When David Bowie’s estate sold his songwriting catalogue to Warner Chappell in early 2022, and Bob Dylan signed his own catalogue away to Universal in late 2020 for somewhere near three hundred million, the story made every news desk. Catalogue economics had become news. The quieter version of that same story, the one that does not get a Rolling Stone cover, is what happens further down the licensing chain, in places nobody writes a thinkpiece about. The pinball cabinet was bolted to the wall of a bar in Reno. The pub jukebox in Camden. The slot machine cabinet at a regional casino in the Midlands. The phone in somebody’s pocket at half-eleven on a Tuesday. Music keeps moving outward, finding new revenue lanes that did not exist when the songs were originally written. The slot reels are one of those lanes, and the most interesting stretch of that story sits inside a fairly short two-year window between 2016 and 2017.
The NetEnt years
NetEnt, a Stockholm-headquartered games studio that has been quietly building cabinets for online operators since the late nineties, spent those two years doing something genuinely noteworthy. In a fairly short stretch, they put their name to a Motörhead slot, then a Jimi Hendrix one, and then a Guns N’ Roses one. Each release had its own separate licensing deal underneath it, none of which was straightforward. Slot soundtracks tend to need full sync rights, master rights, and in the case of likeness or imagery, separate estate sign-offs on top of that. For a song like Welcome to the Jungle to play over a spinning reel, somebody had to call Slash. That somebody was NetEnt’s music licensing team, and from the public side, what you can see is that they were patient and they were courteous, which in catalogue work matters more than money does in the end.
Lemmy’s last yes
The Motörhead slot came out in 2016, but the deal that put it there was already moving before Lemmy Kilmister died in late December 2015. He had given his blessing while still alive, which mattered to the band, to the fans, and very quietly to the licensing department too, since posthumous deals are murkier and slower and generally more expensive to push through. The cabinet uses Ace of Spades, Iron Fist, and Overkill as its soundtrack, with Lemmy’s silhouette appearing in spots where the design language really calls for him to be present. It is not a subtle game, and Motörhead was never really a subtle band, so the fit is honest. When the slot launched, the surviving members did not push back, and from what was reported at the time, the band’s management was kept in the loop on the wider rollout. That is about as close to an actually clean licensing deal as the back-catalogue business gets these days.
The Hendrix estate
The Jimi Hendrix slot, released a few months later in 2016, came out of an arrangement with Experience Hendrix, LLC, the family-run vehicle that has managed Jimi’s catalogue since the mid-nineties under Janie Hendrix. The Hendrix estate is famously protective. Anyone who has tried to clear Purple Haze for a television advert in the last twenty years has stories about how slow and how careful that process actually is. So the fact that the NetEnt team got there with Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, Voodoo Child, and Crosstown Traffic all on the reels at the same time says something about how that conversation went. There are easier rock brands to license than Jimi Hendrix. The slot was the first machine of its type to carry a Hendrix soundtrack at all, and from a catalogue stewardship angle, it represented a genuinely new revenue lane that simply hadn’t existed before for that particular body of work.
Slash’s approval
Guns N’ Roses came last, in early 2017, by which point NetEnt had a track record of treating these catalogues respectfully and that almost certainly helped move the conversation along. Slash was reportedly the main gatekeeper, and the slot’s soundtrack carries Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child o’ Mine, November Rain, and Paradise City, which is essentially the band’s official greatest-hits run laid out across a five-reel cabinet. Of the three NetEnt rock slots from that period, the GnR one ended up the most played, which probably makes sense when you think about how available those four songs are in the cultural memory of basically anyone who turned a car radio on between 1987 and 1993. The cabinet, by the way, was the one that took the longest to actually clear from a paperwork side, since GnR’s publishing arrangements have always been a bit knotted up across the original lineup.
The point of all of this
What that two-year stretch did, fairly quietly at the time, was make rock catalogue a recognised slot-machine genre in its own right. A decade later you will still find those three NetEnt cabinets running on UK casino sites, and if you want to see the Motörhead one or the Hendrix one still in active rotation, you can usually find them in the slot library at The Online Casino alongside several hundred other titles. None of which is the main story here. The main story is that a Stockholm games studio spent two years quietly convincing three of rock and roll’s more carefully tended estates to let their music live somewhere new, and they managed it without anyone in the music press getting upset about it, which is genuinely the rarest outcome of all in legacy catalogue licensing.
