M. Shadows (Avenged Sevenfold)

Today on the Rock Feed Podcast, we are joined by a very special guest back again, M. Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold. And if you look around, we're in your studio, in your house. This is so sick to be in here. I can't imagine, like, how long have you been working? of the studio um i think the first record i started writing in here was probably nightmare really you have nightmare in here yeah um dude that's crazy yeah it's it's uh

It's interesting because, you know, we wrote our first couple records in my mom's garage. Well, we wrote the first record at Huntington Beach High School, basically in guitar class. Me and Zachy wrote it. And then... We moved over to my mom's garage. And then when we moved out of the garage, you kind of get like, there's a little bit of superstition. Like, oh, are we going to be able to make a good record somewhere else? But Nightmare came out of here.

And now the band, everyone's got individual studios. So it's a lot more streamlined than it was, right? Like we can send each other files and just drop them into Pro Tools and you can kind of work on your own things and then we get together. But yeah, Nightmare was the first one. So it wasn't just, the band was writing stuff here as well for Nightmare? Oh yeah. Wow, dude. Me and Brian and Jimmy would come here daily. And Mike Elizondo would come here and listen to demos.

discuss stuff i used to have a um where you're sitting it used to be a drum kit um but like i said things have been you know with technology things have really streamlined a lot of times we can program drums now and then we'll get into another studio to record stuff for real but

Back in the day, you all had those little mini electronic drum kits that we'd get from the Guitar Center, and everyone would have a little one in their house with a couple of toms. But yeah, technology made things a little...

More streamlined. So you've spent, so are you writing pretty much everything vocally in this room? Would you say the majority majority? No, no, I would look at, um, I think my, my. My schedule, whether we're working on a record or not, is I like to just get a coffee. I do a vocal lesson every morning from 10 to 11. So I usually wake up around 730 with the kids and then they go to school and then I'll sit in here.

um with a coffee and just like mess around with ideas and it could be guitar it could be vocals it could be just like it could just be learning chord changes and phrases that i like from someone else's band and i'll throw them into pro tools and i kind of you know, figure out what they're doing and like, just like building the knowledge of things I think sound cool. So really it's just, I would just call this a creative room and I've got my video games in here too. I do like all my, like.

my web three stuff i do my keyboards exploring the studio space as joe breezy would call it happens in here yeah this is so cool it's amazing and you can tell too like The seat I'm sitting in, this is a true veteran's chair right here. This has some wear and tear on it. The microphone as well. Can you show the mic?

I just want you guys to see because you guys are going to think this is cool just like I did. You can really tell he really uses that mic. He really is in here working hard. That's genuine wear and tear. Or I'm chewing on it. I don't know.

That's so amazing. So you guys just announced the tour down in South America. And I know the show in Mexico, like a stadium sold out in like 20 minutes. That's crazy. It's crazy to see the growth of the fan base around the world. It's incredible. And it's, you know, I remember the first time we went down to Mexico with Metallica, they did three nights at the big stadium, you know, the big boy stadium.

You know, just to see where we're at now, I think we're probably close to their age at that time when they took us down there or maybe a little younger still. But, you know, we're doing a baseball stadium there. It looks like we could have played the bigger stadium. It's just... in latin america and in you know asia they just love metal so much and europe and america have always been you know europe's always been the one where it's like oh they love metal and they do but

The rest of the world is just showing their passion, especially for Avenged Sevenfold in ways that we can only dream of, you know, and it makes you, you know, proud to think back.

on the days in my mom's garage and like just even getting a call from the big boys to get to open for them and then now get to kind of do our own thing and then also build our legacy the way we want to do it um in terms of the the bands were bringing out in terms of how we want our show to look and feel. That's all exciting because really it's a blank slate and you can, you're going to inspire younger generations and you want to kind of do things that show them it's, it's okay to kind of.

So, you know, metal should be the place where there's a lot of expression and creativity, I think. And I think so it takes bands with a lot to lose to kind of go out there and continue to do that and not play it safe. And you guys with your technology integrated into your shows, like things like the, the way even.

augmented reality, let's say, can modify your face to the fans in the crowd, almost like a modern visualizer. Talk about kind of the technology and is there anything you can share about?

Because it feels like you guys are just getting started with this. This is like an emerging tech and live music, like where this is going, you think? Yeah, I mean, we... are exploring all sorts of things we're not all in on anything we're only all in on feeling excited about things yes um so you know about a year and a half ago or two years ago i remember our um

We were not only messing around with the production and the things that we were able to do, or at least that made sense, that you can afford to bring on the road. One of the cool things we were playing around with was our... Our, what would be his, it's like a creative director in a way, but he's running the live, he's running the video walls. He'd been working on this AI code.

where he could basically prompt anything in real time to basically, you know, put zombie, you could write zombie or you could write, you could write anything you can write. really bad stuff too right like like penises and then you all turn into penises yeah like it's so um

He tested that. Yeah, I didn't just come up with that right now. We definitely had a day where there's some funny stuff on the screens. But just exploring where everything can take you, right? Like, and the idea of... augmenting the the audience or the band based around the lyrics or the themes of a song um you know it makes it you can have like these hunter s thompson s things for fear and loathing in las vegas and backcountry but then you could also put in

lsd trip and then all of a sudden everything's morphing or you could put lizard people or you could put right and just an incredible tool um that he that he came up with and we were so that's something we were doing a lot live and um just vr concerts um just really exploring peer-to-peer um fandom and relationships and ownership so we're just like

having a really good time we did like an ARG that I mean I I know this this doesn't get talked about a lot but when we did the fake cancellation of our shows so fun I mean and then it goes into I mean at the end of that there was A wallet with $5,000 found. There was multiple puzzles and...

events where people were going in the middle of San Jose in a rainy night and seeing nobody up on the billboard. And then it had clues in it and they were minted a million NFTs. We literally minted a million NFTs with clues. poster boards and bulletins and the community came together all all this stuff was done because of a lot of cool technology that we've been playing with in an incredible like sort of dev team so um we just

To me, I get excited talking about it because that's so fun. Yes. And so that's really what drives it. It's not trying to be first at anything. It's not trying to say, oh, everyone has to follow our path. The only path we hope people will follow is just being true to themselves.

be free right right and just and and trying everything and giving your audience having fun with your audience as they explore it together and you guys have always been you know i think some people hold themselves back from

creativity or pushing the boundaries just because they're afraid of, you know, what people think. You guys don't worry about that. You literally just do exactly what you want to do and you're uncompromising in that it seems. Dave Farrell from Lincoln Park. We were at dinner.

probably a year ago. And we were talking about life is but a dream. And he said, we're in this really nice restaurant and there's a bunch of people around. And he says, if you were to take your record right now or any record that you love and show it to everybody here. How much weight would you put behind any of these people's opinion? And the answer is zero. And so at the end of the day, we're not making art by committee. This isn't art by committee.

like everybody give us your ideas and we're all going to kind of morph the same thing. Yes. We have AI to do that now. Right. You're going to be able to take your favorite records and AI can spit out something sort of like it. That's cool. But you need, but you need.

You need artists and creatives to keep pushing the boundaries. Some things are going to work, some things aren't. But at the end of the day, it's even if something doesn't work, it might spark in someone else. Oh, that was bold. Where can I push limits a little more? that's how this whole space thrives right um and so for me it's it's it really i couldn't care less about but but i also one rule i made myself a long time ago is i i listened to the positivity

equally to the negativity, meaning I don't care about either. If a review is a 10 out of 10, cool. It could be bought and paid for. Cool. They could be trying to be, it doesn't matter. If it's a zero out of 10, it also doesn't matter. So I think that you have to, like, you can't just walk around with all your good stuff and then ignore the bad. You have to kind of ignore both, in my opinion.

I totally agree. And you've always, you know, since I've known you, you've always had that mindset where you guys really don't care, you know, and not in a bad way. Like you don't care about your fans. You have a great relationship with your fans, but like you don't let any outside noise affect you guys. And I was saying this to him.

before we started filming, and I thought this was great. You see bands that have been together as long as Avenge has, and still a long way to go as well. But after all of your history together, you guys seemingly have a really good relationship. And it's not one of those things where you guys are just separate all the time. It seems like you guys are close still after all of these years.

Yeah, we all live really close together. Brooks is the only one that lives in Long Beach, which is what, 20 minutes away? Yeah, not even far. Everyone else is like, you could jog to their house. We was at dinner with Brian last night. I mean, we saw the guys last week for rehearsals for Peru. I mean, we just, our families are intertwined. The wives are intertwined. The kids all playing sports together or whatever they're doing.

And then it's just, yeah, we just really enjoy each other, you know, and they're just, they're, they're my best friends and yeah, it's, it's, it's always been the way it is with our band and it's pretty special for sure. Especially as we get older, we can kind of see.

where where things happen with other bands and just try not to it takes a lot of growth though as individuals right individuals have to understand they have to set their egos aside and understand how to deal with people or deal with each other especially When you know each other so well, you know the things that are going to set someone off, the things that you just don't get into. You know, it's just growing up and being, I guess, a little bit smart about it.

Well, I mean, it's so amazing. It's not something you see very often. And I think something else that we've talked about a lot is we hear all the time, concert tickets. Concert tickets, they're going on sale. We can't get access to them. dynamic pricing all of this and then there's people talking about solutions we saw uh kid rock talking about this all sorts of people about wanting to find solutions

You have, from your vantage point, a solution that could help assist with this through technology. Can you kind of give a baseline overview of what you think would maybe address this ticketing issue? fans are kind of getting the short end of the sticks more often than not and bands too as well. Right. Well, there's the reality that people, first and foremost, before solutions, there's a lot of times there's not enough tickets to meet demand.

So at the end of the day, any solution that gets presented, if you think the solution is, I deserve a concert ticket at the price I want it at. Right. And if I don't get that concert ticket, then it's the artist or ticket master's fault. Right. then there is no solution for you. That's a good point. If Taylor Swift is playing the observatory, which holds 1,200 people, or any stadium...

$20,000 tickets. Yeah, it doesn't matter that there's solutions or not. There's just too much demand for tickets. So for us, one of the things that we've created is some sort of...

proof of fan verification rewards program, right? Where any scalpers, right? So, so what it does is like, first you have to, see who the fans are you have to be able to prove who a fan is right because if i told you oh i've got this token that can interact with ticket master and if you don't have the token you can't get the tickets early you could say well

How do you know the tokens are in the hands of fans that Scalper can get tickets? So if you kind of peel back the layers, there is a solution on the blockchain that will allow peer to peer. ticketing or at least ticket master to a fan at the face value of a ticket. There is that solution. The question becomes who gets these tokens and how do you protect the real fans from getting the tickets?

So we've implemented something for the last few tours. It's worked brilliantly. It works in the United States right now. The other ticketing companies or even Ticketmaster outside of the U.S. doesn't have the ability to do this. But I do think this is something that people will look into where.

You know, if you're a Taylor Swift fan and you've bought five T-shirts and an album, you can receive this token. And then when you go get tickets the day of the show, there's no queues. There's no... There's no reselling sort of fear because you've got this token and that's done on the blockchain in a way that you simply can't.

break into um so without going into the nuts and bolts of that that's that's a cool solution so for us as an example you know we did the system of a down show soldier field it sold out very quickly yes dude so it was about you know 56 000 tickets were sold in about 30 minutes well people that don't know what we did prior to that is we had sold 1700 tickets through the duck bats club and through a thing called ticket pass

And if you look at the analytics of that show, the people that bought the pit tickets with Death Bats Club was two days prior. They had no queues. They had no worries about their tickets. And they bought pit tickets for $280. The person that waited... in the queue and didn't have this deathbats token, some of them ended up paying $800 for Nosebleed. Whoa. And so...

So what you have there is the kick in of dynamic pricing. You have a huge demand. You have more people in the queue that can buy tickets. And so the prices go up. And now that's a whole other discussion that I've got into before, but that's the reality. The prices are going up.

So people that are sitting in the top now paid $800 where people had this sort of digital handshake with us on the blockchain because they have these tokens paid $280 for their pit tickets. So that's a high level macro of it. To me, that's a really great solution for a lot of fans and artists. And the cool thing about it, too, is these tokens, you have ownership of them as a fan. So if you own this token and you don't care about that band anymore or want to participate anymore.

You can sell it to someone else, trade it to someone else, give it to somebody else, and they can have that sort of benefit. So there are solutions and we're working on them. We think, you know, we're kind of a put our money where our mouth is kind of band. Instead of just talking about it, we've built it. Yeah.

building it or using it. So it's one of those things where we keep preaching it. We just had this show in Mexico City, you know, sell out in 20 minutes. There was 30,000 tickets or something like that to sell. We actually did 11,000 tickets before the concert went on sale just with the Death Bat Rewards and Death Bat Club people. Wow. And so I want to talk about the Death Bat Rewards because here's the thing. There's a big misconception that I'm seeing from y'all in the comments.

They have it now where you're literally able to sign up. There's no NFTs. There's no stuff involved. You just literally can enter your email. Now it's as simple as signing up. Now you can join this rewards, which has a battle pass system, which I'm going to show you like call of duty. And you're acquiring basically XP that you can use towards free concert tickets, unreleased music, meet and greets, numerous other collectible items.

all just by entering your email. And what you're saying is by signing up for that, they were even able to get tickets directly from the band. Yes. Wow. Yes. So from the band directly, that is... You know, we talk a lot about companies and ticketing companies. You can buy tickets directly from the band now and they're very early on in.

Yeah, well, what we do is we go to Live Nation or whoever promoters, and they go, you know, the way the contracts work is, what do you guys need? And one thing we do is we say, well, we need 100 seats that are just ours, right? And we use those 100 seats every night.

to fill these tickets out. When people have two free tickets they've earned through the rewards program, or when we first launched Death Bats Club, we gifted everybody in the Death Bats Club two free tickets. So when that happened, there was about... 5,000 of these given out. So that's 10,000 tickets we gave out. And now I think there's about 2,900 of them still out there. Wow. So people have been using them, right? Some shows.

The 100 go quick. And then a lot of shows where if you look at our schedule in Lithuania or France or Sweden. Probably five to six people will use them. And we'll have all those tickets we'll release on the show day. But you're still very early with this as well. You know what I mean? Well, that's the thing. The whole point is that this Mexico show sold out. There's no more tickets to be had.

But there's still these tickets that you could buy from another fan for probably half the price. Wow. If people understood how to use it all, right? And now there is that sort of... barrier to entry of how do I get this ticket? And it's not the normal flow, which is go to Ticketmaster, put your credit card in. Oh, I got him or I didn't. Now it's, oh, I go.

to, you know, the Discord, or I go and I buy them from a fan on OpenSea or through Rarible, and then I have the tickets. And then I go through the Vengeance Unfold site and I pick what show I want to go to. It's a super easy flow, but it's different. So it stumbles people, right? But we're just trying to make this as commonplace as possible because right now there's 30,000 tickets sold in Mexico and we have about 100 empty seats.

that we're just going to wait and see how many of those tickets fill up. And I have a feeling it won't be all of them. Right. Because people just are, it's too early. Right. And those people have friends and family seats is what we do. We hold a hundred seats that are friends and family. So they're very nice seats. They're not nosebleeds. Exactly. Very good seats. So that's one aspect of what we're doing. And it's it's incredibly early, but it's.

But it's pretty cool. I think the email sign-up thing, because it wasn't always that way, but since you've gone to the email list sign-up, it seems like that's grown that exponentially for the band. It's been huge. It's so simple now. When we put this Latin American... and tour on sale the the signups through email were just massive and i want to like make something really clear you still own all the things that

You get through email. What's happening is we're opening a wallet for you behind the scenes. And so you can interact with a wallet through our IO site and not even know you're interacting with one. You just made it as simple as possible. It's just as simple as possible. It's an email.

You sign up your email, we take care of the rest, and then we let you interact the way you want. Now, if you want to upgrade to a wallet, you can. I start out as a total novice, as I have started out with this stuff, and then I become more advanced. As I'm becoming more advanced, I can convert out of that wallet.

established for me into my own yes wow yes and even though all that we established for you is yours right but if you want to like move on to pastors and you want to go interact with the mega death crypto thing they're doing or if you want to interact with Slipknot who's done stuff and a lot of other artists that we know that are coming online, then you'd want to have your own wallet that you could say, well...

This is Brian's wallet, and I interact with all these other things. For now, if you only want to interact in the invention of the ecosystem, email.

We talk about Web3, I think, where this is going as we were talking earlier. Fans of bands are going to be able to trade items amongst each other. I have these two tickets to go see Event 7-fold. I have a meet and greet. I'm going to trade my Event 7-fold meet and greet. for a potentially, let's say, a slipknot meet and greet, et cetera, in real time, instantaneously. Wow. Yeah, it's giving the fans the complete control. It's the same way as saying, well, if, you know...

If Fortnite was on chain and PUBG was on chain and you both like something that you're using in those games, you have ownership and you can swap them and now different people own them. Wow. That doesn't exist with the way things are now, but...

That's why we're starting this, and we hope that you can use an Avenged Sunfold discount in a Megadeth store, or you can use a Good Charlotte discount in the Avenged Sunfold store, right? And vice versa, right? And as one band... goes on tour and one band is promoting a record and things are happening a lot.

and you're earning rewards, and now another band's starting to do their thing, and this band's kind of dying down, well, you can use those rewards over here, and it always kind of, it's got this network effect where all the artists can kind of be together, where... That happens now, except they're all being done behind walled gardens like Facebook or Instagram. And they all have their own little closed off ecosystems where if we do this the other way.

Not only does the fan have ownership of the relationship, but the artist is going to have ownership of the things they provide and also know that their fans are being treated to a higher tier of, you know, of ownership and fandom.

Wow. So I am a visual learner, and I'm sure some people, when you look at the interface, this is like essentially... This is an oversimplification, but the band has basically their own Call of Duty style platform, you know, for lack of a better term, where it's a video game style environment. And you can see all of these things that you're unlocking. And it's crazy to see how simplified it has gotten because I've watched this.

grow over the last couple of years, and now it's really coming to its own. So can we take a look on your computer? Sure, absolutely. Sweet, let's do it. All right, so we're going to take a look on the computer now, and this is the website. Yeah, it's a little gamified world. We've got a token-gated... studio over here where we release music before we release anywhere else in here. You have to have a token to get in. We have the Discord up here. We've got Sandbox up here. All sorts of fun stuff.

This website is super interactive and fun. We've got the Death Bouts Club. We're going to go inside the club. So if you want to go to Death Bouts Rewards and check this out, you're going to click on Death Bouts Rewards and you're going to sign in. you can see here all you have to do is put in your email or if you're a little more web3 savvy you can continue with a wallet so i'll continue with my wallet but it's the same flow you type in your email super simple pops up

Connect. Now I am in. And so you see the battle pass style system here where you're going through, seeing the rewards, the tiers that you're hitting. Yes. And now when you unlock something, they're going to end up in here, which is like, I kind of modeled this after Zelda where you kind of, you know, like your little like backpack with like your bow and arrow. Right. Yeah, all your stuff.

This is like our items. For other bands, it can look any way they want it to look. Now, these are my rewards that I've earned. And so say that you want to go to one of the shows, and I've earned two free tickets here. So this gold rim allows me to be aware that there's a redeemable perk attached to this token that I've earned. I'm going to click this and you'll see here it says redeem perk. So I want to redeem my two tickets.

I press redeem and right here is a list of all the current shows. Wow. So I can pick any show that I want to redeem them for. So let's say we want to redeem them for Istanbul Turkey. I open this up. I click next. And now after I press confirm, this token is going to burn and that's a term meaning it's going to disappear out of my wallet.

We have been sent your information. We'll have your email address, your phone number, your wallet address. And then when you go to the show that day, there'll be tickets waiting for you at Will Call. It's literally like putting you on the guest list of the show. Putting you on the guest list. That's sick.

So all you do is confirm that and then it would burn. I don't want to waste my two tickets just yet. Yeah. And the other thing about this that's cool is like, since I own these two tickets, I could go over here to... my rewards program system over here on Rarible and I could sell these tickets if I want. So on here you can see these people have earned 2,400 people have earned 15% discounts they haven't used yet.

30% discounts on watch. Wow, major discounts. Here's meet and greets are for sale. So a fan is selling a meet and greet right now. This one's going for... 900 but if you bought this meet and greet you would have it in your token folder just like the tickets and you would pick what show you want to go to and then you would be into the meet and greet wow um so what we've built is a peer-to-peer system

for fans to not only have access to things they didn't have access to before, but they can also trade, sell, buy anything they want, or they can earn these things, right? If you're participating in the... that buying the merch or going to the shows and doing these things you're getting points and you're earning this sort of call of duty reward system yes um another cool thing we have here is which i think is fun are

these loot boxes which we don't sell them they're given out for free as you go through the the tiers and what that is is anything from meet and greets to guitars to tickets to merge to collectibles all could be in here so These are fans that haven't opened their token treasures or their loot boxes yet. And they kind of sell them to each other or trade them. And then when they open them up, there's an animation and it pops into whatever token you got.

So yeah, those are fun. There's, SynGates has guitars in there. There's also fun stuff you can earn. So again, that's the rewards program. We think it's a really creative way to give fans some skin in the game. and also allows artists to kind of be really creative with what they want to do that's so exciting i have linked to that in the description m shadows always a pleasure to have you here on rock feed and guys remember if you're sitting here literally now

All you have to do, it takes seconds. Just go enter your email and sign up. It's totally free. At eventsumple.io. Boom.