CANNIBAL CORPSE Bassist Blames Illegal Music Downloading For The Group's Declining Record Sales

CANNIBAL CORPSE bassist Alex Webster recently talked to Metal Reference about the group's upcoming album, "The Wretched Spawn", and his opinion on illegal music downloading. Asked if there is any possibility of the band making another DVD in the future, Webster said, "Actually, for the 'The Wretched Spawn' [CD] we did a DVD that features us recording 'The Wretched Spawn'," Webster revealed. "We're just gonna call it 'The Making of The Wretched Spawn'. This shows us recording and has interviews with us, I think it's pretty cool. Everybody will like it I think. It's all stuff that we filmed while recording in El Paso at the studio. The reason is that the record label wants to help people buy the CD instead of downloading it 'cause now if they buy the CD they get the DVD for free. So I think it's a pretty good deal for the fans 'cause normally something like that would cost 15 dollars maybe but now it's free."

With regards to illegal music downloading, Alex said, "It's something we can't avoid so it's not even worth thinking about you know. The way I look at it is that we probably do lose maybe 20,000 sales per album because of downloading and here is why I think so: Up until 'Gallery of Suicide' [1998]… 'Gallery of Suicide', a lot of fans don't really think it's our best album or anything and some of them don't really like it, but it still sold about 30,000 more than 'Bloodthirst' [1999] or 'Gore Obsessed' [2002], so I think that right around the time 'Bloodthirst' came out was when Napster was starting to get pretty big so it makes sense to me that those albums have sold a little less. You know because of the…you know it just makes sense 'cause our tours are still doing very good, but if we're selling less records but more people are coming to the concerts it means that something is going on, and I think it's the downloading. But it's very possible that the downloading helps to make our band a little bigger, because you know some people might hear the name of our band and now they can listen to it for free where normally they never can listen to it without buying it, and they might not buy it unless they hear it first. I think it helps in some ways. Some ways it's bad and in some ways it's good!" Read the rest of the interview here.