Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows on his “biggest problem with Spotify” and why Web3 is the solution
“We had a shitty record deal. And the fact that you signed in 1999 when you were 18 and you had no money, that’s a lot different than the internet coming along, streaming services being born and you still make 24 cents on the dollar, and Spotify is paying what it pays.”
Image: Scott Legato / Getty Images
Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows has spoken about how Web3 can revolutionise the music industry by offering both artists and fans fairer rewards.
In 2021, A7X launched Deathbats Club — an NFT-based fanclub that rewards members with real-world merch discounts and opportunities for meet and greets.
Three years on, with the launch of Season Pass, a Fortnite-style progression system that lets fans earn points and unlock rewards, the band continues to advocate blockchain technology, arguing that Web3’s decentralised nature affords artists greater control over their music and their revenue.
- READ MORE: “VR concerts are here to stay but people will always complain”: Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows
“Not every artist deserves to be rich. You have to have market share,” Shadows tells MusicTech in a new interview. “People have to want to listen to you. It’s not, ‘Oh, I’m an artist, I should get paid more.’ It’s just not how it works.”
He adds that “the reason a lot of people don’t get paid a lot on Spotify is that they have shitty record deals.”
“We had a shitty record deal. And the fact that you signed in 1999 when you were 18 and you had no money, that’s a lot different than all of a sudden the internet coming along, streaming services being born and you still make 24 cents on the dollar, and Spotify is paying what it pays.”
According to Shadows, the “biggest problem with Spotify is that they don’t share the data with the artist” — an issue Web3 takes care of: “You can take your data as an artist and go somewhere else,” the singer explains. “So I don’t hate Spotify, I just wish they’d share with us who our listeners are, and they don’t.”
Beyond financial benefits, he says the technology also has the potential to revolutionise artist-fan relations.
“[Corporations] want to come to the artist and say, ‘We’ve built a business off of you, and now we want to reward the fan, but you can’t reward the fan, we want you to allow us to reward the fan in our own way,’” Shadows says.
“And [A7X is] taking that power away from them, and saying, ‘No, we’re gonna reward the fan – who is the same fan that participates in all of your corporate networks – and we’re gonna reward them in the way that we feel is the most meaningful, which is access to us, things that we want to give them, not through [corporate networks] but through us.’”
Read the full interview on MusicTech.
