MetalSucks

UPDATE: Apparently Blackie broke out after refusing to pay the club a $198 food bill. Classy dude. Get the full skinny at SMN.

The cancellation of last week’s W.A.S.P. show here in New York was allegedly for very noble reasons – the promoters were charging fans extra for a meet and greet session, which is apparently a big no-no in W.A.S.P.-land – but why did the band cancel another concert last night, this time in Allentown, PA? Metal Insider’s Bram Teitelman (who cleverly suggests that W.A.S.P. must stand for “We Are Screwing Promoters”) did some investigating, and it seems that the reasons behind the cancellation were not quite as chivalrous this time around…

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Shitstain on the Ass of the Universe alumni Vampires Everywhere have signed with Century Media, a press release tells us. I first bestowed the vaulted “Shitstain” status upon Vampires Everywhere just one month ago and proclaimed, “So help me God if this band ends up with a record deal.” Then when I found out Century was making my worst fears come true I got simultaneously really fucking angry and really upset. Why should a band like this that’s obviously just chasing trends and possesses zero originality get signed to a major metal record label when hundreds of extremely talented and deserving bands get passed over on a daily basis? It’s fucked up, to be sure.

But then a funny thing happened; I realized that this signing is actually really good for metal in general.

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As Axl revealed to you all yesterday via the Completely Unreadable Band Logo contest… MARCH IS METAL MONTH! But what does it all mean?!?

To make a long story short, a bunch of legendary metal record labels, including Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Earache, Candlelight, Season of Mist, Willow Tip, Crash Music and more, are teaming up on a “get out the vote”-style initiative to drive traffic to independent retail music stores. The sale of recorded music is still the financial cornerstone of the music we all love, so MetalSucks has jumped on board to help out.

Throughout March is Metal Month you’ll see a bunch of fun contests here and on Metal Injection and Metal Insider, a CD sampler featuring some of the best bands on the above labels, exclusive merch available only at select retail locations and much more.

Read more about March is Metal Month at MarchIsMetalMonth.com or read the full press release after the jump.

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Most of you probably don’t know that I used to work at Atlantic Records. Not back in the heyday of Atlantic metal but during the lifetime of this here metal blog, in fact. Any time I brought up some of the classic metal acts to grace the ranks of Atlantic’s roster — Testament, Skid Row, Saigon Kick, King’s X… P.O.D. [I KID!!] — I was met with blank stares by the label’s higher-ups. They’d rather bob their heads in forced unison to the brand new sappy crappy Staind single that sounds exactly like all the other sappy crappy Staind singles. Oh, the stories I have about those board meetings… for another day.

Don’t worry; I got out of dodge as soon as I could. All is good now that I work safely in the confines of the MS Mansion in pantsless bliss.

I didn’t work in the A&R department at Atlantic, but I sat in on enough meetings and watched enough happen to know that the reality of major label A&R men suggested in this spoof video is frighteningly accurate. Enjoy; and if you’re a budding musician with major label dreams, be frightened. Very frightened.

-VN

Hails & Horns Magazine is now free. Starting with their Winter 2009 / 2010 issue (Municipal Waste cover), out now, Hails & Horns will be online for free in a digital format. Print versions of the magazine are still available for a fee.

As far as I know, Hails & Horns is the first metal print publication to offer its entire magazine online at all, let alone for no cost. Of the big dogs, Decibel offers the first several paragraphs of each feature article and full text of the reviews in the back of the mag, and Revolver offers none of their printed content online. It’s no secret that magazines make a very small portion of their money from subscription fees — the big bread-earner is advertising — so it’s not that shocking that a magazine would forgo subscription fees altogether. Some free magazines are quite profitable (see: The Onion, your town’s alt weekly arts mag [i.e. The Village Voice], etc). What remains to be seen is whether this (or any) magazine’s print advertisers are going to be down with the switch, and whether online readers have an interest in long-form magazine-style journalism and whether they want to read it on a computer screen.

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Prosthetic Records, home to such artists as Gojira, Skeletonwitch, The Acacia Strain, and Through the Eyes of the Dead, has filed suit against Razor & Tie, Billboard reports. I don’t wanna re-type or misinterpret any of the legalese, so I’m just gonna cut and paste the nitty gritty from Billboard:

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[MetalSucks will be involved in this very cool contest for unsigned bands, brought to you by Scion and Metal Insider. We hope you like what we have in store... it's going to be really cool and we're quite excited. -Ed.]

Your band shows tremendous promise. You have accumulated a solid following, written memorable songs, put together a great live show and have real momentum. With help from MetalInsider – including advice from industry professionals including a mentoring session with Shadows Fall and the opportunity to record with super-producer, Machine – you’ll be well on your way to the next level.

The No Label Needed Contest and Series presented by Scion in collaboration with MetalInsider will help one band leave labels behind and take on the industry all on their own.  The series will show readers how it’s done, all while helping one special contest-winning band get ahead in a spectacular way.

From 1/18 through 2/1, unsigned acts can submit demo packages at www.metalinsider.net/nolabelneeded. Twenty finalists will be selected and one winner will be voted on by a panel of label heads, A&R executives, writers, and site readers to win all the help and education they need to become a truly self-sufficient artist without having to sign a traditional record deal.

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Let’s say you’re Sully Erna. You’re the lead singer of a God awful band but you basically won the lottery, since there are enough ree-rees in the world to buy your music and make you a gajillionaire. How do you celebrate? Dineyland? Hookers n’ blow? How about you pull a Vince Neil?

So. Erna has reached a settlement with a 27 year old girl, Lindsay Taylor, and her parents, Elaine and Jeffrey, following a 2007 car accident that left Taylor with “a severe traumatic brain injury.” Erna, who left the accident unscathed, rammed the Taylor’s with his Hummer, and while he’s blaming the crash on another driver and – I shit you not – the design of the road, that hasn’t stopped him from agreeing to pay $3.3 million dollars, plus thousands of dollars a month in additional fees. Here’s the complete breakdown of what Erna will pay, according to The Eagle-Tribune:

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I’m all for heavy metal artists licensing their songs out to commercials and movies. With diminished record sales and an over-flooded touring market, every little bit counts… and these types of commercial spots pay extremely well. “Way to go, Lamb of God,” I say. I guess they’ve finally reached that level of ubiquity.

-VN

[Thanks: Mike Winston]

Our email boxes have been blowing up about this for the past week, but until the BBC and Billboard reported that it actually had legs I just thought it was another ridiculous Internet campaign.

The campaign is an online effort to get Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 hit “Killing in the Name” to grab the top spot on the U.K.’s Christmas Singles chart, a spot that’s been dominated by winners of the “X Factor” TV talent show (similar to American Idol) for the past four years. As of right now the RATM classic actually holds a 10% margin over Joe McElderry’s cover of Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb,” which occupies the number 2 spot at the moment.

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While reading through the comments of my Apple / LaLa post yesterday, I was shocked. Shocked at the amount of ignorance and misinformation that’s floating around out there, and that our readership is so easily gullible by said inaccuracies. Though I never do this, today I feel inclined to directly address a number of comments and dispel some of the idiocy that took place on this site yesterday.

• builtforsin says: “Anyone with lack of internet access 100% of the time, and if you have an Iphone like me, this is already a bad start….” Presumably there’s also be a download option, where you have access to a certain number of tracks locally (on your device or hard drive) if there is no Internet available. and “I guess if you only used Apple manufactured devices that would be great, but Apple doesn’t play nice with hardware not purchased from Apple.” I can’t speak to this issue as I use a Mac, but my PC-using friends don’t complain about iTunes/iPod on their PCs. I’m sure iPhone campatibility will only get better, especially if this type of service necessitates it.
• Tim says: “Digital still doesn’t have the same fidelity as a CD, unless you use wav files, which are huge and would eat memory.” True. But as Internet connections get better so will audio quality. No one is trying to scheme you with crappy audio… it’s just a bandwidth issue. Honestly, while I was initially a skeptic too and subscribed to the “audio quality” argument, it’s really hard to notice the difference between a 192 AAC and a full WAV/AIFF rip.
• Viking-Shredder: “I don’t know man. I’m still a fan of actually owning a physical copy of the music. Just something about having the physical copy makes me feel safer than confiding in computer files.” Also, you must like riding a horse and buggy because it’s “safer.”
  

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A less forward-thinking company might shirk at the prospect of an unlimited music streaming service, especially one whose music business is rooted so firmly in pay-per-track iTunes and the iPods/iPhones that carry said tracks. If Apple were as thick-headed and dense as the major record labels, they’d forge ahead with their existing models while attempting to sue the newcomers into oblivion. But Apple is not that company. Apple is smart, aware and aggressive, and as such they’ve recently purchased music streaming site LaLa, a move that seems to indicate the company will soon be pursuing a subscription-based model.

And if Apple is going to make a play at a subscription streaming model, then the holy grail of music experiences — the ability to stream any song, at any time, from anywhere (aka “the cloud”) — is that much closer to becoming reality.

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Our friend D.X. Ferris recently interviewed Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta for the Riverfront Times. Ferris is a great writer and an all-around good dude, so it’s definitely worth checking out… but here’s the part that really caught my attention:

What’s the latest with your books?
I had a major setback with the lyric book, which the lawyers are dealing with. Let’s hope these bad deals I’ve done in the past don’t come back to haunt me any more. It’s not something I can really talk about in the press. When you sign a bad [record] deal, it affects everything: the use of your lyrics, and the use of your music in commercials and TV shows and movies and soundtracks.

<sarcasm>A bad record deal? When did Hatebreed ever sign a bad record deal? Haven’t they always been on top-quality labels that have reputations for treating their artists fairly? What could Jamey possibly be talking about? Hmm… the mind boggles…</sarcasm>

On a semi-related note, please allow me to take the opportunity to once again plug D.X. Ferris’ awesome entry on Reign in Blood into the 33 1/3 book series. There were a lot of great metal-related books in 2009, but I think this one was my very favorite. With the holidays right around the corner, I can’t think of a better stocking stuffer. Order a copy here.

-AR

After the fracas that ensued following my post about the supposed non-metal future of Roadrunner Records, it would appear that Roadrunner Records hasn’t given up on metal after all. In the past week they’ve announced two brand new metal signings, which would seemingly indicate that Roadrunner is going to try and forge ahead with metal while also building up their non-metal roster.

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Metal Insider tells us that brand new music streaming service MOG went live yesterday morning. MOG promises a deep library at a $5 monthly fee, and boasts a service “better than Rhapsody, iTunes and Pandora…combined.” [Full disclosure: MOG's advertising arm sells some ad space on this site.] With all four major labels signed on (those being Warner, EMI, Sony and Universal), a $5/month unlimited streaming service is a tantalizing proposition indeed. But the million dollar question on our minds (and undoubtedly yours as well) is: do they have metal?

Without having tested the service yet I’m inclined to say that, surprisingly, the answer is actually “yes.” Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Earache, Willowtip and a few other metal labels are distributed digitally through EMI, so those ought to be covered. Warner holds a majority stake in Roadrunner so that oughtta be a no-brainer. Relapse, Metal Blade and Victory releases are distributed by Red, which is owned by Sony. Those are all the labels at the proverbial metal big kids table right there. Obviously there are plenty of other smaller metal labels, but I’m guessing most of them also have major distribution.

This new MOG service is interesting indeed. If anyone here has tested it out, please let us know in the comments how it fares metal-wise. How does it stack up against the much simpler, sleeker Spotify? Watch a brief description of some of the service’s key features in the video below.

-VN

Our broheims at Metal Insider alerted us to the fact that Apple has a new extortion scheme product called iTunes LP and Extras, which basically amounts to charging money for a product that’s typically free on a band’s website (videos, lyrics, liner notes, etc). Apparently LP and Extras has been available to major labels with existing iTunes deals for a little while already, but Metal Insider is reporting that the platform will be available to everyone else starting in early 2010.

My question to you… is anyone going to give a shit? I can’t see anyone but the die-hardest of the die-hard fans paying extra for this content, and these kinds of fans strike me as people who’d prefer to have a physical copy anyway. Beyond that, why shell out for videos when they’ll end up on YouTube? Why shell out for lyrics when you have Google? Why shell out for digital artwork when you can just visit the band’s website or have a physical copy? Is there something I’m missing here… some kind of extra super-cool features that are going to blow my mind?

I don’t get it. Total waste of money for the consumer, and total waste of time/resources on Apple’s part. This is fuck-tarded. Let’s get Spotify going in the States so all of this crap can end.

-VN

Rocklahoma, the three day hair metal festival that’s taken place in – doy-hickey – Oklahoma the past few years, was really successful in its first two incarnations – so successful that there were rumors of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest headlining the 2008 edition of the fest. But this past summer’s third running of the show was an epic failure, with embarrassingly  low attendance, despite a line-up that included Anthrax, the “they’re so hot right now!” Anvil, Overkill, Twisted Sister, Ratt, and Skid Row.

Now our pal Allyson at Bring Back Glam has posted a press release announcing that AEG live, “the world’s largest producer of music festivals,” has been put in charge of “revamping” the fest for the 2010 version.

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There are too many fucking metal tours happening in the U.S. right now. Whether this is a result of the decline of record sales is impossible to measure given the absence of a control group, but it’d be hard to argue that’s not at least a factor; lacking revenue from royalties, bands are having to go out on the road in order to make any money. The result is a complete oversaturation of the tour marketplace, and the result of that is that bands are right back where they left off, their audience spread too thin amongst too many shows.

Case in point, we’re right in the middle of 10 straight days of metal shows here in NYC. Several of these days have two or even three shows from which to choose:

• Thur, Nov. 12: Periphery, The Binary Code, Empyreon -also- Machine Head, Mutiny Within
• Fri, Nov 13: Krallice, Liturgy, etc. -also- Hung, Ikillya, Devil to Pay -also- The Austerity Program etc
• Sat, Nov 14: Skeletonwitch / Black Anvil -also- Metallica, Lamb of God
• Sun, Nov 15: Shrinebuilder / Rwake, Liturgy -also- Metallica, Lamb of God
• Mon, Nov 16: Aphonia, The Binary Code, Brock Murdock -also- The Jesus Lizard
• Tue, Nov 17: Valient Thorr, Red Fang -also- The Jesus Lizard -als0- Dark Castle, Wetnurse, The Atlas Moth
• Wed, Nov 18: Javelina, Black Tusk, Batillus
• Thur, Nov 19: Cave In, Trap Them, Narrows
• Fri, Nov 20: Baroness, Earthless

Not even halfway through this mess and I’m fucking beat.

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Forget record labels, expensive music videos, fancy photo shoots or physical distribution… just come up with an interesting idea to make people pay attention to you and they might just like what they hear. Don’t bother trying to hit the mass populace over the head via carpet-bombing marketing tactics; gain credibility as a trusted source for reliable material and you’ll make a fan for life.

I sound like Bob fucking Lefsetz. But that’s exactly what Trondheim, Norway based Miksha have done with their viral video tribute to late TV sales guru Billy Mays. Everything is well done; the acting, the subtitles, playing the music for just long enough… it’s a quality production through and through. Because I was watching the video while the music was playing, I listened to a band I may not have paid attention to before… and it worked! Miksha’s music is quality, just like this video. Next time I see their name mentioned on a blog or in a press release, I’ll definitely read more.

Watch the video below.

-VN

[Thanks: longtime MS reader / Miksha bassist and vocalist "fritz"]