Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx Sells Song Catalog to Hipgnosis

Jem Aswad
·3 min read

Hipgnosis Songs has acquired the music catalog of Motley Crue bassist and main songwriter Nikki Sixx, one of the most successful rock bands of the 1980s.

Hipgnosis have acquired 100% of Sixx’s writer’s share of PRO income and writer’s Sound Exchange royalties for the cataog, which contains 305 songs. Further details were not disclosed.

With hits like “Looks That Kills,” Shout at the Devil,” “Home Sweet Home” and “Girls, Girls, Girls,” the group has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and scored nine Top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart. The band released its debut album “Too Fast for Love” in 1981 and undertook a farewell tour in 2015, but reconsidered and announced a reunion tour for this year, which has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Merck Mercuriadis, Founder of Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited and The Family (Music) Limited, said: “Mötley Crüe were single-handedly responsible for the Los Angeles rock explosion of the 1980s paving the way for everyone that came in their wake and putting rock music back onto Top 40 radio and the pop charts. Nikki was the catalyst and architect of all of that and we are delighted to welcome him to the Hipgnosis family.”

Sixx (real name: Frank Ferranna, second from left above) said:“Merck and his team at Hipgnosis are an artist friendly forward thinking company. Looking to the future I am grateful that they will treat my music with great care and respect.”

Hipgnosis Songs recently released its annual report, which showed its revenues soaring in its first full year of business, climbing to $81 million in the 12 month period ended in March 2020 from around $8.9 million in the preceding period. The firm, which has been on an unprecedented acquisition binge of hit songwriter and producer catalogs — been buying up catalogs by hitmakers ranging from Timbaland and Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart to Jack Antonoff and Jeff Bhasker — began trading on the London Stock Exchange in July of 2018. Between March 2019 and March 2020, the company spent nearly $700 million to acquire 42 catalogs.

In the report, Mercuriadis notes, “When compared with the three major song companies, we have achieved between 7% and 12.5% of their revenue on between 0.5% and 0.9% of their number of songs.” This is a result of the group’s highly selective investments, which he summarizes in the report thus: “All of our songs have a proven track record and we do not speculate on new songs regardless of the past performance of the songwriter, producer or artist. These proven hit Songs produce reliable, predictable and uncorrelated cash flows which are highly investible.”

 

 

 

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