Multi-platinum alternative rock band Chevelle have made considerable headway for their eventual tenth studio album. Speaking recently with Heavy New York, the group’s drummer Sam Loeffler recently had the following to say about that:
“We have a whole bunch of music written now that we’re trying to put together another record for ’23. Because that’s what we do — you put music out, you write… It’ll be our first record in a long time not with a major label, which is just neither here nor there. Epic Records did a lot of good stuff; we were with them for a long time, but we’re finished with that contract now. So now we’re doing something different. And we’ll see how different it is.”
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The spring of 2021 saw Chevelle explain the downsides of their then longtime label relationship with Sony/Epic, explaining that despite selling nearly six million albums, they had yet to make money directly from the album sales themselves.
Sam offered at the time:
“…The reality is, with Epic Records, where we’ve been for 20 years, we have a lot of control; they’ve been very good about letting us do almost whatever we want, and supportive. But [in] 20 years, we’ve had eight different [label] presidents, nine different A&R people. There’s no person at Epic that’s responsible for us not making money. Everyone there, I’m sure, wants us to make money. It’s just not the model that exists.
And they’ve been supportive. And we have good people there that have done a lot of work. And I think that, unfortunately, some of those people will probably be disappointed to hear that, but all you have to do is put yourself in anyone’s shoes. Somebody who’s an inventor and goes out and develops this fantastic engine that saves five miles a gallon for a super airliner and he spends his life’s work doing it, and then, at the end of it, he gets zero for it. It’s, like, well, he’s probably entitled to something. And maybe someday we will make something from it.”
He continued:
“People don’t understand how the major label record deal works. Just the standard deal is that the artist pays for everything — marketing, promotion, radio promotion, videos; the artist pays for every single thing. It goes against their record sales.
If you are a major pop artist, the label might spend millions of dollars to promote your music, and that money comes out of your share of the record sales. So if your share is 20 percent, your 20 percent pays for all the marketing — the millions of dollars. So until it gets paid back, you’re in a negative situation.”
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