Bleeding Through is releasing "The Great Fire", their seventh studio album, this week, and frontman Brandan Schieppati is fired up! The Southern Californian singer, and gym proprietor, is on the phone with Noisecreep when he opens up about his feelings on the current state of underground music industry. "There's a track on the new album called 'Goodbye To Death' which is about how bands, record labels, and management companies, pat themselves on the back before they even really accomplish anything. When Bleeding Through first starting doing this, you would hear people gloat about stuff like selling 400K albums, or selling out huge venues, but it's do different now. Now you'll hear bands say, "We made it! We sold $700 in merch tonight!" It's a joke," Schieppati tells Noisecreep.
"I think people are too busy celebrating the short term, rather than the long term – and that's concerning to me. I've never wanted to be in a band that had a few fantastic years and then went away. We've definitely had years that were better than others. It's never been the kind of thing where we would break up as soon as we stopped drawing 1000 people at our shows. We've always done this to please ourselves, and not as some delusion of grandeur," the vocalist says about Bleeding Through's 13-year career.
Schieppati is also worried that some of the younger bands that Bleeding Through helped influence might have missed the point of it all. "I don't think it's always the kids in these bands' fault. But I hear about bands dropping out of high school because someone told them they had to do that so they can tour full time and become rich. It's scary. This stuff – hardcore, metal, punk – it has a short shelf life. So you're going to throw your education away so someone else can make money off of you? It's just wrong.
"No one is buying records anymore. So these newer bands need to know that there won't be another Metallica. Those level bands are just not going to pop up any more. You have to play this kind of music because you love it. Playing hardcore and metal is not a career move."
"The Great Fire" is being issued by Rise Records, a company known for popular acts like Attack Attack! and Miss May I, but with Bleeding Through not touring as heavily as they did in the past, Noisecreep asked Schieppati if that was causing any friction between the band and its label.
"Rise Records has been great to us. When they signed us back in 2009, they knew we were going to give the first record we did with them [2010's 'Bleeding Through'] a full, 7-8 month tour to support it, and that we wouldn't be doing the same for this new album. They're just happy that we're still putting out new music, and I also feel like they genuinely care about the band. I'm sure you know how rare that is in the music industry."
Listen to Bleeding Through's "The Great Fire" in its entirety at the AOL Listening Party.
Listen to "Goodbye To Death" From Bleeding Through:
So true, start a band because you're passionate about making music, not for a career. Unless it's a tribute band, you can get good money from playing Bon Jovi covers to drunkards.
I would disagree that being in a metal band ISN'T a career move, that's a little bit too definite, because there are (recent( bands who have at least pushed themselves into mainstream popularity, or as mainstream as metal comes. Bring me the Horizon, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for my Valentine and even (sigh) Black Veil Brides are edging on what could be called mainstream popularity, so it can happen, even if we don;t personally like these bands, they exist to appeal to the uneducated masses.
1 Word: Nightwish (If metal isn't a career move explain how their most recent album reached No. 1 in Finland in 4 weeks)
Read the article, he explains himself pretty well. His point isn't that it's impossible to make a career playing metal or crapcore, it's that it's stupid to start a band in the hope that you'll make a career out of doing it, because you probably won't. Anyone who's had a band on a local scene for more than 5 minutes knows how ridiculously unlikely it is that you'll ever become successful enough to support yourself financially in the long term.
In the scene that I'm in, there are so many bands that celebrate the short term achievements and don't think about the long term, sometimes to the point of compromising the quality of those achievements. A few bands I've encountered threw up EPs that were clearly rushed and not thought out and refined in their respective recording process, and somehow they don't understand that it'll reflect on them in the negative.
Metal and/or hardcore are by no means career moves because of their visceral manner, but they clearly have their audiences. Bands just need to remember to always have their head in the game for the right reasons and to be passionate about they do for the music they make, not for the money or the status. That's just how the trendy shit still keeps up.
We've detected that you are using Ad Blocking software.
If you hate ads, but love Ultimate Guitar, how about subscribing to Ultimate Guitar's Ad Free Service? If you subscribe to this service, you won't see annoying banner ads, pop-up ads, text-link ads or video ads and will be helping to support your favorite site at the same time.
As you know, we provide you with a lot of great, free content like news, reviews, interviews, tabs and chords, but you see, ads are the way we generate revenue to run UG and pay royalties to the songwriters and music publishers of the songs that are posted here.
