M. Shadows has laid out the reasoning behind AVENGED SEVENFOLD's decade-long push into fan-data technology — and his verdict on the business that let the ground shift under it.
Appearing on the "Artist Friendly With Joel Madden" podcast, the frontman described a band that came up straddling two eras. "We came up in 1999, you could still sell CDs, you could still buy space on the endcap, you could still get at least enough radio play to see if it researched well," he said. "You still had the ability to do things with half-a-million-dollar music video budget. But at this time, what was happening was the whole industry was changing, not from the music perspective, but from a technology perspective."
The industry's response, in his telling, was nothing. "You have YouTube coming online. You have the Internet being invented. You have Limewire and Napster. You have all these things happening, and the music industry did nothing. It sat there. And now we have a situation where everything has been blown to bits."
His conclusion was that the artist owns almost nothing that matters. "There's a merch company that doesn't give us who's buying our merch. There's a record label who's not telling us who our fan is. There's Facebook, Instagram, they're not telling us who our fans are. In fact, they'll change the rules on us and charge us. That's how they make the money. I am the product at that point." Ticketing and streaming came in for the same treatment: "Ticketmaster wouldn't tell us who is buying all of our tickets. That's their customer, not ours... all those companies are standing on the shoulders of artists."
That, he insists, and not speculation, is what drew him to blockchain. "I didn't think of NFT price go up. I didn't think of Bitcoin," he said. "I was thinking, 'These are pieces of data, the fan, and how do you make the fan's experience better while collecting that data and being able to reach out to them?'" The answer was a reward layer covering everything a fan does — listening, buying, attending — with front-of-line access, early tickets and genuine ownership of what they earn.
AVENGED SEVENFOLD launched the Deathbats Club NFT collection in December 2021, partnered with Ticketmaster on token-gated ticket access in March 2023, and then rolled out TicketPass, a free loyalty programme built with Bitflips. Shadows knows how that has read publicly: "All I've seen in the press for the last 10 years that I've been involved in crypto is how bad it is and how much it's a scam."
His fear is a repeat. "I don't want the music industry to be again behind the times, and then all these new artists are gonna come up, and they're locked into shitty deals, giving 75% of their earnings away, when the label really doesn't have the tools at that point to do what they can do themselves."
The band completed its Warner deal with 2023's "Life Is But A Dream…" and is now fully independent.
Source: blabbermouth.net