It’s never the end of the road for Kiss. The hard rock quartet has sold its catalog, trademark and IP to Swedish company Pophouse Entertainment Group in a deal valued at more than $300 million, it was announced Thursday.
This isn’t the first time Kiss has teamed up with Pophouse, which was co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus. When the band’s current lineup—founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, along with guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer—took the stage on the final night of their December farewell tour at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden, they ended by unveiling digitized avatars of themselves.
The cutting-edge technology was created by George Lucas’ special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse. The two companies recently teamed up for the ‘ABBA Voyage’ show in London, where fans could attend a full concert of the Swedish band in their prime performed by their own digital avatars.
The ways in which the Kiss avatars will be used have yet to be announced, but Pophouse CEO Per Sundin says fans can expect a Kiss biopic, documentary and experience on the horizon.
An avatar show is slated to launch in the second half of 2027, but don’t expect it to look like “ABBA Voyage,” Sundin told the AP. And fans can expect it to begin in North America.
Sundin says the purpose of the purchase is to introduce Kiss to new generations – which he says sets Pophouse apart from other music catalog acquisitions.
“The record companies, the big three left, are doing a fantastic job, but they have so many catalogs and they can’t focus on everything,” he says. “We are working together with Universal (Music Group) and Kiss, although we will own the artist rights and we are doing it together with Kiss. But yeah, we bought all the rights and it’s not something I’ve seen so clearly before.”
“I don’t like the word acquisition,” Gene Simmons told the AP via Zoom, assuring the band would never sell their catalog to a company they didn’t value.
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“Collaboration is exactly what it’s all about. It would be a breach of our supposed fiduciary duty – see what I just did? — to the thing we created to abandon,” he continued. “People might misunderstand and think, ‘Okay, now Pophouse is doing this stuff, and we’re just in Beverly Hills crossing our fingers.’ No, that’s not true. We talk all the time with the band our baby.”
And within that: no more live touring, really. “We’re not touring like Kiss again, period,” he says. “We’re not going to go put on makeup and go out there.”
Kiss is Pophouse’s second investment outside of Sweden: in February, Cyndi Lauper entered into a partnership with the company that includes the sale of a majority stake in her music and a new immersive performance project, which she calls an “immersive piece of theater” that transports audiences to New York , in which she grew up.
The goal is to develop new ways to bring Lauper’s music to fans and younger audiences through new performances and live experiences.
“Most outfits, when you tell them an idea, their eyes light up, they just want your greatest hits,” Lauper told the AP at Pophouse headquarters in Stockholm in February. “But these guys are a multimedia company, they don’t just want to buy my catalog, they want to do something new.”
