Before this past Christmas, Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody” was far from one of his most-streamed songs; neither are most of the tracks from Dylan’s 1962 debut album. But all that changed over the holiday season, when “Song to Woody” jumped from an average of 4,000 streams a day to a robust 55,000. And that’s merely one example of what you might call the Chalamet Effect on Dylan’s catalog.
Long before filming on A Complete Unknown even began, those involved in Dylan’s records and publishing wondered what impact a film starring Timothée Chalamet as the bard would have on his streaming and record sales. According to Marc Cimino, Global COO of Universal Music Publishing, the thought was on the company’s mind when it was considering buying Dylan’s entire songwriting catalog (which it did, in 2020, for an undisclosed but surely huge sum).
“We knew this movie was already in development,” says Cimino. “So we knew we were buying into a catalog that was going to be connected to an A-list director and up-and-coming actor. We made a projection on what the earnings are today and what they were going to do [thanks to a possible movie]. It was definitely a factor.”
The long-term effect is too early to gauge, but it’s clear that the gamble has paid off. Since A Complete Unknown opened on Christmas day, the combination of critical acclaim, impressive box office returns ($70 million as of last week), and new attention from Chalamet’s fanbase has helped give Dylan’s catalog a noticeable bump.
According to Spotify data shared with Rolling Stone, Dylan’s songs got about one million streams per day a year ago; thanks to the movie, that number is now closer to 4 million. Streams of his overall catalog have jumped 100 percent. Newcomers to his body of work have increased 110 percent, and in that category are now three times the number of women than in the past. “Timothée has that demo, and it’s maybe not a complete shocker that that would happen,” says Richard Story, president of the Commercial Music Group at Sony Music Entertainment. “But it was a great opportunity that it did.”
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The week after the movie opened, digital and physical Dylan album sales nearly doubled, with Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (both part of the film’s narrative) and his original Greatest Hits leading the way. And “Song to Woody” — the first song we see Chalamet sing in the film, in a pivotal scene where he meets his hero Woody Guthrie in a hospital room — wasn’t the only deep-cut beneficiary. When the actor guest-hosted and guest-sang on Saturday Night Live in January, he performed three songs, including “Three Angels,” a spoken-word track off New Morning that’s the farthest thing from Dylan’s best-known or most accessible song. After the show, the song’s streams briefly vaulted from 1,000 streams a day to 20,000.
According to a source close to the Dylan camp, the idea of introducing Dylan to those born this century was part but not all of the strategy. “We’re not looking at the metrics,” says the source. “Bob doesn’t care. Like everything we do, our hopes were that [the film] would introduce his music not just a newer generation, but to more people. We might introduce Bob Dylan to people who’ve only heard about him or read about him in history books and who may have forgotten or moved on to something else.”
For Universal Publishing, connecting Dylan to Gen Z and millennials was enacted on several fronts. Starting in October, two months before the movie’s release, the company put up a whopping 65 posts on its social media accounts, including a mini-history of “Like a Rolling Stone” and a clip of Chalamet singing “Visions of Johanna.” When the company learned about a Chalamet lookalike contest taking place in New York’s Washington Square Park, it not only sent a film crew but also recruited a songwriter signed to the company to busk songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
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Anyone watching Chalamet’s SNL performance might have also noticed a 30-second ad for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. The Center began seeing an uptick in visitors shortly before the film opened, and museum director Steven Jenkins has since noticed newcomers examining the original covers of Dylan albums that were recreated in A Complete Unknown with Chalamet’s mug. To match a scene in the movie where Dylan visits his record company and is handed a mailbag full of fan letters, the museum now features a collection of actual mail Dylan received (and never opened), in a vintage mailbag to boot. A new exhibit opening Feb. 28, “Stepping into the Unknown,” will make the movie connection even more explicit by spotlighting a Woody Guthrie harmonica, some of Johnny Cash’s letters to Dylan, and the film’s fake album covers.
At the Center, Jenkins has also noticed younger music fans making a connection between Dylan and songs they didn’t even know he wrote. “A lot of the younger visitors here assume ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ is an Adele or Garth Brooks song,” he says. “So it’s fun to see those aha moments, when they say, ‘Oh, he’s that guy, too.’’’
