“New York is a-changin’,” Zohran Mamdani quipped in a social media post on Tuesday night, shortly before voters elected the democratic socialist the next mayor of New York City.
But Mr. Mamdani apparently didn’t have permission to use the song he wanted — Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “The Times They Are a-Changin’” — to underscore his point.
In a minute-long montage video posted in the waning hours of Election Day, the 34-year-old candidate is seen handing out leaflets, shaking hands with voters and walking the streets with Senator Bernie Sanders while delivering lines like “We all want more money in our pocket, more dignity in our lives, more rest and joy in this wild, beautiful city.”
Throughout the video, Mr. Dylan’s voice, guitar and harmonica can be prominently heard, performing his famed protest song, which begins:
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
At the end of the video, as Mr. Mamdani says, “This, my friends, was your movement,” the words “Paid for by Zohran for NYC” are displayed on the screen.
On the social media platform X, Mr. Mamdani posted it at 7:48 p.m., saying: “Our final ad just dropped.”
But by Wednesday, the video had disappeared from X, with a note saying, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright holder.” (On Instagram, it remained as of Wednesday afternoon.)
The campaign’s use of the song was apparently denied permission by the Universal Music Publishing Group, or UMPG, the company that purchased Mr. Dylan’s songwriting rights from him in 2020 for more than $300 million. The deal jolted an already-heated market in the music industry for artists’ music rights. In the years since Mr. Dylan’s deal, major music companies and private investors poured billions of dollars into acquiring the song catalogs of Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Sting, Justin Timberlake, Stevie Nicks, Miles Davis and many others.
In a statement, a spokesman for UMPG said: “As a longstanding policy, we do not license Bob Dylan compositions for projects involving political figures.”
A spokesman from the Mamdani campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
According to two people briefed on the episode, who were not authorized to speak about it, the Mamdani campaign had approached UMPG recently with a request to license the song, but the company denied the use.
The circumstances of the takedown from X were not immediately clear. Universal declined to comment on the specifics; in the fast-moving world of social media, takedown notices are sometimes sent automatically by copyright owners after a usage is detected electronically.
Unauthorized uses of popular songs have been a hazard for artists and their lawyers for decades. But they have become particularly common in recent election cycles, with Donald Trump frequently using songs without permission at his campaign rallies. Among the artists who have complained — in and out of court — about those uses are Neil Young, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones.
As part of its deal for Mr. Dylan’s catalog, Universal acquired 100 percent of the rights to his songs, giving the company the power to make decisions about how they are used.
But for years, Mr. Dylan confounded critics and fans by sometimes giving permission for his work to appear in commercial form. In a Victoria’s Secret commercial in 2004, his song “Love Sick” was used, and Mr. Dylan appeared on camera, interspersed with shots of a scantily clad model.
And a decade before, Mr. Dylan allowed one of his songs to be sung by Richie Havens in an ad for the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, a predecessor of the current giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It was “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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