When underground music came about, it addressed a simple problem: rising costs had forced market concentration in the music industry. This produced six big companies that owned all the content, paid all the people who promoted and played it on radio, and therefore shaped the listening audience.
6 CommentsTags: money, music industry
Veteran doom/proto-metal band Black Sabbath decided to cash in on the latest media trend and released a riff on one of their classic designs changed to read “Black Lives Matter” instead of “Black Sabbath.” It is apparently hoped that this will extend their relevance for another six months and shift up to another fifty thousand units.
30 CommentsTags: black sabbath, money
Varg Vikernes is one of the rare musicians in death/black metal that won’t sell his soul for the dollar. In a new video posted to his Thulean Perspective YouTube channel, Varg has revealed that some scumbag promoter has at one point offered over £ 300,000 for him to do a live Burzum show in London. While many in black metal swore never to play live, almost everyone ranging from Darkthrone to Graveland has given in at some point. But with the most notorious metal musician in the genre’s history, blood is thicker than water and that’s never been more prevalent than now.
47 CommentsTags: Black Metal, blood, burzum, cash grab, culture, divas, ideology, live Burzum, metal, money, purpose, varg vikernes
Finance and accounting skills are useful life skills for everyone, not just Derek Brewer.
In response to the “popular” deathcore act Thy Art Is Murder losing their vocalist over finance, an employee of Outerloop Management, a company that handles the finance of several modern popular metal bands, wrote up a budget analysis of a metal band’s touring budget for our competitors over at MetalSucks. Derek Brewer claims that with sound budgeting techniques and by avoiding expensive luxuries like cocaine, a “mid-level” band can make enough money through touring and merchandise to survive and maintain an okayish standard of living while arguably contributing more to society than a retail drone.
There are a few holes you can poke in Brewer’s assumptions, but overall his numbers give me the impression that a band that gets big enough to receive regular coverage on heavily trafficked news sites can reach some degree of financial security. My real emphasis here is on the idea that getting to the point where your band is even moderately successful to the point of even potentially being fiscally self-sustaining is going to be the difficult part. Barring enormous luck (or a potentially lucrative if musically dubious gimmick like adding a flautist to your grindcore band), building up a fanbase for any sort of creative content requires an immense and persistent amount of work over time. Society in general knows that by now, and by traveling this path you’ll also be in competition with an enormous amount of other bands who think they’re going to be the next big thing and are also working long hours to get noticed. The competition isn’t necessarily going to improve the quality of metal works released (at least by our standards, since most bands aren’t writing specifically for our tastes), but it is something to note if you look at Brewer or similars’ figures and think that someday, you could make it as a metal rockstar.
3 CommentsTags: finance, lame metal, management, managers, metalcore, money
A recent article on Gene Simmons observed the following:
Rock star Gene Simmons says that when it comes to making money he is like a great white shark.
And that despite being worth more than $300m (£200m), he will never stop wanting to make more.
…”I’ll never stop hunting more money, I’ll never have enough.”
On the other hand, many excellent metal bands are probably clearing $300/month in royalties or less. At that point, we tend to call the making of metal a hobby and talk about their day jobs. The advantage to that approach is that the metal can remain un-tainted by commerce and with consumerism, the need to appeal to an audience by jumping on trend bandwagons or otherwise showing them what they already know they like, sort of like how baby food is ground-up vegetables.
Looking at the other side, it must be nice to be worth $300m and to have the power to do great things with that. Maybe Mr. Simmons has done so. But one might think that at some point, the money becomes more important than the music, which turns metal away from its mission of brutal realism and makes it a friendly, happy, warm and fuzzy product like your average American beer or hamburger.
Perhaps a middle ground exists, where fewer metal bands make $300m but also fewer worthy metal bands subsist on $300. Most metal musicians would be very happy with $60-80,000 a year. They tend not to be materialistic, except for collecting vinyl and guitars, but in the grand scheme of things those aren’t very expensive.
16 CommentsTags: commercialism, gene simmons, Heavy Metal, KISS, money, trends
