GODSMACK Rolling With The Times
May 11, 2007Mark Lindsay of McClatchy Newspapers recently conducted an interview with GODSMACK drummer Shannon Larkin. A few excerpts from the chat follow:
On the changing nature of the music industry — and the big questions those changes bring:
"The market now, sales-wise and all that, is just crazy. You can have a band like FALL OUT BOY debut at No. 1 with 80,000 (records) sold or something." [FALL OUT BOY's "Infinity On High" actually sold 260,000 copies in its debut week, but MODEST MOUSE, for instance, had a No. 1 album with "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank", which moved just 129,000 copies.]
"(Soon) there'll be no more CDs to sell. You'll just walk in the store, swipe your card and plug your MP3 player in."
On the fact that the new technology abandons an important part of the record-buying experience: holding a new album in your hands and admiring the cover art:
"It's sad to me, the whole art thing. If I go and swipe the new GODSMACK record, I've got the music in my iPod and maybe a (cover) image that's 2-by-2 inches. It seems like my kids are going to miss out on that beautiful part of my youth."
On what needs to be done to see the industry survive:
"Bands and labels and management companies and agents, everybody's going to have to work together. It's a whole new era of access. (Kids don't) walk to the record store and buy a CD, they don't turn on the radio and hear a song. They go online and somebody says, 'Oh, you gotta go to MySpace and check out this song.' "
On the band's future recording plans:
"Who knows? If we take a couple years to make the 'V' record, it might not even be a record we're putting out."
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