Last October, I did a podcast on Bob Dylan selling the publishing rights to his music for a reported $300 million (though some sources say the number is closer to $400M) to Universal Music Group. I combined Fermi estimating, shady looking websites (shout out to Kworb.net!), and fun puns to try to understand why a company would pay such eye-popping sums for an asset that would almost certainly drop in value over time. It was one of my favorite essays to write and I highly recommend it if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet. Today, I thought I’d take a look at a slightly more contemporary artist and see if the same logic holds or if the deal (and the strategy to maximize revenue) changes with each artist. 
That artist? Slipknot, the nine-piece Nu Metal band from Iowa, “sold a majority stake in their catalog to HarbourView Equity Partners, the company confirmed exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday”. We don’t know the exact numbers – the percentage that Slipknot will retain or the price for their catalog, so, in order for us to look at this through a business lens, we have to assume what the deal looks like.
Per an iHeart Radio article from this week, “Slipknot own their publishing (via Sony Music Publishing), but the band’s master recording catalogue is controlled by Warner Music Group, which acquired their label Roadrunner Records back in 2007. Because of this, only the band’s royalty income was being offered for sale.” For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that the master recording split with the band is 75/25 with the label retaining 75%. I’m also going to assume that all live performances and demos fall under the same heading when calculating royalty splits.
The Hollywood Reporter estimated the catalog to be worth $120M. Let’s take that number as gospel and say that Slipknot sold 2/3rds of their catalog for $80M. Why 2/3rds? The article says that a majority was sold – this number could be anywhere from 51% to 99%. 66% is close to the middle of this. Also, and this is important to note for the uninformed, Slipknot is a huge band. They have eight current members and nine former members, so 17 in total. We don’t know if all or only some of the members agreed to this deal – some members may have decided to retain their royalties and not sell to HarbourView. The other thing to note is that, unlike most bands that have one or two primary songwriters – Beatles, Stones, Police – the songwriting credits for Slipknot, especially on the early records, were split equally. Because of this, a method to determine the split would be to take 17 multiple it by 2, and get 34%. I can assume that the easiest way to resolve this would have been to give each member and their families 2% of the remaining equity and sell the rest. Again, I have no insider knowledge but, for modeling purposes, let’s assume that this is what happened.
So the question is, is 2/3rds of Slipknot’s catalog worth $80M? HarbourView is buying both sets of rights – the publishing rights and master recording royalties. It’s important, again, here to note that the master recordings are still owned by WMG, which bought Slipknot’s label nearly two decades ago. The majors streams of revenue included in the deal would be compositional rights (radio, streams, etc) and a portion of master recording rights (whenever the master recording is used or sold – album sales, streams, radio, sync rights). It doesn’t say in the THR article what songs or albums are or are not included. The article mentions 11 albums, so I’m assuming this includes studio albums and live albums. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to say that this deal includes 100 songs across all studio albums, though they will also receive streaming revenue from streamed live albums and demos. I’m also going to assume that the deal goes into effect immediately and that the band does not have a right of refusal that would be used to veto possible deals that they find would not be in the best interest of the band. 
Unlike just throwing your money into the S & P 500 or buying a T-Bill, managing musical rights is an active investment – you have to track contracts, pitch joint ventures, track what songs are used where, and maintain relationships with the musical artist themselves. Because of all this, the expectation is for the returns to be higher as well. It’s likely that HarbourView will require a dedicated team to handle this account. I estimated a team of 20-40 for Bob at a cost of 4-8M; Given the smaller catalog and cultural impact of Slipknot, I’m going to estimate a million dollars for the Slipknot team.
The expectations, then look like this: a normal passive investment of 80M, assuming a 5% return would be 4M a year, in perpetuity. Assuming that the returns should be closer to 10%, and assuming the million dollars for the team, it would be reasonable to expect 9M every year, forever, for this deal to be successful. There are, of course, complications to this when looking at taxes and risk, but, for now, we’ll use these as simplified baselines. Onto the revenues.
Unsurprisingly, Slipknot’s revenue streams look a lot different than Bob Dylan’s. Probably the biggest (and certainly the most surprising to me), were the streaming numbers. Per Kworb.net (KWORB!), Slipknot has right around 10B streams on Spotify. Assuming that a billion streams is the equivalent of 4M dollars, the cumulative revenue would be 40M. Assuming that Spotify has been in operation for 7 years, this totals roughly $6M a year. 
How is that 6M split between the parties? Let’s say that 80% of this goes to the master rights holders, and 20% goes to the compositional rights holders. Out of 4.8M, Slipknot would receive 25% or 1.2M and then 1.2M for compositional rights, which they split between the members who wrote the song. For the sake of simplicity, we are going to assume that every song was written collectively. 
So the Slipknot part of this pie would be 2.4M, assuming our 1/3rd that is retained by the band, this would be a revenue stream of 1.6M for HarbourView. 
Because Slipknot have relatively few covers, I’m not going to calculate the compositional rights they will receive when they are covered. Unlike my assumptions with Dylan, that his songs will live forever, I’m going to apply a depreciated cash flow model to get a more realistic number than the $6M per year. This is simulating the relative decline in popularity of the band over time. Per Chat GPT, the discount rate they would use would be 10% for an “average” musical group. Because of its clear influence in the Nu Metal scene and longevity of the copyright (more on this later), I’m going to use a lower discount (7%) and this gives us an average revenue stream per year of roughly $1.2M USD. We’ll assume that Spotify is a third of this market, making this stream $3.6M per year. The average yearly breakdown then looks like this, post-HarbourView deal:
80% of 3.6M =  2.88M, with Warner Music Group receiving 75% or 2.16M and HarbourView and Slipknot splitting the rest; HarbourView gets 480K. 
20% of 3.6M = 720K, with 480K going to HarbourView.
So HarbourView’s expected revenue stream is 960K a year from streaming services. 
Let’s move now to satellite radio.
There are a handful of stations where I can make an argument for Slipknot’s music being played on semi-heavy rotation. It’s difficult to predict into the future what this revenue stream will be because satellite radio stations churn pretty frequently, but, for the sake of projections, let’s say that there are 5 stations that play Slipknot songs on average 3 times a day. Using the $30 per spin that we used last time, that takes us to a stream of roughly $165K a year. I’m actually not going to discount this. The reason is that satellite radio allows for multiple formats – so as a band moves from contemporary rock to classic rock, their spins don’t diminish - and I think that Slipknot’s place in this niche genre of music is cemented, so I’m going to use current numbers and project these into the future. 
The split will be similar to the above, so:
80% going to the master recording holder, which is then split with the band.
	Before the HarbourView deal, WMG would get 75% of 132K or 99K and the band would get 33K. 
	Assuming HarbourView gets 2/3rds, they get 22K each year.
20% going to the compositional rights holder, in this case the songwriters. We’ll assume all band members are co-writers and all songs fall under this agreement.
	After HarbourView split, .2 * 165K would be 33K. 2/3rds of this would be another 22K.
As it was with Bob, should Slipknot ever get their own channel, this could drive this stream up substantially. I think the relatively small catalog at present makes this less likely but not out of the question, should the band continue to record new music (though those songs would most likely not be covered under this deal).
For terrestrial radio, the numbers are a bit harder to find. Because of the limited playlists and relatively few FM stations that have a heavy metal, Nu Metal, or Hard Rock format, I’m going to say, and this is a swag, that the revenue stream from this would be the same as for satellite radio (above).
We’ll say this is 88K per year. 
So for streaming, terrestrial radio, and satellite radio, the cumulative revenues are probably around per $1,048,000/year for HarborView.
I believe that the streaming numbers I included above, with Spotify at a third of the market, takes into account Apple Music, Pandora, Tidal (and possibly Vevo). This leaves out YouTube. I’m going to assume this is a separate stream.
Slipknot is huge on YouTube. They currently have nearly 9.5M subscribers (compared to Bob’s 1.6M). What is the value of this? Let’s assume that the number of subscribers translates to 200M views per year. If the average length per view is 3 minutes, you have 600M minutes per year. At $8,000 per million minutes, this is a total of $4.8M per year. This number does not include any payments that YouTube premium may make to high-profile artists for their content. I’m going to say that this bumps us up to the same 6M as above – part of this is the believe that YouTube is a permanent platform and that the number of subscribers using YouTube premium will increase in the future. Assuming our same discount as above, this nets HarbourView 960K per year.
So we’re at roughly 2M per year. Looks like we have some ground to cover. 
Before we look at touring and other possible revenue sources, let’s hear a word from our sponsor.
Touring is the lifeblood of any contemporary rock band. The last world tour that Slipknot held, between 2019 and 2021, had a total of 84 dates. Most of these look to have been arenas. To get a sense of what the performance royalties would be, we need to estimate ticket prices, tickets sold, and number of songs that Slipknot performs under this agreement. Assuming Slipknot plays a set entirely of songs under this agreement, and that each ticket is $150, and that they sell 12K seats a show, with 5% of gross sales going to live royalty rights, this amounts to 90K per show. I’m going to take the world tour and divide by 3 – this accounts for them not touring every year. This assumes that Slipknot will be touring consistently for a very long time and that new fans will find their ways to these shows – more on this later. Assume 28 shows per year and 90K per show, we have a total of 2.5M, with 1.68M going to HarborView.
Because the number of Slipknot covers is relatively few, I’m going to assume the royalty rates for performance royalties when other bands cover Slipknot is zero. Obviously, if someone hits it big with a cover of Duality, and then tours on this, this could also be a chunk of change, both in radio/streaming/satellite radio revenue but live royalties too.
Let’s add this to the streams of revenue going to HarborView: 3.68M per year. 
Let’s also look at physical media sales. I assume that, like Bob’s catalog, that this will not be a huge revenue stream but we should include it here for completion’s sake. Per THR, Slipknot has 11 records, including studio and live albums. Assuming that if the band releases more albums after this deal that they will fall outside of it, we can estimate the number of albums sold over the next 70 years. Assuming that the total copies they sell are an average 100,000 a year, across the entire catalog, and that the average cost per copy is $25 across vinyl, CD, cassette, digital album, etc, that equates to 2.5M per year. Assume a 50% split with the retailer, and that’s a 1.25M a year. The split for this would be slightly different than above – In the US, the songwriter or publisher has a fixed rate per song of 12 cents per song. 100,000 * 12 songs a record * .12 a song = 144K, 2/3rds being 96K.
The mechanical royalties would break down similar to the above. 25% of 1M (1.25M*.8) a year would be 250K, with 2/3rds being around 167K.
We’re at 3.847M.
There’s a big question that looms over this deal but, before we get to that, what else could HarborView do to make this a good investment?
Let’s start with the most obvious places and go from there.
The first place is sync fees. Sync and licensing fees can be extremely lucrative. Movies, TV, Video Games – All buy syncs to use in their products. Like I mentioned in my previous episode, the market for syncs is heating up, as more bands have sold their extensive catalogs to private equity and record labels. 
How does Slipknot fit into this? The value of Slipknot’s catalog is relative to how valued their music is in the minds of the creators of the art that wants to use their music. Unlike Bob, who is a singular cultural icon, Slipknot is usually grouped with Nu Metal bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and System of a Down. While purists may complain about the label Nu Metal, it’s a good short hand for understanding the types of projects that would want to license Slipnot’s music. 
It's very difficult to estimate the value of this catalog when it comes to these rights. Bob Dylan is nearly synonymous with the folk scene of the 1960s and counter-culture in general. Slipknot is one of a handful of bands that are titans in a relatively niche form of music. 
Because of this, Slipknot will likely have fewer placement opportunities and draw a lower fee due to higher competition than Dylan. 
Let’s estimate the amount of placements and their likely frequency.
Movies – I’m going to estimate the sync fees in a major movie to be 200K. This is a little more than a quarter for the rate I estimated for Dylan – I think it accurately reflects the competition for syncs for the music that Slipknot makes, while respecting their cultural clout. I’m going to estimate that they are able to make 2 placements a year. The 400K is most likely split 80/20 with the master rights holder receiving the bulk of the revenue. Why is this? The Bob Dylan deal between Sony and UMG was almost certainly going to be very high value for both sides wanting to maximize their revenues by working together. They both likely had huge teams in order to handle this account, given the size of Bob’s catalog. Both sides also had connections that could get their foot in the door in terms of syncs – Sony owns a movie studio, for example. You also had, because of the number of covers of Bob’s songs, more ways for UMG to make money than simply licensing the master recordings – in some cases, it was actually in their best interest NOT to do this.
The relationship between WMG and HarbourView is different here – the clout is likely on the WMG side having a larger team and more inside connections. Also, historically speaking, the master rights holder receives the bulk of the sync fees. 
So assuming that the total stream here is 400K per year, 80% would go to the master rights holders, WMG, and of that, 25% would be split between the band and HarbourView, with HarbourView getting 2/3rds of 20%, or about 50K. 
HarbourView would also get 2/3rds of 20% from the compositional rights or another 50K.
TV Ads – I don’t think we’re likely to see Slipknot’s music on a Super Bowl ad so we’re left with ad campaigns of a non-super variety. Unlike Bob, I don’t see a ton of placements for commercials for Slipknot. The Times they are a’changin for Rolex? Sure. A Hard Rain’s a’ gonna fall for Gortex? Absolutely. Who would license People = Shit? For that reason, I’m going to estimate this to be one or two a year. We’ll say this is about 300K a year. The same logic applies – it works out to 80K for HarbourView. 
TV Shows – I think the placement rate for TV will be lower but that there will be more opportunities. If we have say 10 placements a year at 60K a placement, we have 600K total, 160K for HarbourView.
Video Games – If there is one area where I can assume that Slipknot will be able to outshine Bob Dylan, other than Spotify, it’s here. Like TV shows, I think the placement rate will be lower than Bob but the number of placements are likely to be much higher. I’m going to estimate this to be 300K for each title and I will say that the average number of titles each year will be 3. HarbourView’s cut would be $250K.
The sync rates add up to 590K. 
We’re at 4.437M dollars.
Unlike Bob, I think Slipknot is well positioned for a couple of opportunities that, should they become available, could shift things considerably. 
Something I forgot to include in my earlier episode that I will include here: sample clearance. Per whosampled.com, Bob and Slipknot have been sampled about the same number of times. Of course, Bob has about 10 times the number of covers that Slipknot does. Why does this matter to our conversation? Typically, most musicians have to clear samples in order to include them on records. The law is famously murky on when fair use begins and ends, so for the sake of our revenue streams today, I’m going to note that this is another revenue stream that Slipknot (and HarbourView) should be capturing but that putting a number on this is going to be difficult. This stream incudes royalties when said songs are played on the radio, sold as part of an album, or licensed themselves for film, TV, or video games. HarbourView’s cut of this is likely quite small today but wanted to place it here in the off-chance that a song samples Slipknot and then becomes a huge hit.
Because I didn’t break down the difference in the earlier episode I’ll do it here – a sample is when you include a master recording of someone else’s work in your composition. Some famous examples of this are: MC Hammer using Rick James’ Superfreak for Can’t Touch This, Mariah Carey sampling the Tom Tom Clubs’ Genius of Love, and Vanilla Ice sampling Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure. A cover is where new music is created by a musician to play or adapt another song. Johnny Cash countrifying Nine Inch Nail’s Hurt or, as I mentioned in the last episode, Alien Ant Farm covering Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson.
I think Slipknot’s music dovetails very nicely with video games, especially first-person shooters, which tend to have atmospheric, aggressive soundtracks. If there is a game that utilizes their music, and it falls under this deal, and they receive a royalty deal – ie. a fraction of sales for each copy sold (and that game is a huge hit), this is a revenue stream that could persist for quite a long time. To give a hypothetical, say a developer is making a game and wants to do a retro-FPS and taps Slipknot to do the music. They use a mix of their old music and new music created for the game – let’s say it’s half and half. The game sells 5M copies at an average cost of $60. If the sixty dollars is split sixty-forty with retailers and platforms, that’s $36 going to the developers for every copy sold. If the band gets 5% of first dollar gross (let’s say that their soundtrack is a big driver of why people are buying the game), this is a 9M pool of money. Some of it would have to go to WMG but HarbourView would also get a cut.
If the soundtrack becomes a physical product and sells a significant number of copies, this also would be an additional revenue stream from this game – ala Quake – where the artist (in that case Trent Reznor) continues to get paid years after the release of the game.
Slipknot has been around for 30 years and, given the popularity of their YouTube and Spotify channels, have a lot of fans who are a lot younger than that. There is a question as to when they are going to stop touring (more on that later) but a relatively new way that legacy acts are making money are virtual concerts. A recent example is Abba, the Swedish pop legends. Per the website Music Business Worldwide, “Abba Voyage generated $113m in 2024 as demand for virtual concert series stayed strong in third year”. Slipknot is not Abba but it’s hard not to be impressed with these numbers. Could Slipknot do something similar? Abba is beloved in Europe in a way that I, as an American, often have difficulty understanding. The cost of this production is high – there would likely need to be a custom-built club, with live performers, both on and off stage, at ever show. Slipknot is from Iowa – there’s not a natural city for them in same way that London is one of the major cities in Europe. Most of Slipknot’s album sales, per their Wikipedia page, are from North America, so they would need to find a place in the states. You want to maximize access to tourists, so that leaves us with (probably) a short list of New York, Chicago, Las Vegas or Los Angeles. None of these cities feel like natural fits to me but let’s say that this could in fact be done and that after all the deals and rights are paid out, when adding in merch and other revenues, less taxes, that they end up making something like 1.5M a year. This assumes that this venture doesn’t cannibalize the touring revenue. 
Another route to go would be to partner with a pre-existing organization. Halloween Horror Night, in Florida alone, brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. A recent Forbes article (which is behind a paywall) estimates it to be nearly 600M. If the band partners with HHN for a piece of the door, and say, gets 3%, that’s 18M. This partnership is unlikely to last the entirety of the length of the deal due to changing tastes but this is a decent chunk of change for relatively little work. HarbourView could also do a Slipknot-themed pop-up haunted house but it’s unlikely to raise this much revenue and would likely require a lot more work.
I mentioned above that we don’t know when Slipknot is going to stop touring. I didn’t know this before I started writing this essay but the band is down to a single original member – the Clown. There could be a deal where the band is sunsetted at a specific time or if some unknown conditions are reached but, assuming that this is not the case, I don’t know how difficult it would be to continue to cycle members and they could tour, presuming they can find an audience, forever. Foreigner, a band that was formed in 1976, is currently touring with no original members. I don’t know why this wouldn’t work for Slipknot – they all wear masks onstage; how would we know?
If you’ve been following my math and logic through all of this you may be asking yourself, “if these numbers are accurate, why would HarbourView do this deal? Wouldn’t they be losing money”? Three points – 1). It’s very unlikely that they will lose money. I’ll explain this before going onto point number two. Taking the streams that are, barring a force majeure, a lock, HarbourView would make their money back, on paper, in less than twenty years. I say on paper because a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Private equity doesn’t get into risky investments, for tens of millions of dollars, to break even.
2). The value of this deal will take a very long time to reach zero. Part of the royalty streams are tied to each of the individual songwriters. Unlike Bob Dylan’s deal with UMG, where his songs will enter the public domain 70 years from his death, because Slipknot has seemingly split its songwriting rights equally, this stream does not enter public domain, where royalties do not need to be paid, until 70 years after the last member of the songwriting team passes away. It’s very likely that, 100 years from now, HarbourView will still be making money from this deal. My discount rate of 7% is quite high for a musical group and some of that is due to the unusually long lifespan of the deal.
3). Most importantly, we’ve assumed that the structure of the deal will remain constant. It’s extremely rare but there is a possibility that Slipknot is able to negotiate the rights back to their master recordings from Warner Music Group, which bought Slipknot’s record company, Roadrunner, in 2007. Should this happen, and, because Slipknot retained some portion of their rights under the HarbourView deal, it would benefit both the band and HarbourView. It’s very likely that under the HarbourView’s deal that there is a provision such that if Slipknot gets their masters back, that they would be split in the same way that the overall deal is, which I’m assuming to be 2/3rds for HarbourView and 1/3rd for the band. If WMG currently owns 75%, then the new split would be that the band gets a third, while Harbourview gets 2/3rds. This would change the above calculations significantly in HarbourView’s favor, should the master ownership be reverted to the band. 
Assuming that doesn’t happen. Where are we?
Some of this is easy money – specifically the streaming, terrestrial radio, satellite radio, and YouTube money. The sync money will be a bit harder to come by. I think whether the deal makes sense or not will rely on a few key factors – how likely it will be for HarbourView to drastically run up the syncs to levels I’m not estimating. This is possible but, realistically, I think the saturated market is going to make things tough. I also think partnerships will be key – the HHN idea is just one possible way to leverage the royalties to make decent money. I think the theatrics of the band would fit into this very nicely and, should experiences like this continue to grow in size, finding avenues to place the band and their music should also prove easier. 
I touched on it earlier but the law changing to favor the artist could also drastically change the contours of the deal. The legal system in the United States is slow and it often takes years, if not decades, for it to catch up to technological or cultural changes. For example, I mentioned the changing rates for mechanical royalties on the last episode. These only apply to physical copies. When was the last time you bought a physical CD? Anyhoo, should there be a push to give musical artists back ownership of their masters, by law, this could benefit both parties, but especially HarbourView, provided they accounted for this in their contract with the band. 
If my numbers and assumptions are correct, HarbourView needs a few million dollars more each year to make the deal look good. I mentioned it last episode but potentially lucrative areas like NFTs or Tik Tok are just now starting to be viable. It’s very difficult to predict what this is going to look like, in terms of revenue, over the life of the deal but technological changes are going to increase with time and opportunities to place the music should increase as well. I don’t know if it has been replicated since but per a PC Gamer article from 2020, writer Andy Chalk reported that Travis Scott made $20M pre-tax for his virtual performance in the video game Fortnite. Slipknot has their own concert series, Knotfest. Could they do something similar: have a virtual option for those who are unlikely to attend in real life? Could they make 2-3M a year from this? Yeah. I’d say that with a little effort that could be done. 
On the downside, there is always the risk that a band fades much faster than suspected. I think this is unlikely with this band given the devotion and relatively youth of its fanbase – I’m buoyed by the fact that they plan on continuing to release music, even after this deal, so they aren’t riding into the sunset with a bag of money. Given that the deal will have an extraordinary long lifespan, I think it could be lucrative, with a little work and barring unexpected disaster, for a very long time.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.