Are there enough quality hard rock and metal bands out there? Metallica manager Peter Mensch doesn’t think so. The co-owner of Q Prime Management, which also counts the Black Keys, Baroness and Red Hot Chili Peppers around its clients, spoke with the BBC Radio 4’s Today show, and shared his thoughts:
There aren’t quality new hard rock bands to keep it up. Hard rock used to appeal, essentially, to your average 15-year-old male. He had bad skin, he didn’t like his parents, girls didn’t like him, and he was an angry kid – he was frustrated. And, lo and behold, there were 10,000 other people like yourself. The problem is, and we ask this all the time, where is the new Metallica? Please, anybody out there that’s in a hard rock band under the age of 25, call me. We need you.
He went on to say that with record sales declining and streaming catching on, that he doesn’t know who the fans are. “Fans are the people who will actually pay for something, pay for a ticket…. If I don’t get you to pay for a ticket, then you’re really not a fan of mine.”
People have been asking who the next Metallica are since the Black Album came out. The thing is, there is no next Metallica. They have the best-selling album of the SoundScan era, a milestone that no other current act will be able to top, given the decline in album sales. But other than that, there is and will be a problem getting bands to fill arenas. That being said, Metallica weren’t filling arenas until …And Justice For All, their fourth album. It’s true that there aren’t many hard rock bands, even on their fourth albums, that can fill arenas. But no one would have expected Metallica, upon hearing Kill em All or even Master of Puppets, to be an arena-filling band. Perhaps the next band that will reach arena-filling status is a band that’s slowly gaining a following and honing their sound that no one’s thinking about yet.
[via Metal Hammer]
