Review: The Offspring – Let the Bad Times Roll

The Offspring - Let the Bad Times Roll

For years now, it seems like a new The Offspring album has been promised like a new Avatar movie. There were rumblings of a new record being recorded as early as 2013, but nothing came to fruition despite the band hyping up their progress. In this time, they left the record label they’ve been a part of since 1996, Columbia Records, and also parted ways with long-time bass player Greg K. After the delays, band drama, national chaos and a global pandemic, the band finally dropped their first new album after nine years, the appropriately titled Let the Bad Times Roll.

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Andy Hull Reviews Every Manchester Orchestra Album

Uproxx:

I’ll never forget being in the office at Columbia, and playing them the record, and the radio team just having these blank stares on their faces. They had no idea what to do. I was like, “I have a pretty good idea: I think this song ‘Pensacola’ is really catchy.” And, they were like, “No, no, no, it can’t be that, there’s no real chorus to it. We should do ‘Simple Math’ and then also the next week release ‘April Fool,’ so that nobody knows what the single is.”

Streaming Music Payouts

This breakdown from Nick Heer about music streaming payouts touched on a point I think about often:

I get millions of songs for my $10 per month. In about the same timeframe in 2009, I also added Burial’s “Untrue” to my library. I have played the thirteen songs on that album 684 times in total, leading to an estimated payout of $6.84. My CD copy of that album probably cost $15, of which William Bevan probably earned just a few pennies. Apple Music obviously has not existed since 2009 but, if it had, I cannot work out how much less artists would have made if I had streamed all of my music instead of buying physical copies.

Somehow, we are still paying just $10 per month for music in an era where streaming must be paired with live performance to have any hope of generating an income for an artist, all the while fighting the paradox of streaming music, and artists are still getting screwed in the middle of all of it. There would not be a music industry without music, but the industry gets all of the money while musicians still have to fight for scraps.