As the singer of Mudvayne and Hellyeah, Chad Gray’s a pretty busy guy. Right now, he’s wrapping up a Hellyeah tour with Korn, and when that’s done, the band will head out with Bloodsimple and Otep. At the same time, Gray is helping finalize plans for Mudvayne’s live and B-Sides album By the People, For the People, which will come out November 27 and feature two new songs, the recently released single “Dull Boy” and a cover of The Police’s “King of Pain.” Yet between the playing and planning, Gray accepted an offer to contribute a guest entry for the HBB Blog in order to vent about the bane of every recording artist’s existence — illegal downloading. And Gray’s argument is pretty convincing:
If I take a bunch of wood and build a chair, and somebody walks up and steals it, no one in their right mind will say that’s not theft. There’s a lot of work that goes into making a good chair and if that happened to me, people would feel sorry for me and be pissed off at the guy who took it. Yet that exact situation is happening all the time to hard working musicians, and no one seems to care.
Let’s look at it another way: If you want a Diet Coke, you will go into a store and pay money to get it, and then you’ll walk out of the store with it in your hand. But if you didn’t pay for that Diet Coke, you better know if you walked out that door and that buzzer goes off, you’re going to jail. It don’t matter if it costs $300 or 30 cents. If you steal something that you’re holding in your hand and you get caught, you’re going to jail. They don’t jack with that crap anymore. Shoplifting is pretty hardcore. They will bust your ass for nothing.
Yet, I can literally work for months and months and months and put all my creative energy into something, and, I guess, at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of “zeros” and “ones” to a lot of people. I mean, who are we kidding? Stealing is stealing.
Recently, the alternative rock band Radiohead did something interesting. They put their new album online and gave it to people to download at a price of their choosing. It’s like the Amish with their pumpkin patches. It’s the honors system. You go into the pumpkin patch and weight your pumpkin, then leave the money in a little box. It’s bizarre, but it works because at some point your conscience comes into play. Maybe Radiohead are on to something.
I think one of the reasons people are so willing to download stuff without paying for it is because music isn’t really a tangible thing. It used to be. It used to be something you could hold. But now, you have everything in the palm of your hand. You literally have your entire CD collection that will fit in an iPod in the palm of your hand, and that’s where we missed the boat. Somehow, that’s where everything started to go south.
When people pay to see shows, they get a ticket, which lets them in. People will buy a t-shirt at a show because it’s something real – something they can put on their back. In my day, you had a cassette and then a CD – or back in the early days, an LP. You had this thing and you felt good about having it. But now you just have this file you’ve downloaded and it’s not a tangible thing that you own.
And that’s such a shame and a crime because if somebody’s working on something and doing something that takes time, they deserve to be compensated for it. And if people who download music illegally think they’re sticking it to the man that’s bulls—t because the man is going to stick it right back to the band. At the end of the day, you’re hurting the people that you look up to or that get you through hard times, or people you just love. Next time you download something without paying for it, remember that it’s the bands that’s really gonna take the hit.
That’s food for thought, right there. And here’s some food for yer ears and eyes — the video for Mudvayne’s “Happy?”
