In March 1962, a 20-year-old Bob Dylan released his self-titled debut album through Columbia Records, hoping to make a name for himself in the burgeoning folk music scene. Instead, the record was a commercial disappointment, selling approximately 2,500 copies in the United States during its first year.
The disappointing sales reportedly earned Dylan the nickname “Hammond’s Folly,” a reference to Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who had taken a chance on the young musician.
Fifty-eight years later, Dylan’s music would command a dramatically different price. In December 2020, the legendary singer-songwriter sold his entire songwriting catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group in a deal reportedly worth more than $300 million. The contrast was remarkable, particularly for an artist whose early career had given record executives reason to question his commercial potential.
Hammond had discovered Dylan performing in New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene in 1961 and signed him to Columbia Records that October.
“I brought in Dylan and signed him, and this was over everybody’s dead body,” Hammond later recalled in an interview. “One vice president at Columbia was annoyed at me because I had let Joan Baez go to Vanguard, and his son was at Harvard, and he thought the world began and ended with Joan, which it almost did–she was that good. But Vanguard offered her more money than I did—I decided I didn’t like her manager, who was Al Grossman. […] I must say that his first records didn’t sell all that much, but he got an awful lot of attention.”
The following month, Dylan recorded his debut album in just two sessions, performing traditional folk and blues songs alongside two original compositions, “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody.”
“Dylan was a born rebel, and I figured that, you know, Dylan could capture an audience of kids that Columbia had lost years before,” Hammond told NPR.
Although the record showcased his distinctive voice, harmonica playing, and guitar work, it failed to make much of an impression on the charts.
But Dylan’s breakthrough was just around the corner.
His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, arrived in 1963 and introduced songs including “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” The record established Dylan as one of the most important new voices in American folk music. Over the following decades, he transformed popular songwriting with classics including “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
“I play the guitar wherever I find one,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1968. “But I try to write the song when it comes. I try to get it all … ’cause if you don’t get it all, you’re not gonna get it. So the best kinds of songs you can write are in motel rooms and cars. . . places which are all temporary. ‘Cause you’re forced to do it. Rather, it lets you go into it.”
His influence extended far beyond his own recordings, with artists including Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and Adele finding success interpreting his compositions. In 2016, Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first songwriter to win the prestigious honor.
Four years later, Universal acquired the publishing rights to more than 600 songs spanning nearly six decades of his career. Although the financial terms were not officially disclosed, reports valued the agreement at more than $300 million, making it one of the music industry’s most significant catalog acquisitions.
For Dylan, the deal represented an extraordinary financial milestone in a career that began with a record hardly anybody bought.
And for Hammond, whose faith in the young singer had once inspired an unflattering nickname, history ultimately delivered a very different verdict. The artist once dismissed as a costly mistake became one of the most influential songwriters of all time, with a catalog worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Related: Richard Branson sold records by mail in 1970 to launch Virgin; 36 years later, he pledged $3 billion of airline profits to clean energy
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