LOS ANGELES (CN) — Limp Bizkit, the alternative metal band that rose to fame in the late 1990s, sued Universal Music Group on Tuesday seeking to rescind their 2000 contract and claiming they are owned at least $200 million in royalties and profits.
Frontman Fred Durst says in a complaint filed in federal court in Los Angeles that the band hadn’t received any royalties from Universal ever until he retained new representation this year who discovered that the company had about $1 million sitting in Limp Bizkit accounts that it hadn’t paid them.
This discovery prompted the band to review their royalty statements only to discover that Universal hadn’t provided a detailed accounting of its recoupment costs for the advances Limp Bizkit purportedly received and had claimed these recoupment costs for an extraordinarily long time, according to the complaint.
Universal, the band claims, also hadn’t issued them any royalty statements at all for certain periods, including those during which they were selling millions of albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“UMG’s failure to issue royalty statements in particular from 1997-2004 — the height of the band’s fame and during periods in which they made record-breaking sales — with respect to its most popular albums suggests that UMG was intentionally concealing the true amount of sales, and therefore royalties, due and owing to Limp Bizkit in order to unfairly keep those profits for itself,” Durst and the band say.
They also claim Universal’s royalty statements fail to reflect the band’s “massive explosion” in popularity over the past five or so years. So far this year, Limp Bizkit songs have been streamed 450 million times, according to the complaint, and the former owner of Flip Records, the band’s original label that still gets a cut of royalties from Universal, told Durst that he had been receiving millions of dollars in recent years.
Representatives of Universal didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
According to the complaint, one Universal executive told the band that a one-off mistake with a new software program caused them not to get paid the royalties that were sitting as payable in their account. However, that explanation doesn’t add up because the same had happened with a separate Flawless Records account of Durst with Universal, the band claims.
Another Universal agent told them that the record company had paid them about $43 million in recoupable advances, which is why they weren’t entitled to any royalty payments until recently, but the company hadn’t provided the band with any accounting to substantiate this amount, according to the complaint.
In fact, the band claims, the royalty statements they do have only indicate that Universal has only charged them $13 million in recoupable advances, indicating that the $43-million figure is fraudulently inflated.
Because Universal has materially breached its recording agreement with them, Limp Bizkit now wants to rescind this and two other related agreements with the company, which they say means that Universal owes them more than $200 million.
“It is clear that defendants did not intend to make any royalty payments unless or until plaintiffs took action on their own, and have implemented a system designed to prevent artists, including plaintiffs, from obtaining their rightful royalties by default,” the band claims. “This is in material breach of the Flip agreement, the recording agreement, and the Flawless agreement, and has wrongfully defrauded plaintiffs out of millions of dollars of royalties and/or profits owed to them.”
Limp Bizkit is known as a so-called nu metal band that mixes elements of heavy metal with hip-hop and other genres. The band from Jacksonville, Florida, has sold about 45 million records. Its third album, “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water,” released in 2000, was the first rock record ever to sell a million copies in a single week.
The band’s claims against Universal include rescission, and alternatively breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, breach of fiduciary duty and fraudulent concealment, among others.
They seek at least $200 million in general and special damages as well as punitive damages and declaratory relief.
Durst and the band are represented by Frank Seddigh and Alicia Veglia of Seddigh Arbetter LLP in Los Angeles.