Finland’s Kaaos TV recently spoke with Tom Maxwell from Hellyeah, in a remarkable interview he went on to explain his theory about why bands aren’t selling albums nowadays. Apparently it’s not the fault of the digital age, it’s because your band sucks! “People don’t want to buy dogshit… That’s really basically what it comes down to. There’s just so much over-saturation and just so many bands, and none of them sound original; everybody sounds like the band you just listened to before. I put on a heavy metal radio station here in the States, [and] nine times out of ten, I can’t tell who’s who. So why would people go out and spend good money on music that f*cking sucks?”
He also went on to say: “If you really dig deep and put together a record, from song one until the end that is just great, and you don’t have any songs that you fast-forward to the next song for, then, you know, they might need that record, they might need to have all of it, the whole package, not just one song.
“I think with technology nowadays, with… all the downloading and streaming, it gives people an opportunity to listen to your record and judge whether they wanna go out and buy it or not. So, yeah, I think if more bands put more time and quality into the writing, they might actually sell more records.”
These comments are fairly rich coming from a guy whose band has relied on their producer Kevin Churko to co-write every song on their upcoming album. Hellyeah’s fifth album Unden!able will be out on June 3 via Sony Music Australia. You can listen for more pearls of wisdom in the full interview below.
