STONE SOUR/SLIPKNOT Guitarist On The Downfall Of Music Industry

Subba-Cultcha.com recently conducted an interview with STONE SOUR/SLIPKNOT guitarist Jim Root. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Subba-Cultcha.com: Obviously the business side of music, the environment for music has changed quite drastically since you joined STONE SOUR and SLIPKNOT started to take off. What's your take on the way that music has changed in the beginning of the digital age, the way that it's become devalued in many people's eyes, almost throwaway?

Root: Oh yeah. It absolutely has become that. It's almost reminiscent of when rock ‘n' roll first started getting spun in the Fifties. Everything was single-based, nobody cared about records until bands like THE BEATLES, THE WHO and LED ZEPPELIN, PINK FLOYD, too, of course, started experimenting with making full-length records. It's kind of a weird evolution, because in some ways we've been seeing things going down the toilet. It makes it harder, because it trickles down to everything: it doesn't just affect record labels and bands, it affects the people who drive buses for bands, the hotels that the bands book into, it effects the entire economy of the music industry. It's already started affecting touring, the only place a band can make any money at all anymore is by touring. That's part of the reason that I haven't come off the road in the last 11 years. And now you're going to have every band in the world, even if they're successful on radio or successful in the pop world, having to hit the road in order to make money. They're not making any money from publishing, and they're not making any money from selling records, so they have no choice. And what you'll see from that is such an over-saturation of every band, y'know, touring bands might be playing in your city on any given night, all fighting to pay their mortgages, I guess! (laughs) You can certainly see it that way. It goes pretty deep, and it's not just that… The culture of buying an album on CD or vinyl has gone out of the window. A lot of kids don't really understand that, they just hop onto Limewire, or find a BitTorrent, or even just go onto iTunes if they're going to pay for something. It's just right there, there's no searching about. No talking to the old crusty guy who runs the mom-and-pop record shop, "If you like this, this guy played guitar on this album, at this time…" There's no studying the album artwork, or finding out where it was recorded at, who produced it, or how the album artwork was put together. There are many different artforms that are just being lost because the whole digital revolution has homogenized everything, turned it all into Walmart. (laughs) It's a little bit sad.

Subba-Cultcha.com: Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the music itself evolves as a result. I mean, there could well be a further shift towards providing instant gratification, quick thrills, if you like.

Root: It'll be really difficult to find anything that's new and valid. Especially with technology evolving the way that it's evolving. I mean, I just got an email from Native Instruments, who're doing this thing called The Mouth: basically it can take anything or turn it into a loop or a sequence. You don't even need to play an instrument, you just basically say what you want to do and it'll either turn it into a drum pattern or a loop, and you can arrange them however you like… next thing you know you've got a song. There are people making all kinds of music with that and then uploading it to iTunes from their Garage Band or whatever. You might go see this person live and they don't have a band, it's just them there singing along with their computer. From that to the people who really take recording seriously, write and arrange music, you'll have everything in between. It's going to be difficult, in some ways it's like, well now they've just got to go out and search for new music in the digital world, rather than walking half a mile from their house to the record shop.

Subba-Cultcha.com: Nobody really knows how it's going to go from here.

Root: No, in some ways it's kind of like the Wild West out there. But all I know is that I've watched it evolve, have been on the road every year since '99, and you can definitely see the impact of it, talking to people at record labels, other bands, the people who work for bands, the guitar techs, the stage managers and all that stuff, it's definitely something that people are kind of freaked out about.

Subba-Cultcha.com: It seems that making a livelihood from music is becoming increasingly difficult, that the weekend job at Walmart is increasingly necessary.

Root: Well that's probably what'll end up happening: a load of really good musicians who can't afford to be in bands, who have to have day jobs, you know what I mean? And then that's when you start losing a lot of the live touring bands. Unless the digital realm gets to the point where people can sit in their bedrooms and broadcast a show somewhere. (laughs)

Read the entire interview from Subba-Cultcha.com.