pilot? Then he won't then be living in the house. What if he is offered a great job in New York? Do you want him to turn that job down in order to keep his parents living your house? When Little Billy is 50 years old, and you have been dead for decades, do you still want him opening up your will to ask your permission before he makes a life choice? Instead, how about we let him live in the house until he is 25 and then he can sell it?
When people get old their mobility/independence/memory diminishes. To combat that they try to maintain a routine, a steady state. They fear change. Dynamic young people become scary unpredictable things. The answer is to exercise control in those areas over which you exercise effective control: finance and property. The natural extension of this control during life is to maintain control after one's death. That's what wills are all about.
Imagination also suffers with age. Old people that enjoy their later years want their kids to enjoy the same life... literally. So they leave the house to the daughter so that she can drop into her parents life. The parents cannot imagine that their daughter has her own perspective. They cannot imagine that the only reason the daughter even lives in town is to help take care of her wealthy parents, that the day after the funeral she will be on a plane to california.
After 2-3 million you don't really "need" money for anything yourself.
You take them for family, because you can, to not let it go away, because you want the power that comes with it, and for extravagance. But not for "need".
There's a great story about the police getting a call for a homeless man wandering around a super posh neighborhood. Turned out to be bob dylan, I think he might have been house hunting.
With 3-4 million (less in many countries) all your needs are covered for life. You wont die or have any harmful effect (lack of job, nutricion, housing, clothing, health coverage) when you don't get to have more, except for things common to everybody like natural death, accidents etc.
If you go for more, you do it for various wants, not for needs.
Even when it comes to happiness, there's a plataeu at around that level:
> lack of job, nutricion, housing, clothing, health coverage
Minimum wage is enough for this.
And the link you shared couldn't get the analysis more wrong just to come up with clickbaity title. They are taking average happiness of state and average wage, and even then the data doesn't look like it is plateauing.
Even with a $80,000 salary, in the US a medical or other emergency (e.g. getting fired in a bad economy), can leave you unemployed, homeless, or living with a big debt. Even worse so for your retirement prospects (or lack thereof).
With a few cool million in the bank you don't need to worry about any of those things.
>And the link you shared couldn't get the analysis more wrong just to come up with clickbaity title. They are taking average happiness of state and average wage, and even then the data doesn't look like it is plateauing.
Can you even understood what I said. I have more needs than "lack of job, nutricion, housing, clothing, health coverage". If I have have 10 million dollar, I wouldn't reject earning another 10 million dollar. I am answering the poster whos said "need" is defined as that for which I think minimum wage could do. My need is dynamic in that case.
It was less likely that Dylan was looking to unload his catalogue, and more likely Universal were just extremely hungry for it. At that point you can name the price.
Well I'd also wonder what he'd need to retain ownership for. For some people that's important, but others it's not, especially if they trust the new stewards.
I wonder why he needs the liquidity. I'm sure he's making a ton of money from royalties alone. Even to his ancestors, it's probably better off long term, and good enough short term, to leave the catalog than cash.
One wonders if he and his family felt it was better to sell now than later, because for all Dylan’s recognized greatness as a songwriter now, popular tastes can drastically change, especially now that guitar-based music is being eclipsed. There has been a lot of discussion recently about how young people’s familiarity with Elvis or even the Beatles is dwindling, and Dylan’s most acclaimed work was recorded in the same era as them.
I wonder how much of this is because of copyrights. Look at the way a lot of older music has been preserved in modern times, through the use of sampling, covers and other things.
The Beatles, Elvis, even Dylan played a lot of covers of old blues tunes or other songs that had been lost by that current generation and were made popular again.
The way laws work now, that's not really something people can do any more without being sued or paying licensing fees. I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot, so a lot of young people who might have heard some of their music won't really get the chance.
I know me personally, i've only discovered a lot of older music after hearing a cover or a sample in a song that's made me go back and look for the original.
Look at reggae music to see the difference. Songs from the 50's and 60's are still being remade, covered, remixed and used in modern songs. A lot of reggae fans still know the big names from that time because you still hear their songs.
> The Beatles, Elvis, even Dylan played a lot of covers of old blues tunes or other songs that had been lost by that current generation and were made popular again.
> I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot
These are two different things, from a legal and licensing standpoint. My understanding is that sampling (expensive, no set pricing) and covering (set pricing) are distinct. I think that if you cover a song, you agree to credit the original person as writer and pay them an (industry standard) fraction of the royalties. But sampling requires negotiation for usage rights and can get expensive quite quickly. I suspect people are not sampling the Beatles because it would be expensive, but that's a distinct question from that of whether people are covering the Beatles.
For a cover you need a mechanical license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license In the US under the compulsory license scheme, it's a fixed fee per copy or stream (with a minimum licensing fee). It's been a long time since I've looked into this (in the pre-streaming era) but back in those days it was around $.30 per copy. In the US, this is mostly handled through the Harry Fox Agency. I just peaked at their pricing page and there's a lot more categories than their were back in the 90s. https://www.harryfox.com/#/rate-charts
Interesting that the per-copy fee for "Ringtones" (24¢) is much higher than the fee for "Permanent Digital Downloads" (9.1¢).
IIRC, personal, non-commercial "public performances" of recordings as mere ringtones are exempt from public performance royalties under US law, so there appear to be no material additional rights granted by a ringtone sale vs. an ordinary digital download.
So I guess what the extra 14.9¢ buys you is the right to automatically insert the recording into the purchaser's mobile phone's "ringtone" list?
At that point, guitar music had already been giving way in Europe to beats-based music. While initially North America scoffed at trends like eurodance, in retrospect it was only a matter of time before the electronic-music wave hit America, too. Also, the turn of the millennium is when hip-hop in the USA started to go from a somewhat niche and edgy genre to completely mainstream and ascendant over guitar music. Metallica had nothing to do with it.
I don't think guitar music's dead. Guitar centric music may not be popular anymore, but you'll find guitars in a lot of places these days.
There's also a trend towards guitarists that play with samplers and loopers and perform live that way.
I see plenty of new guitar music on youtube in a huge variety of styles and genres.
I also frequently hear guitars, albeit hidden under layers of effects, in hip-hop and electronic music. I think guitar music is a long ways from dead.
Rock and its derivitives and the typical 4 or 5 piece drum, bass and guitar ensemble may be dead, but guitars are doing just fine and I think if anything, there's so many more avenues available for incorporating guitars into music with a lower barrier of entry than previously.
Someone can actually sound pretty decent strumming a few chords, looping them and playing with the sound without needing to learn as much.
It's not the same, but guitars are everywhere and these days they're even being incorporated with midi technology or other things to let you do some crazy stuff with them.
Also, trends come and go at some point you'll get a group of young people who wanna rebel against the 'digital electronic sounds' the older people like and suddenly discover acoustic instruments and stuff again, they'll be new and cool, the even older people will shake their fists and say things like
'those darned kids, we used to play real instruments before any of that electronic stuff came along'
I think the guitar did have a sort of outsize influence and symbolism, due to a few factors that no longer exist, or don't have the same punch. First, it's the quintessential american instrument, and it came to dominate the music world at about the same time america was coming to dominate the world world. Second, it records well. Third, it's cheap to produce.
Now, a computer is much cheaper than a guitar, and a microphone is cheaper than a computer. American dominance and dynamism are sliding into a morass of nostalgia and rent seeking. With computers, anything can record well. You can make an album out of the sounds sampled from a pig being slaughtered, and people do.
The /electric/ guitar might be the quintessential American instrument but I think South America would like a word if you think the acoustic guitar is quintessentially American outside of the American zeitgeist.
Your observation that guitar music is being eclipsed is too good an opportunity to pass up on to dig out the (possibly apocryphal) rejection of The Beatles back in 1962 -
“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”
—Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962
> young people’s familiarity with Elvis or even the Beatles is dwindling
I'm not surprised you mentioned Elvis, but his catalog isn't as deep, the songwriting wasn't as good, and between his stint in Vegas, death, the impersonators, and rumors that he's not really dead, he seems like more of a punchline.
I do wonder how this will play out with the Beatles, though.
Funny enough, I think part of what will keep songs going is their inclusion in movies and TV shows, something artists are often reluctant to do.
quite a lot of songs that Elvis had in his catalog were by the top professional song writers in his day, the thing is though that a lot of those songs are in a style of songwriting that was rendered somewhat outdated by Dylan and the Beatles.
The alternative would be to release the songs as public domain like Tom Lehrer [1].
Disney is making movies out of public domain stories because it's easier without the licensing overhead. Same is true for songs. Elvis and the Beatles fade because their songs cannot be shared without learning about the licensing agreements. A fate that Dylan could have avoided.
Generally speaking these kinds of arrangements are made with the expectation that the company managing these copyrights are going to generously sublicense everything to maximize profit. So, for example, Dylan will be selling his songs off to people who want you to listen to them as much as possible. Nobody spends 9 figures on a song's rights without expecting to make 10 figures on it.
The Beatles followed the Disney/Nintendo school of copyright management, where you just hold onto something valuable for the fear that actually making money off the thing you own will make it worth less in the future. This is what gives you shit like the "Disney Vault" where you periodically take old works off the market entirely for the sake of artificial scarcity. In this particular case, The Beatles were a massive hole in pretty much every digital music store's back catalog, so much so that them finally selling digital copies of their songs was considered actual tech news.
Whether or not a work actually thrives once it's been escheated to the public domain is really complicated. You see, the act of reusing something in the public domain also grants you copyright over anything you added to the work. Disney's reuse of public domain stories not only saved them money, but it also took things out of the public domain, in a sense. Yes, all of the old Hans Christen Andersen stories are very much open to reuse, but only if you're careful not to use the bits Disney added into their adaptations - and there are a lot of them. So if your goal is to just keep the work accessible and relevant, something akin to a Creative Commons ShareAlike license might be more appropriate than a public domain dedication.
The Beatles followed the Disney/Nintendo school of copyright management, where you just hold onto something valuable for the fear that actually making money off the thing you own will make it worth less in the future.
I don't know, sitting on one's catalog until digital music storefronts are widely established and you've been holding out long enough that the eventual release is a newsworthy event seems like a perfectly reasonable marketing decision if you ask me, typical back-catalog revenue numbers being what they are.
>The alternative would be to release the songs as public domain like Tom Lehrer
In the United States, authors cannot put creative works in the public domain. The concept of abandoning copyright doesn't exist in US law. At best, copyright holders can license their works permissively.
Be aware that authors (except work-for-hires) and their heirs have an inalienable statutory right of termination, which allows them to terminate copyright transfers and licenses in certain circumstances.
> There has been a lot of discussion recently about how young people’s familiarity with Elvis or even the Beatles is dwindling
10 years ago my wife and I went to a cafe after Ringo’s concert. We met there her university classmate with boyfriend, excitedly we told them “We are coming from the Ringo’s concert! Did you go?”, they asked “Who is Ringo?”
One of the life-forming experiences for me.
>One wonders if he and his family felt it was better to sell now than later, because for all Dylan’s recognized greatness as a songwriter now, popular tastes can drastically change
People who bought them for 300M don't think it will "drastically change" to devalue it any time soon...
I think Dylan has aged much better than the Beatles have: their sound is very emblematic of a particular era of music in my mind. Of course, it may be that their focus on heavy, lush production, particularly in their later work, makes them particularly vulnerable to changes in taste. Dylan's work, on the other hand, is generally much more spare and focused on guitar and voice.
Also, your description excludes much of Dylan's extensive[1] catalog, starting with Bringing it All Back Home and including some of his best work like Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks, much of which features diverse instrumentation and extensive, if not always "lush", production work.
[1] "Bob Dylan has released 39 studio albums, 94 singles, 26 notable extended plays, 50 music videos, 12 live albums, 15 volumes comprising The Bootleg Series, 20 compilation albums, 15 box sets, seven soundtracks as main contributor, five music home videos and two non-music home videos."
Beatles _seem_ overrated because of how much influence they have had. Every great musician after them has probably learned from them, imitated them and improved upon their techniques.
So, if you listen to recent artists first and then go back and listen to Beatles, they sound more of the same, even though in their time they were kilometers ahead of everyone else.
Yes, they pretty much invented (or least multiplied 100 fold) the Pop Rock genre. When they played, it was new, novel and interesting. If you had listened to them in the 50s, you would have been astounded by the completely new sound.
Now, pop rock might be the most popular genre in existence across the world. So doesn't sound that great.
> If you had listened to them in the 50s, you would have been astounded by the completely new sound.
I think it's similar to how back in the day, and Apple ][ or Commodore was revolutionary. That doesn't mean they have remained the pinnacle in their field. But it also doesn't take away from the significance of what they accomplished in their time.
But still, I just really don't care for pop rock whether new or old.
I remember there was a review of a Beatles box set that started something like "half of these songs sound like some rock band you have heard before, and the other half sound like Oasis"
The Scorsese doc that came out on PBS in 2005(?) called No Direction Home does a great job of showing the "open source" body of work on which Dylan and the other Greenwich Village musicians in his orbit in the folk scene drew upon.
A Pete Seeger interview in the doc has particularly good commentary on the issue, with Seeger analogizing the playing and remaking of shared songs to how lawyers rewrite old laws and storytellers retell old stories to fit the new generations.
Nah. Give it 30 years and that's that. Ideally, every artist should live long enough to see what the rest of the world does with their work (both good and bad) when it's set free.
That could be pretty cruel. I don’t think even The Rolling Stones would want to see their songs reused by, say, neonazis.
I reckon life + 30 would be enough. Both you and your kids (who knew you) should be able to die in the peaceful knowledge that your will was respected and your family benefited from your art. After that, your material is effectively History and should be fair game.
> That could be pretty cruel. I don’t think even The Rolling Stones would want to see their songs reused by, say, neonazis.
Hard disagree from me. I mean it might hurt to see your work misused but that already happens all the time across different disciplines. The artist behind pepe the frog is not a fan of his work being adopted by white nationalists and that's terrible, but intellectual property law is not gonna stop anonymous people with photoshop on 4chan.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of neonazis trying to turn music I like into their propaganda, but I can't see any reasonable way to fix this via IP law. Fundamentally the problem is not with reprehensible people remixing/reusing/appropriating culture, it's people holding reprehensible beliefs. The solution is to try and change their beliefs.
"But nazis might use it!" is an incredibly weak excuse for perpetual copyright. Creators aren't a special breed of fragile human that needs to be protected from seeing the potential future of their work.
There's a compelling argument for having creators around when their work gets used for nefarious ends - they can add their voice to the condemnation, if they choose.
Besides, in the age of corporate ownership of practically everything (see: TFA), what makes you think creators still have any say in how their work gets used?
A recent article [0] on the difficulty of controlling culture (mostly in the context of people trying to keep their brands from being associated with the alt-right) speaks to the challenges involved in this approach.
The article decribes Matt Furie, the artist behind the Pepe the frog cartoon, and his struggles to control its usage.
> At one point, Furie purchased $45,000 worth of Pepe T-shirts to sell, but he can’t even give them away to thrift stores because he is horrified at the prospect of white supremacists proudly wearing them. Unable to rehabilitate Pepe’s image, Furie killed the frog off in a comic—but by that point, he’d effectively lost control of Pepe’s image. Furie would go on to sue InfoWars’ Alex Jones, who had been using a Pepe image to sell posters. (Jones used the lawsuit to increase the price of the posters—eventually, InfoWars settled with Furie.)
> Furie’s attorneys estimate they have issued between 75 and 100 successful legal challenges halting the unauthorized use of Pepe. But the damage remains: Despite his best efforts, Furie will forever be associated with a toxic symbol of white supremacy.
It's hard to judge from a distance, but it sounds to me like there is a lot of time, effort, and money being spent trying to enforce rights, and yet it's a game of whack-a-mole where the alt-right never gets the message.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works. If there's no copyright it's easy for anyone to copy the work without paying, so there's no incentive to make works for money. If copyright lasts for the entire lifetime of the author there's no incentive to keep making new works after they've become successful. The ideal term should be long enough to make a profit form the work, but short enough to encourage authors to keep making new works for continual income.
> The ideal term should be long enough to make a profit form the work, but short enough to encourage authors to keep making new works for continual income.
This assumes that profit is the main motivator for all of an artist's life.
I could imagine a songwriter like Dylan getting discouraged if he were to see his work being used to promote products or causes that he despises.
Payment is not the primary incentive for artists to make creative works. The need for payment in order to survive is an obstacle that needs to be overcome so one can pursue their true incentives. If you are the sort of person whose primary motivation is money, becoming an artist is one of the worst paths for achieving that.
> The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works.
Is this true? I know in many cases copyright does the complete opposite as it hinders artists from creating derivative work. Then there is a whole genre of art—folk art; which is arguably the most popular genre—where artists continue to do art where the copyright is hardly ever perused, enforced, or if present almost always ignored.
You could just as easily make the case that in the art genre where copyright is the most loose, the amount of art created is the greatest.
Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution:
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
It's neither guaranteed to be an effective or necessary means of achieving that objective, but that is undeniably copyright's stated purpose.
If it's the right of an artist to be allowed to sell their IP to a corporation (which doesn't 'die' in the biological sense), then there needs to be a disconnect between the author/IP holder's health and the duration for which copyright should be given. Personally, I'm in favor of a fixed copyright duration after creation. I would prefer a requirement to offer 'fair' terms, if such a thing could be determined (probably not possible).
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How many socks must they lose?
Before they aren't a child
The answer my friend
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I wonder if this is a sign that the neverending tour is coming to an end. I saw Dylan play for the third time a few years ago and I had a strong sense it was the last time I would ever see him play live.
Universal Music Publishing is a subsidiary of Universal Music Group (UMG), which is a subsidiary of the French conglomerate Vivendi. UMG is one of the big three global music publishers, behind Sony Music but in front of Warner Music.
"Terms were not disclosed, but a source tells Variety that the deal was easily in nine figures. Since 80% of Stevie Nicks’ publishing catalog was acquired by Primary Wave last week for a reported $100 million, the Dylan catalog probably drew a number well above that."
I read that Imagine Dragons sold all their songs for over $100 million as well. ( https://variety.com/2020/music/news/imagine-dragons-publishi... )