Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows has never been shy about the business side of music, and in a new interview he laid out an unusually detailed teardown of the record-label model — and explained exactly why his now-independent band has no intention of ever signing to one again.
The comments came on a recent episode of “Delivering Happiness,” the unscripted, celebrity-driven podcast hosted by actor Nick Turturro for Prince St. Pizza. There, Shadows expanded on Avenged Sevenfold‘s status as, in his words, a fully independent act, a position the band reached after fulfilling its eight-album run with Warner, which wrapped with 2023’s Life Is But A Dream…. His verdict on labels was flat and unsentimental.
“We did eight records with [Warner], and then we are done with record labels. So we’re a fully independent band now. Three years ago was our last album we had to do with [Warner], and then because of the way the music industry is now, we just don’t see a point of ever being on a label again. They really can’t do much for you. They’ll tell you they can do a lot, but they can’t. There’s no radio that matters. There’s no MTV. They’re gonna try to get you on TikTok, which everyone can do themselves. In my opinion, they don’t bring anything extra [to the table],” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Pressed by Turturro on what the majors actually provided for a band like Avenged Sevenfold in its early days, Shadows walked through the old playbook, advances, studio hookups, and a fair amount of money changing hands behind the scenes:
“Well, they’d give you an advance. You had no money, so they’d give you money to record a record. They would hook you up with producers or engineers, mixers, and then they would go pay Walmart and Target to put you on the endcaps, and then they’d pay radio stations to play you. It’s called payola. It was illegal, but they’d do it. And then they would go hound MTV and get your records played on national television. Now it’s all gone. So I can go upload something on YouTube and on TikTok, and I can go play shows. I can make more money in one show than it would cost to make a record than they can give you, and when they give you the money, you’re paying four times what that money is to get it back. So there’s just no point.”
Where he grew most pointed was on the economics, the recoupment math that, in his telling, leaves most artists deep in the hole for the privilege of a label logo:
“The industry just blew it all open. And people are still very late to move. They’re looking at it going, ‘Well, it’s really cool to tell my grandparents that I’m on Universal Records.’ But really, Universal Records gives you $25,000, you have to make 100,000 to pay that back. Every penny. And so if you can afford it yourself, you should do it yourself. ‘Cause there is no MTV. There is no KROQ anymore that’s gonna play something modern. They don’t. They play all the old stuff. So there’s no point.”
For all his bluntness, Shadows was quick to say he isn’t mourning the old system. Given the choice, he far prefers the current landscape, which he sees as a boon for creativity — even as he acknowledges what his own band gained by coming up in the MTV era. It’s a duality he summed up with a memorable image of Avenged Sevenfold as a “hinge band”:
“I absolutely love where everything’s at right now. I think it’s super interesting, and it creates way more artistic freedom ’cause people can do whatever they want, and either it works or it doesn’t and you kind of move and pivot. When you have radio stations and MTV and this and that, you get a lot of favorites being played because ‘this worked, so go make more stuff like that.’ There’s not a lot of creativity there. It’s basically based on, what are people listening to? And so the art form really becomes a full-on product. It’s just, like, make more of the product. And that’s not really what music should be. It should be a free expression. But I will say I’m extremely grateful that we came around during a time where we could get our foot in the door and sell a ton of records, and we were on MTV and we were on radio stations. So it really catapulted the band in a way that the normal kid that’s playing ‘Call Of Duty‘ or ‘Madden‘ hears our music on there because there’s these drivers. But if I had to choose — right now, I love the way the industry is now because people can throw such creative stuff at the wall, and you can go find it, and it’s amazing. But that comes with the caveat of you’re not gonna get as big as you could’ve… We’re kind of like a hinge band. We have our left leg in the old, and we have our right leg fully focused on what’s happening now. And we got to see both, where the younger generation, they have no clue what it was like to walk into Walmart and buy a record that was on an endcap. Or to turn on MTV and ‘TRL”s on and your favorite band’s number one on ‘TRL‘, and you’re calling and voting. It doesn’t exist anymore. But that’s what I grew up with. And it was fun. It was exciting. But it’s changed.”
Avenged Sevenfold cemented their independence back in May, when they announced they had bought back the master recordings and rights to their 2016 album The Stage and declared themselves free of any label after 26 years together. And the band has already been living out the philosophy Shadows describes: their recent surprise EP Statica and the single “Magic” both arrived with no label behind them, released entirely on the group’s own terms — proof that, for Avenged Sevenfold at least, going it alone is more than a talking point.
