The Misfits’ Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein Really, REALLY Hates Fan Meet and Greets
Napster kicked the bucket 18 years ago, and streaming has been entrenched in music culture for nearly a decade already. It’s a well-accepted fact that musicians need to work harder to make money than they did two decades ago. It sucks, but them’s the breaks.
But Misfits guitarist / solo artist Doyle von Frankenstein is still quite unhappy about it, griping about music piracy (is it even still a thing people do??) and meet and greets and insulting his fans all within the space of a few sentences.
In a recent interview with The Liquid Conversations [transcribed by Ultimate Guitar], Doyle had the following to say when asked about how the industry has changed over the years:
Over the years, how has the industry changed and how you had to adapt to it?
“The thing that sucks the most about it is that everybody steals music. You spend thousands and thousands of dollars to make a record and all of these scumbags are just stealing it. And then they want more, and then you’re a dick because you’re doing a meet ‘n’ greet for 50 fucking bucks to make up for it, which you don’t want to do. You think I want to meet all these fucking people? I don’t. When I’m done, I just want to take a shower and go to bed. I just worked, so…”
Looking at that aspect, you feel that people, the fans, put some undue pressure on you because of something like that, because you charge $50 for a meet ‘n’ greet?
“They can kiss my ass. You want to steal shit? If I was making motorcycles and they came and took one, would that be a crime? Why can’t we punish people for stealing songs? There should be a $10,000 fine for that.”
The industry, certain aspects of it protect you, but a lot of it doesn’t. It’s weird because you put so much time and effort into it, and it’s almost like people are literally stealing from you like you said.
“Yeah, they should really fucking fix that shit. Shut the internet down for a day and fix it.”
With you doing your own stuff with your label, how do you approach that?
“How can I approach that? What can I do? As soon as somebody buys it, where is it? Somewhere where it’s easy for others to steal.”
You sell it once and everybody just shares it a million times. You mentioned Spotify – it doesn’t even really matter, no one’s making money from it anyway…
“You make nothing, it’s $9 a month, and you can listen to a song 10,000 times if you want. If there’s enough time in that month to listen to it 10,000 times, I don’t know… I can’t do the math, but how much do you think the bands get? It’s like a hundredth, maybe a thousandth of a penny you get. My girlfriend [Arch Enemy singer Alissa White-Gluz] went to their office, said that shit was insane. I would’ve went fucking mental, I would’ve started breaking everything.”
Look, Doyle is certainly right about one thing: it sucks that musicians need to work harder than they used to. But it’s pointless to complain about it, and doing so 20 years after the fact makes him look old and out of touch. Further, making a living from music is a privilege, not a right, and the fifty year period it was possible to do so handsomely (but at no other time throughout history) was an anomaly, not the norm.
The worst part about all of this is the disregard Doyle is displaying not only for all of his fans — the very people who enable his livelihood — but for the ones who shell out extra money for one fucking minute in his presence. It’d be one thing to express some resentment at having to work harder and longer (playing a set is grueling, I totally get it!), but to insult “these fucking people” in the process by saying you “don’t want to meet” them? “These fucking people” are the exact ones who are actually still paying to buy your music. And that “shut the internet down for a day and fix it” line is akin to Trump talking about immigration, the space force, artificial intelligence or myriad other subjects he has absolutely no understanding of.
Lame, dude, really fucking lame.
