Twisted Sisters vocalist Dee Snider was the owner of a catalogue of 69 songs including smashing hits as “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” among others. In 2015, he sold all of them to Universal Music Publishing Group. He explained in an interview with Eddie Trunk (transcribed by Blabbermouth) that it was a very good deal for him.
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“They look at its annual income, and then they offer you multiple [years of payment at once] – say, ‘We will give you seven years, 10 years, 14 years…’ This is the negotiation.
“And the appeal of that is when you’re in – this isn’t bragging, rich rock star; sorry, but I’ve worked hard for that – but you’re in your 40-50% tax bracket. The money that you get each year goes in there. When you sell it, you sell it as a capital gain, so you’re only paying 20% instead of 50%.
“So you get a multiple of 10, 12 years, then you’re only gonna pay 20% tax on the money instead of paying nearly half of it. And you sort of weigh it up and you look at your life expectancy.
“Plus, you can say about a song, ‘Oh, I expect it to do good forever.’ But, you know – it may, it may not. You have up years, you have down years. If you take the money, you can invest it.
“And so now you’ve got an actual almost set income stream coming from your investment, and you’re paying much less taxes. So there’s a reason to do it at a certain point in your career. The time not to do it is when you’re in your 20s. The time to do it is when you’re retirement age.”
About being broke in the 1990s, and writing his biography telling it sucked, he added:
“I bottomed out in the ’90s – I was dead broke. If I had been made an offer for anything, for nothing, I would have sold. But there was zero interest – zero. [That stuff was thought of as] buried and over. No one saw it coming back.
“Metal was a dirty word. You couldn’t touch my catalog with a 10-foot pole – thankfully, because I would have [done it for] pennies [on the dollar]. Because I was broke.”
