• Duff McKagan Talks Record Biz, Says GN'R Label Stiffs Him on Royalties [LISTEN]

    Duff McKagan stopped by Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta's podcast recently to talk about his time with Guns N' Roses. The bassist explained some of the financial aspects of the iconic rock band, like the difficulty of getting royalties nowadays and how much the group was paid for its exhaustive, two-year "Use Your Illusion" jaunt in the 1990s. According to Blabbermouth, McKagan has some issues with his former record company. The GN'R back catalog, which includes "Appetite for Destruction" and both "Use Your Illusion" albums, belongs to Universal Music Group. With hits like "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child O' Mine," the collection nets the company plenty of dough, but the musicians responsible for the songs are not as lucky. "It's, like, the second biggest catalog item they have. It sells. In 1994, I'd just gotten sober and I was kind of figuring some stuff out. And our lawyer said, 'We're gonna audit Geffen,' audit our record company. Before that, I lived in this sort of fantasy world that they were our partner in this thing," he said. "We were going out and attacking the world together. Well, they didn't pay us on something like 6 million records. Six million records! That's what we found."
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