Dee Snider of Twisted Sister opens up about the band’s royalties: “Our royalty checks are a joke”

Dee Snider of the glam metal and hard rock icon Twisted Sister has been publicly calling out the modern music business for quite some time now. For example Spotify has had it’s fair share of comments by Snider considering their ethical treatment of royalties.

Now Snider has opened up in an interview with The Metal Voice about the royalty checks considering Twisted Sister’s music. Snider tells that his band didn’t receive a penny in album royalties until 1998.

“Twisted Sister didn’t start receiving any album sales royalties until we recorded ‘Heroes are Hard to Find’ for the ‘Strangeland’ soundtrack. In order to get the band to reunite the record label wiped our debt out; that was 1997. The band had been broken up for 10 years, we had sold tens of millions of records and we had not gotten one royalty check.

“Somebody brought it to [Atlantic Records boss] Ahmet Ertegun’s attention that we were still in the red all these years later,” he said. “[T]hey were trying to get us together and said, ‘Ahmet would you please just wipe these guys’ accounts clean? Ahmet, we got enough from them.’ And Ahmet Ertegun probably didn’t even pay attention or know these things but he saw it and said, ‘They paid enough – cleared the debt.’ And so we have been getting royalty checks.”

“The ones we should have gotten [for] those big ones, we never got. In 2001 Napster came out, so a few years later people stopped buying records – so our royalty checks are a joke.”