Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit & Black Light Burns recently shared his thoughts on the current status of the music industry today with Metalshrine. You can read his grim, yet somewhat hopeful, assessment of the current climate below:
“…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 over saturation 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 Gaga’s 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.”
