LIMP BIZKIT Guitarist: 'There's No Money In Selling Records Anymore, But Making Them Is Cheap'

Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with LIMP BIZKIT guitarist and BLACK LIGHT BURNS mainman Wes Borland. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metalshrine: LIMP BIZKIT [has] got a new record deal. How do you feel about the music industry today? I read that the album "Significant Other" sold about 600,000 copies in its first week, but these days if you sell that in three years, that's pretty damn good.

Wes Borland: It is really different. Here we go! Let's start the engine. The way things are now, there's no money in selling records anymore, but making them is very cheap. The scale has tipped. Now anybody can make a record for nothing and they can do it at home and it sounds great. Because of that, and the Internet, we now have this oversaturation of music everywhere. Some of it's great, and there are people that have made records probably for free at home, and they would never have been able to put anything out before. You have all this great music, but you also have all this shitty music that people are putting out. Boat anchor music. It's really hard to find that good music. It's like a needle in a haystack. Thank god there's Spotify and stuff, because sometimes those things will send you to other things that are similar to what you're listening to. You have some sort of navigation through the mess of stuff, and I think it's getting better. The scales have tipped, and everyone's trying figure out how to deal with it after the fact. Things like Spotify are great and they are going to, at some point, start providing income to artists again so they can keep making records, but as of right now it's impossible for people to sell records, unless you're a titan like the Lady Gagas of the world. It's sad, because a lot of people aren’t going to be able to afford to make music their lives and make that second follow-up or third record. How many more records are we gonna have that make bands into legends? There's probably a LED ZEPPELIN out there that just the carpet pulled out from under their feet because they don't have time or money to go on tour anymore, so all the things they could've been in their career are gonna be gone because they have to wash dishes to pay the rent. That's the biggest loss, people not being able to afford to make music. We'll see what happens. Maybe it'll start happening to where they can afford to just devote their lives to music. BLACK LIGHT BURNS records are selling like shit, but somehow everyone seems to have heard it. I get people saying, "Oh, the record's amazing!" all day long and people who tell me they love the record, but they haven't bought it. That's where we are. No one's buying the records and that's even worse for other bands. It's a scary time, but I have some kinda hope that they were just headed through a valley and there will be a peak, that makes sense for everyone. You can all get music for way less than you would have been paying for it in the past and we can all somehow make money from record sales again. Not the amount we were making, but enough so people can make a career out of it. That would be great.

Metalshrine: Definitely. What's the status of LIMP BIZKIT then? I read you were in Miami recording.

Wes Borland: We've been doing several different things. We've been in Miami. We're on Cash Money now and we're the first rock band on that label, which is crazy. That in itself is just weird, but in a good way. It totally makes no sense and it makes total sense at the same time. That's been going great and we've been doing songs with their producers down in Miami. I've been working at Fred's [Durst, vocals] house a lot, playing guitar and writing songs with him. I'm actually starting to write some vocals on LIMP BIZKIT songs. It happened the other day, which is a new development and strange and good at the same time. We've been doing some band stuff in a few different studios, but we're getting ready to go back into a studio in October and hash out a bunch of the demos that we have right now. We're shooting a video tomorrow (September 7) for a song we did with some Cash Money people. It'll be interesting.

Metalshrine: Are you looking at a record release later this year or early next year?

Wes Borland: I think early next year. We're gonna actually be finishing it, hopefully, in October and then it's highly doubtful we'll get it out by the end of the year.

Metalshrine: Is it gonna be "classic" LIMP BIZKIT music or are you gonna take it in a whole other direction?

Wes Borland: I think it'll be a mixture of both. There's gonna be some classic LIMP BIZKIT stuff and some stuff that’s more musically rock and a bit more experimental and there's stuff that's gonna be super Cash Money club-type stuff. It sounds all over the place, but when I think of what we've done in the past, it's always been like a mix of pop elements with rock and some songs being completely rock and some songs have been completely hip hop. It's really the same. It's the same thing with different players involved.

Metalshrine: You mentioned the covers album and that it's hard listening to it today, do you feel the same with some LIMP BIZKIT stuff? How do you look at old stuff?

Wes Borland: I've heard the old LIMP BIZKIT stuff so much and most of the time I won't listen to a record after it has come out. Especially when we start playing the songs live and songs live tend to change a little bit. Sometimes it's weird to go back and go, "Oh, so that's how it is on the record!" because we do it live like this now. I don't really regret anything that I've done. I don't really regret the covers album. I wish the production had been a little bit better, but you know what? Fuck it! [laughs] We did it and it's important that I learned the lesson, because I learned a lot even though it didn't come out the way I intended. It was a good release, for the most part.

Read the entire interview from Metalshrine.