A legal brawl has broken out between Universal Music Group and Limp Bizkit over an alleged flaw in the record company’s system that calculates royalties, with the band claiming that it didn’t receive any fees for its music until this year when it uncovered the alleged defect.
Limp Bizkit, in a lawsuit filed in California federal court on Tuesday, accuses Universal of fraud, as well as breach of contract and fiduciary duty, for intentionally designing a software system that “systematically prevented artists from being paid their royalties.” It seeks a court order voiding its contracts with the conglomerate on top of damages that it says could exceed $200 million.
While Limp Bizkit peaked in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, interest in the band has grown in recent years. In 2024, it has over 450 million streams on Spotify and is selling out arenas without producing any new music.
This prompted lead singer Fred Durst, who retained new representation this year, to inquire why he had never received any royalties from Universal, which had repeatedly told him that he still needed to recoup advances he’d been paid, the lawsuit says. When his business managers got access to the company’s portal that manages royalties, Durst claims they discovered he was owed over $1 million.
Limp Bizkit’s accounts “had been payable starting in 2019, and then fraudulently reclassified as ‘unrecouped’ to prevent payment” despite the band selling millions of albums, the complaint states. A royalty statement for one of its projects sent in the second quarter of 2022 showed a positive balance, the lawsuit says, only for it to be labeled as unrecouped by nearly $200,000 two quarters later. Durst alleges the unexplained charges “came out of thin air to overdraft” his account. His lawyers demanded immediate payment and the return of his master recordings.
A Universal executive responded that the nonpayment of royalties was a “one-off mistake” due to an error with the company’s new software. Limp Bizkit was subsequently paid roughly $1 million in back royalties, as well as a $2.3 million payment to Flawless Records, which Durst owns, for a first look deal struck in 1999.
An agent with the music conglomerate also explained that it paid the band roughly $43 million in advances over the years, which is why the account only recently began paying out royalties. Limp Bizkit disputes that it was paid that amount in advances, saying the figure is inflated by nearly $30 million.
“Although Limp Bizkit and Flawless Records had completely separate royalty accounts with UMG, they appear to both have suffered from a critical, prejudicial, and essentially fraudulent design in UMG’s system whereby artists are owed millions of dollars in royalties and yet know nothing about it,” the complaint states.
The band claims that its contracts with Universal, which declined to comment, were terminated on Sept. 30 due to the alleged fraud but that the company continues to exploit its music.