Jimmy Kay from Canada’s The Metal Voice spoke to Flotsam and Jetsam guitarist Michael Gilbert and Drummer Ken Mary about the bands new album ‘I AM THE WEAPON’ and the trends and changes in the music industry over the years.
When asked to compare today’s US metal scene to the rest of the world
“If you look at Europe they’re open, they never stopped loving metal and the weird thing in the United States I feel like metal is actually squashed on social media on things like YouTube. I think they restrict metal. I’m not sure exactly why or what the reasoning is but metal is huge everywhere else in the world (expect USA). Let’s take a band like Arch Enemy for instance, they’ll play huge festivals in Europe. They’ll play in front of half a million people in South America, huge shows in Japan. They come to the United States and Play House of Blues with a thousand people. So you tell me what’s going on? How can a band and how can a genre be huge everywhere else but not in the United States? It seems kind of squashed to me. There’s like a few bands here and there that are doing okay but by and large there’s a whole genre that is not doing well. I think the fans (In USA) aren’t as connected as in Europe. There’s a huge metal scene and everybody is connected and everybody goes to the festivals and everybody loves the music and it really doesn’t matter like, are you thrash metal, are you melodic metal like whatever you are the fans embrace everything. They’re not going like okay I’m only a thrash metal fan so I will only listen to thrash metal. I think that happens maybe a little more in the United States too where somebody goes okay. I like only a specific genre, a very specific area of a genre and I’m not going to listen to anything else. I think that happens maybe a little bit more in the US but I do think in terms of the mechanics of the industry I think that there is an effort in my opinion to elevate things like Rap and Pop and to sort of push metal to the Wayside. Like I said there’s a few bands here and there that kind of buck the trend but for the most part that’s what I’m seeing in the United States.”
Ken Mary continued
“(Metal) it’s huge except for the United States. How is that possible? I think it’s only possible through control and it’s control of the media and control of social media too. I mean there’s a lot of things that get blocked. I Notice this when we share something, let’s say I share something about Flotsam and Jetsam on my Facebook page. I’ll have 20 people share something that I shared and if I click on their share there’s like one person that has looked at what they’ve shared. And you’re thinking to yourself, you’re going okay 20 people shared it so there should be like 10 more people you know sharing it there and it should go viral and it should expand so how is that not happening? I can tell you the algorithm here is definitely in my opinion skewing things and and maybe not just metal but seems like with music they’re very careful. I think to some degree they’re concerned about becoming the next Myspace or something like that. Myspace towards the end just became this social media Network that was all about promoting bands and I think somewhere at Facebook somebody’s very concerned about that and they don’t want to see that happen with Facebook that’s my theory.”
When asked if constant Radio Play would help Flotsam and Jetsam
“It absolutely would. You’re talking about getting a song into the public Consciousness. If you have a song that’s being played all the time every day and getting into the public consciousness there’s going to be a large percentage of people that are going to like that song because we do like what we’re familiar with. If we hear something and we become familiar with a song then we tend to like it. I mean that’s why Classic Rock Radio is bigger now than it ever has been. I mean people are listening to Led Zeppelin and Cream and all these 60’s and 70s bands and it’s not stopped. I mean we’re talking 50 years later and people are still listening to this. I don’t think it’s (radio) as important as it used to be in the past but I still think it’s a very important tool.”
When asked if vinyl sales helped bands recover from the lost CD sales in the past years
“It helps a little bit. Let’s put it this way the record industry reached its peak in around 2000- 2002 and it used to be about a $50 billion industry every year. Now it’s about a five or six billion dollar industry, so it’s 1/10 the size of what it used to be in terms of an industry from the actual music .The other thing that’s weird is 70% of the revenue right now from music is from Classic Albums that already existed. From the 70s and 80s 60s that’s where 70% of the revenue is from streaming and is a complete travesty in my opinion. I think it’s horrible. I think (streaming) did a horrible thing in terms of the artist and the industry. I think it’s very destabilizing. Basically we don’t see any money from the music as a matter of fact. We even talk about it amongst ourselves we’re like well we’re gonna make an album. Why are we doing it ? We’re basically doing it because we love making music and we want to give our fans something new. We love our fans and we love the process of making music but I don’t know what we saw literally, I’m not going to say nothing from it but for the amount of time that we put into creating a record we pretty much saw nothing from it. So I do think vinyl helped a little bit but if you look at the actual numbers and what we’ve lost in terms of what streaming has done. If you look at the music business on a graph you know it’s like a plane going down. When iTunes took off in around 2005 now all of a sudden instead of selling a CD you would sell one song for .99 cents so instantly your gross margin was cut down by 90%. And then from streaming now everything’s just it’s even worse. if you’re doing this for some other reason like you’re trying to get rich off of it I would suggest you not do it. I would suggest if you’re doing this because you love it and you love your fans and you love the art you know that’s great you know but that that’s why we’re doing it we’re not doing it to get rich. Let’s say you have Spotify for 11 bucks (a Month) you can access every bit of music that exists on the planet. $11 and you can access absolutely everything under the sun. In the past when we used to have to buy records I mean you would work hard you’d save up your money you’d buy a record you’d have a real connection with that record because you you invested into it.”
Metal Shock Finland (World Assault ) 