M. Shadows says the music industry sat still as technology changed it, and explains his blockchain push.
M. Shadows has argued that the record business had years of warning about what streaming and file-sharing would do to it and used none of them. The Avenged Sevenfold frontman set out the case on the “Artist Friendly” podcast, hosted by Good Charlotte‘s Joel Madden, tracing his own band’s move into blockchain back to a simple complaint: nobody in the chain would tell them who their fans actually were.
Shadows described a band that arrived at the exact point the old model started to break.
“For me, when I see the hornet’s nest of the music industry trying to figure out what’s going on and what the next steps are, I am super grateful that I live in a time where there is no pure-cut path to success. There was a time when Avenged Sevenfold, we had our left foot in one way and the right foot in the other. And what I mean by that is we came up in 1999, you could still sell CDs, you could still buy space on the endcap, you could still get at least enough radio play to see if it researched well. You could go into [Los Angeles radio station] KROQ and maybe get [then-KROQ DJ Ted] Stryker to play it. You guys [in Good Charlotte] were on ‘TRL‘. You brought us on. You still had the ability to do things with half-a-million-dollar music video budget. But at this time, what was happening was the whole industry was changing, not from the music perspective, but from a technology perspective. And technology, at the end of the day, is how we listen, how we we adapt to what we’re doing, how we view this stuff. So you have YouTube coming online. You have the Internet being invented. You have Limewire and Napster. You have all these things happening, and the music industry did nothing. It sat there. And now we have a situation where everything has been blown to bits. And so you have to look back and go, ‘Okay, well, how can these people serve me as an artist?’ ‘Cause an artist should be working on the songs. But once you have the songs done, how can this person serve me in terms of a record label or management or agents, whatever it is? And what do they deserve for what they can [do for you]?” he explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Shadows credited the majors with getting the band to a position where they could take risks, then explained what he found when he looked at the machinery around them.
He continued: “So our band, because of a major label and because of being on record labels, and we give them credit where it’s due, in that time, it got us to a point to where now we can kind of take all the safety nets and the parachute off and go, ‘Okay, well, what is in front of us now? If I’m gonna make a step from day one, how do I make that first step?’ And to me, it’s looking at all the new technologies. Blockchain really stood out to me as something — because when I looked at the music industry, I said, there’s a merch company that doesn’t give us who’s buying our merch. There’s a record label who’s not telling us who our fan is. There’s Facebook, Instagram, they’re not telling us who our fans are. In fact, they’ll change the rules on us and charge us. That’s how they make the money. I am the product at that point. They are taking all the money. Then I’m looking at ticketing. Ticketmaster wouldn’t tell us who is buying all of our tickets. That’s their customer, not ours. And then I’m looking at streaming. Well, who’s listening? Well, that’s Spotify‘s customer, and that’s Tidal‘s customer. That’s not your customer. Well, actually, if you look at it, all those companies are standing on the shoulders of artists. And so when I saw blockchain, I didn’t think of NFT price go up. I didn’t think of Bitcoin. Obviously, those are different conversations, and I wasn’t thinking of all these things. I was thinking, ‘These are pieces of data, the fan, and how do you make the fan’s experience better while collecting that data and being able to reach out to them?’ … So my idea with BitFlips was to make an completely comprehensive flow of everything a fan would do with an artist — listening, purchasing, going to events, all of it — and putting it on some sort of reward card. This is your user profile. You get rewarded, and then you’d go, ‘Well, Matt, how do you make their experience better?’ Well, it’s easy. You give them your time. You give them access to the front of the line, which most of them want. You give them access to early tickets, and you give them ownership of all these things. Now you prove that you’re a fan, and you have ownership of whether you wanna use it, sell it or give it to somebody. And the blockchain is the only thing I’ve seen that allows you to do that. People can come at you all day and go, ‘Make your own database.’ Oh, yeah? Well, how am I gonna get the information from all these companies that are taking it from us? How am I gonna have that user database and be able to give somebody something that’s not like a user code and tell them that they can sell that? The person will steal it from you or take it from you. So there’s all these things that blockchain…”
Shadows said press coverage of the technology has shifted, and that his concern is for artists signing deals now.
“All I’ve seen in the press for the last 10 years that I’ve been involved in crypto is how bad it is and how much it’s a scam,” he added. “Today I’m starting to see all the, ‘We were too late to the puzzle. Now you can move money around the world, and that’s how it works.’ And all of a sudden, it’s a, ‘Oh, my God. What were we doing? We weren’t paying attention.’ And so I don’t want the music industry to be again behind the times, and then all these new artists are gonna come up, and they’re locked into sh**ty deals, giving 75% of their earnings away, when the label really doesn’t have the tools at that point to do what they can do themselves and give the fan a better experience.”
Avenged Sevenfold launched the Deathbats Club NFT collection in December 2021 as the base layer for the rest of it. In March 2023 they struck a deal with Ticketmaster giving Deathbats Club holders token-gated priority on tickets, and weeks later added a free loyalty programme built with Bitflips, using Berify‘s authentication. Fans accumulate points by streaming, buying merchandise and attending shows, authenticate through a wallet or email address, and request tickets through the system, with confirmation coming back from Ticketmaster. It now runs under the Deathbat Rewards name.
The band announced on 19 May that they had become “a fully independent band” after 26 years, having bought back the master recordings and rights to The Stage, its deluxe edition and Live At The Grammy Museum from Capitol Records. The deluxe edition now carries their four-song rooftop performance from the Capitol building.
Getting there took a decade. Warner sued the band in late 2015 after they invoked the California Labor Code’s seven-year rule, which lets parties leave a contract after seven years in certain circumstances. That case never reached trial and was settled out of court, leaving the band free to sign with Capitol, which put out The Stage as a surprise release in October 2016 with a concert on the label’s roof. They then returned to Warner for Life Is But A Dream… in June 2023, and completing that deal is what closed the loop.
Shadows postponed touring in September 2025 after suffering a vocal fold hematoma, pushing the band’s plans into this year. In July they released Statica, a four-track EP issued with no announcement and produced by Joe Barresi, leaning on electronic textures and processed vocals, a direction that split the fanbase.
Avenged Sevenfold return to Australia and New Zealand this October for the first time in twelve years, with Coheed And Cambria and Thornhill supporting, and have a North American co-headline run booked with Good Charlotte, whose singer conducted this interview.
The band, Shadows, Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance, Johnny Christ and Brooks Wackerman, have taken two consecutive Billboard 200 number ones with 2010’s Nightmare and 2013’s Hail To The King, along with several rock radio chart-toppers.
