In an interview with Booked on Rock, Jesse Fink, the author of ‘Bon: The Last Highway: The Untold Story of Bon Scott and AC/DC’s Back In Black,’ discussed whether Bon Scott’s family gets royalties from the album.
“And Vince Lovegrove had access to the brothers. He had access to Bon’s mother at the time,” the author explained. “It wasn’t the first time that he claimed that Bon’s family were getting royalties for ‘Back in Black.’ He also wrote about it on his personal blog. And then Lovegrove was killed in a car accident in 2012.”
“On the website, they say that the Estate does not receive any royalties for songs on ‘Back and Black,’” Fink continued. “Now, the keywords there are ‘for songs.’ It’s not sort of flat-out saying that they don’t get a payment. But it’s saying that they don’t get royalties for songs. So, I can’t answer that to the satisfaction that I would like, because the Estate has never responded to me.”
There have been rumors about whether Scott wrote lyrics for ‘Back in Black’ album shortly before his death on February 19, 1980. The band members are aware of the rumors and even have an answer for them.
“No, no. Bon’s family receives royalties from the stuff he’s done – I’m sure,” frontman Brian Johnson said of the rumors in a 2022 interview with Metal Edge. “They’ll have an estate, most people do afterwards if they die and there’s still money coming in from that period of their work. That would be right. That’s the right and proper thing. But I don’t think so… I know so, ‘cause I get them [‘Back In Black’ royalties]. There’s the simple answer.”
‘Back in Black’ is currently the fourth best-selling album of all time. The album has 31.1 million certified copies sold worldwide.