Three years ago, actress-rocker Courtney Love claimed to have just $4,000 in her bank account. She said she was thinking about applying for food stamps. Instead, she struck upon a simple solution: cash in on her rights to the song catalog of her deceased husband, grunge-era icon Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s frontman. But the deal—in which Love sold a 50 percent interest in Cobain’s music-publishing rights for a reported $50 million—outraged Cobain’s anti­establishment fans. They criticized Love for using Cobain’s music to promote the kinds of commercial interests he denounced until his suicide 15 years ago.

If the revenue generated so far by the licenses is any indication, there’s less of a market than fans imagined. According to estimates from music, advertising, and videogame-industry analysts, the buyer, Primary Wave Music ­Publishing—which also controls publishing rights for such acts as Hall and Oates and Greg Allman—has earned slightly more than $2.3 million on Nirvana licenses. That’s relatively low compared with other rock and pop groups.

When the makers of the video­game Guitar Hero struck a deal with Primary Wave, it was only for “Breed,” one of Nirvana’s biggest hits, which probably brought in about $50,000, estimates one industry expert. By comparison, they wanted 24 of Aerosmith’s most popular tunes and paid $5 million for them. Over the past three years, Primary Wave has licensed 13 Nirvana songs to film and television productions for an estimated $480,000. Tween heartthrobs the Jonas Brothers scored about $1 million for 105 licenses sold to film and television shows in 2008 alone.

The main reason sales have been slow is that Nirvana’s music is less commercially adaptable than that of other rock acts. The sound and lyrics embody generational angst and are not exactly ready-made to sell pop-culture trinkets. “Nirvana was so revolutionary that it’s very difficult to match different projects, and there are tons of iconic groups that allow their music to be utilized,” explains Sony/ATV Music Publishing chairman and CEO Martin Bandier, who manages catalogs for bands ranging from the Jonas Brothers to the Beatles.

In retrospect, it looks like Primary Wave, which shares revenue from licensing deals with Love, may have had unrealistic expectations. Back in 2006, the company’s chief executive, Larry Mestel, initiated heavily publicized talks with the TV series CSI: Miami to feature several Nirvana songs in an episode written around the music. But once Primary Wave and the Nirvana team (including Love, former band members, and their recording label) asked for a sum “twice the industry standard,” CBS backed off. “The whole deal kind of imploded,” says a source involved in the talks. Mestel declined to comment for this story.

For her part, Love has been busy working on projects to keep the Cobain name alive and currently serves as an executive producer for a new Cobain biopic being written by David Benioff. Love and her daughter, Frances Bean, who was a year old at the time of Cobain’s death, have put their food-stamp worries behind them. Frances Bean, now 16, was spotted last year checking out a $6.5 million penthouse in New York where she could live with her mom.