Before the days of hair bands, heavy metal was aggressive and down right dangerous. Parents feared kids who started wearing jean jackets and leather with patches all around, now affectionately known as warrior jackets. Bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Krokus, Metallica, Dokken and the Scorpions seemed to adorn every jacket and right smack in the middle of all of them all was Accept. One of the last TRUE METAL BANDS, they refused to change with the times, even when the times were changing. Our reward is one of the best TRUE METAL albums we have heard in a long time. Accept’s Too Mean To Die!
So much of that is part of the mystique that metal bands have. Even with symphonic metal bands carrying the torch now, does it seems to you that metal bands are a dying breed?
"We all grew up thinking that metal rock stars are larger than life and there was something charming about that. Now everybody streams from their sofa and its takes away from that mys-tique. I mean its not all supposed to be all fake and fantasy, I mean we’re all real people, but at the same time I still like the old way because of that reason.."
All of this great music we get inspiration from is all public domain. What to you is the most significant change in the industry in your 45 years?
"The way we produce, market and sell music has all changed. We used to go out and tour to support the album sales and now its almost like we make the album as an excuse to go on tour. It’s all about touring now. Album sales are dropping every year. Between streaming and ev-erything it’s really hard to keep track of the changes. It’s crazy. Someone makes the argument that you can make more money through streaming. When someone bought an album they owned it and can play it as may times as they want, but with streaming they can stream it thousands of times. I don’t know who would actually stream and entire album thou-sands of times. It doesn’t equate. .00017 per stream as opposed to $12.99 for album purchase/ The answer is.. I don’t know (chuckles), its just dwindling."
In leu of touring what are you guys doing to support the record?
"I mean we could have postponed everything, We have such great hardcore fans that would love this record no matter when we put it out, but its been already 4 years since out last release and we wanted to get it out to them. We have no idea when we can tour, so we just released it so the fans can enjoy it. I don’t think we’ll do a live stream because our shows are so dependent on the audience be-ing there. It would feel strange to play to a bunch of cameras without any audience participation. I mean we’ve already done live DVD’s so there no value in doing that."
Read MORE in the new issue of Total Order!
Comments