Nickelback have quietly joined the long list of major acts to cash out of their own back catalogue. Bassist Mike Kroeger confirmed the deal in a new interview with veteran radio host Abe Kanan of “Audacy“, disclosing that the band offloaded the bulk of its rights some time ago.
The subject came up when Kanan floated a valuation, suggesting the catalogue “has to be worth” at least $200 million. Kroeger answered by revealing the sale rather than the sum (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“Well, we found out how much it’s worth, ’cause we did sell 80% of it. [We did that] a couple of years ago.”
He described the experience of watching a body of work get priced:
“It is an interesting thing to try to assign a value to something like that. It’s very interesting. It was a really, really peculiar and interesting process, but we got a good partner and we’re real happy with how it went.”
Kanan then asked whether he had spent the day of the transfer watching his banking app. Kroeger put it in perspective:
“It’s pretty weird. It’s no less weird than walking on stage to a sold-out arena or whatever either. This life has been anything but normal.”
Two points are worth spelling out, because the numbers attached to this story travel faster than the facts.
The $200 million figure came from the interviewer. Kroeger neither confirmed it nor corrected it, and at no stage did he attach a price to the deal. Nothing about the value of the transaction is on the record.
He also did not identify the buyer, referring only to a “good partner”. No terms have been made public, and none of the parties have issued a statement.
Nickelback are late arrivals to a market that has been running hot for several years, as investment funds and major labels compete for ownership of proven, revenue-generating catalogues.
Among heavy music’s recent transactions, Slipknot, once labelmates of Nickelback at Roadrunner, sold a stake in their catalogue last year in a deal rumoured to be worth around $120 million. Red Hot Chili Peppers are reported to have sold their masters this year in a deal put at roughly $300 million. Deftones are also understood to have taken a buyout, though no figures have surfaced.
None of those sums have been confirmed by the artists involved.
The disclosure lands three months out from Everything Under The Sun, Nickelback‘s 11th studio album, due October 30 through Virgin Music Group.
Lead single “Rattle The Cage” arrived earlier this month with a guest turn from John 5, the Mötley Crüe guitarist. The record is the band’s first since 2022’s Get Rollin’.
The gap between albums has not been idle time.
“Hate To Love: Nickelback“, directed by Leigh Brooks, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023 before a theatrical run across 30 countries and a streaming debut on Veeps the following spring. It reached Netflix in June 2024, where it spent weeks in the platform’s Global Top 10 and found by far its largest audience. The film tackles the band’s odd position as one of the most commercially successful and most publicly mocked rock acts of their era, with Ryan Reynolds and Billy Corgan among those making the case for the defence.
“The Get Rollin’” world tour ran alongside it, breaking attendance records across multiple markets.
Nickelback have sold close to 60 million albums worldwide, hold billions of streams across platforms and count more than 50 million monthly listeners — figures that go some way to explaining why an 80 percent stake in their catalogue was worth buying.
