DEE SNIDER Says He Sold His TWISTED SISTER Catalog For 'A Lot Of Money'

During a brand new interview with SiriusXM's Eddie Trunk, Dee Snider spoke about his decision to sell his Snidest Music music publishing catalog of 69 songs — including the classic TWISTED SISTER rock anthems "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock" — to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) in 2015.

The songs in the catalog have been featured in numerous national commercials, films, television and the Broadway musical "Rock Of Ages", which had a three-year residency at the Venetian and then a one-year residency at Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas until January 2017.

Saying that he sold "a major part" of the catalog for "a lot of money," Snider described how the deal was set up. "They look at its annual income, and then they offer you multiple — say, 'We will give you seven years, 10 years, 14 years…'" he said. "This is the negotiation. And the appeal of that is when you're in — this isn't bragging; rich rock star. Sorry. I mean, I've worked hard for that. But you're in your 40-, 50-percent 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 percent instead of 50 percent. So you get a multiple of 10, 12 years, then you're only gonna pay 20-percent 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."

"We're Not Gonna Take It" and "Stay Hungry" were the biggest hit single and album, respectively, in TWISTED SISTER's career. Snider said "We're Not Gonna Take It" is now part of America's cultural fabric. "[It has proven] itself to be a folk song," he said. "It was just in that Steven Spielberg movie, 'Ready Player One'; it was the finale of that movie. Here, all these years later, the big finale of Steven Spielberg's big movie, and the guys holds up a boombox, and the entire battle scene is set to 'We're Not Gonna Take It'."

Snider went on to say that he is now glad he didn't got an offer for the catalog a couple of decades ago when he really needed the money. "I bottomed out in the '90s; I was dead broke," he said. "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."

"We're Not Gonna Take It" has been used in commercials for hotel chain Extended Stay America, Claritin, Walmart, Stanley Steamer and Yaz birth control.

The song's lyrics say in part "Oh you're so condescending/Your gall is never ending/We don't want nothin'/Not a thing from you."

"We're Not Gonna Take It" was first released as a single (with B-side song "You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll") on April 27, 1984. The "Stay Hungry" album was released two weeks later, on May 10, 1984. The single made #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, making it TWISTED SISTER's only Top 40 single, and the song was ranked #47 on VH1's "100 Greatest '80s Songs".

"We're Not Gonna Take It" was written solely by Snider. As influences for the song, he previously cited the glam rock band SLADE, the punk band SEX PISTOLS, and the Christmas carol "O Come, All Ye Faithful".