Peter Mensch recently opened up to Classic Rock about his concerns for the future of rock music. He explained if rock bands could still be relevant in the streaming and playlists era by saying:
“I hope so, I gotta tell you, you ask the question that I ask myself daily and the sad thing is, I don’t know the answer. Although maybe I do know the answer, I just don’t want to admit it. I don’t know. You’ve got to name me a guitar-based rock band that has broken through to the point of playing the O2, or you have to decide what your aspirational choices are. I look around and I don’t see a lot.”
Success Costs A Lot
Peter Mensch’s management catalog under Q Prime included Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Def Leppard since the ’80s. But the change in the industry pushed Mensch to talk to younger bands about their future whenever he worked with a new one:
“It’s why you have to sit there and talk to your bands when they show up when they’re 21 or 22, going ‘I think I’m going to need at least 10 years of your life, maybe more, maybe five albums if we get that far, if a record company will finance’ – and that’s the other problem, I don’t know if any record labels are going to invest the kind of money it costs to make a rock band record and to tour them and stuff like that and then do it again and do it a third time. The answer is I don’t say it’s looking rosy up there in rock band land.”
Audience Is Less Interested In Rock Records
The manager also highlighted the declining demand for rock records as a barrier to new groups’ success during a previous chat with BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today.’ He shared in 2015:
“Well, the business model was, obviously, great back then. You invested a certain amount of time and energy, even though you didn’t get paid for a couple of years. As you put out increasingly successful albums, there were hundreds of people out promoting your records and selling them. Now the record business is contracting.”
His words continued:
“Fewer and fewer records get sold or streamed. Less money is there. So what we’ve had to do is, basically, expand our management company to almost duplicate a record company. We’re making deals with individual record companies in various countries, so they can work our records individually. The global business is fragmenting.”
You can check out Mensch’s new interview here.