Roadrunner Records is Dying

Want another reason to hate Warner Bros? Although this isn't COMPLETELY at the fault of Warner Bros, but ever since they bought the biggest rock/metal record label Roadrunner Records, things have just been plummeting for them. Don't know Roadrunner? Well, they're the label that HUGE acts such as Slipknot, Korn, Trivium, Machine Head, Opeth (my favorite band), Dream Theater, Rush, Killswitch Engage, Soulfly, Gojira, and Porcupine Tree call home.

What happens first? Because of bad business, Roadrunner is forced to close their European HQ. BIG FUCKING LOSS for RR because Europe, especially Germany, where their office was located, has a MUCH healthier music industry than that of the United States. This was back in April of this year.

Next, the guy who is 70% responsible for the label's success, A&R executive Monte Conner, after being the president for the label for more than TWO WHOLE DECADES steps down from his position and leaves RR all together! So now, the label no longer has one of the best band-recruiting machines in the history of professional music, and are now stuck with a bunch of half-asses that they're obviously just talking nice about to maintain their disintegrating reputation. Read the more detailed Metal Injection article on that incident and the post on RR's website here:

http://www.metalinjection.net/its-just-business/roadrunner-records-president-steps-down-after-20-years

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/news/farewell-to-monte-conner

What I just did recently was check out the good ol' RR site to see if they had recruited any fresh meat. Well guess what I found: the biggest heavy metal record label in history currently has a roster of only 29 bands. Does that seem like a lot to you? Let's take a look at other metal labels that aren't nearly as mainstream as Roadrunner: Century Media currently has a roster of 92 bands and artists, Relapse Records currently has 73 artists, Victory Records has 70, and Metal Blade Records takes the cake with a whopping 117 bands that are CURRENTLY on their roster! 29 bands? 29 FUCKING BANDS!? And not only that, ALL OF THEM ARE MAJOR BANDS! Listen guys, I know that since you're a mainstream metal record label, you're money-whores, it's not a secret. But I never knew that you were going to be THAT DAMN PICKY about the bands they sign! Sometimes it's a really good thing to sign underground bands because if you have a good A&R guy (hint hint!!!!) that knows good music that has potential when he/she hears it, then you'll sign unknown bands that then get your promotion therefore selling awesome records and getting you the damn money you want.

Roadrunner Records is going down the drain, and I'm hoping that all the bands that are still signed on to them are seeing that are are doing what they can to get the hell out of there. Opeth has already gone through that once, when KOCH records went out of business and got bought by a metal-hating label, Opeth was label-less until good-ol Monte Conner swept them out of the dust to then have them release their two most successful albums of their career, Ghost Reveries and Watershed (and then Heritage in 2011).