Avenged Sevenfold Talk Sales Of 'The Stage' & The Media

As you should hopefully know, Avenged Sevenfold released a new album a couple weeks back called 'The Stage', which was officially released following a very cool live-streamed set on top of the Capitol Records in Hollywood. And it's great! But compared to 2013's 'Hail To The King' it did not sell as well, which is just pure fact, and the band has since taken on an overly defensive tone after many media outlets did their jobs and reported on that simple fucking fact.

See, frontman M. Shadows recently addressed the click bait nature of various websites and their articles, and then breaks down the sales of their own record, which still sold really well all things considered; over 76,000 copies in the US alone and #4 on the ARIA Charts over here. Look, it's a long statement and you can read it in full here, but you can read the aforementioned sales breakdown, easily the most interesting part of the whole post, below:

"76k records sold in the first week by a heavy metal band in 2016 is supposedly a failure (USA only). Actually, 76k records on a surprise release with zero promotion and a single that had been out for 13 days with a running time of 8:30 is a failure. This kind of talk is insane and is the exact sort of narrative that plagues the failing music industry. This is the sort of talk that pressures artist to write their songs around " what works financially" and not "what they really want to create.' People want different. People want innovation. People want art. If this wasn't a huge risk then everybody would be doing it. I haven't seen the hip hop community or country music community questioning Jeezy or Kenny Chesney about why they didn't sell more albums and crush a heavy metal band with a surprise release by more then 3k records. Sure, we sold WAY less than "Hail to the King." But we feel this is a different circumstance."

"When "Hail to the King" was released Apple Music did not exist. It now has around 15 million subscribers. Spotify has 40 million subscribers these days. And when these websites try to sell you on the streaming metric its a little more complicated then that. There are plenty of studies done as to why rock doesn't have as many streams as hip hop. You need 1500 streams to equal 1 album. Who has time to stream a song like "The Stage" or "Exist' that many times? These two songs alone equal 25 min. So should we write 3 min. songs so we can get more streams? Fuck no. Thats ridiculous."

Look, there are some good points that he made there (Apple Music being new, the length of their songs, the release nature of this record), but basically, this whole thing can be summed up in a far quicker fashion. Here, let me do that now: Avenged Sevenfold releases surprise new album, it doesn't sell as much as past releases in its first week, media outlets do their job and report on that simple fact, band then makes a big social media statement saying "Fuck those guys for doing basic math and giving us good reviews, because we did really good here aye?'. Cool? Cool.

*Sigh*

Well, in any case, 'The Stage' is a bloody good record and is easily the most ambitious and the most interesting A7X album in years! You can read our review of it here.