Metal Reviews

A Letter from Rich Ward:

My dreams came true in March of 1995. Stuck Mojo's first release, "Snappin Necks," could be found on the shelves of music stores all across the world. We had formed in 1989 so, after six years of counting change to buy bean burritos, sleeping in our rehearsal space and playing every small watering-hole that would have our southern-fried, rap-rock, funk-metal hybrid, we felt like we had finally made it. Well, as it turned out...not so much.

For a while, things didn't really change that much. We had spent more on recording "Snappin Necks" than the record company had given us as an advance. So now instead of just being broke (the norm), we actually owed people a lot of money as well.

Now we are approaching the end of 2006 and, as the Machine Head album so appropriately notes, "The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same." In the past twelve years I've had seven official releases with Stuck Mojo, three with Fozzy, one with Sick Speed and one with The Duke, my solo effort. Every success was accompanied by a great desire to achieve and do more. Every failure was an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and was humbly embraced. Everything I have learned from being signed to four different record companies and from having licensed albums to over a dozen distributors around the world has brought me to a single conclusion. From now on we really should try to make and sell albums without them.

Looking back, Century Media was a great record company for Stuck Mojo. The people who worked for the label took pride in doing a great job and worked hard for our band. The down side was that, at that time, we were just a bunch of young, eager and naive musicians who signed a contract that would prohibit us from making much more than if we had taken jobs at McDonalds. Of course, that's our fault, not theirs, as they did not force us to sign the deal. In fairness, we never cared about the contract, the publishing or the royalty rate. We just wanted to destroy the stage in whatever town we were in and then get in the van, drive to the next town and do it again and again. In retrospect, it was the best experience that I ever had with a label. We were broke, but we had lived the dream.

But, this is where the nightmare began.

Palm Records, after putting out the debut Fozzy album in October of 2000, disappeared off the face of the earth. Palm has never returned a phone call, paid us a cent of royalties or even attempted to send us a sales statement.

Sonic Rendesvous, the Dutch label who released my Sick Speed record in 2002, delivered my first statement on schedule (didn't include the check, but that's nit-picking), but shortly thereafter disappeared and is still selling that album years after the contract has expired. To date I have still never received a cent from the sales of that album.

When the process began to write and record the third Fozzy record, "All That Remains," the decision was made to record (Rich) and finance (Jericho) the album ourselves. This would allow us 100% creative control with a maximum return on the financial investment. Well, once again....not so much. But I'll get to that in a second. To get the album in shops, we licensed the album to a different distributor in each major market around the world. In Europe, it was distributed by SPV....and they still owe us money. In Canada, by Koch.....and they still owe us money. But, the award for the largest debt (in excess of $100,000) goes to our US distributor, SMD. At least all of these companies admit to owing us the money. I guess that's the first step toward collecting on a debt owed for almost two years.

I signed "The Duke" to Spitfire/Eagle Records for a two album deal. The debut album, "My Kung Fu Is Good," was released in April of 2005 and, as stated in the contract, my first sales statement was due by September of that same year. As of today (12-10-06), I have still not received that first statement from Spitfire. So, as you can imagine, no royalties have been paid either.

So where does that leave us? Well, walk into your local record shop and look at the price of your average CD. In most cases the band receives only pennies if any of the money that you paid for that CD. Plus, maybe you like the song you heard on the radio but, after purchasing the disc, the rest of the tracks suck. So you just dropped eighteen bucks on a shitty record that the band will never see any money from and now you're really pissed. Keep in mind that even when the record labels do owe bands money, as in our case, they don't always pay. So now you just download your favorite songs for free and tell everyone to get f'd and the record companies stand around wondering why album sales are in the tank.

A change in the way that we, the music fans, get access to and discover new bands and music has been underway for a few years and now it seems like a revolution against the music business itself is finally on the horizon. This is a revolution that sees musicians, not the music industry, controlling the music we create and how our fans get access to it.