Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows Offers Essential Advice for New Bands

Avenged Sevenfold's M. Shadows has some essential advice for new bands. He tweeted "never let your art become a commodity," and proceeded to offer more guidance for up and coming artists via the Twitter thread.

The Avenged Sevenfold singer started off the thread by saying, "Attention all up and coming artists: never let your art become a commodity. Let the creation take you where it's gonna take you and let the chips fall where they may...always."

Shadows also advises artists to "learn where the boundaries are so you can go beyond them. Nothing will take you further away from what's important than trying to create something that will appease everyone. Analytics show us were [sic] we have been... not where we are going."

Shadows, who has been active in cryptocurrency, then offered, "I have recently seen many people pull back from web3 and it's been for 2 reasons...price dip in crypto or they don't want blowback from the mob. What this says to me is they were never here for the right reason anyway."

His next tweet then asked a key question before offering a challenge. "Now that everything is recovering will they pop their heads back in? If you want to be a musician, painter, songwriter, novelist...whatever. Don't become a commodity. People want to see YOUR creativity... lead the way," said the singer.

The musician responded to @DVLBand's question "Do you think music will shift over to NFTs and will it be more beneficial for independent artists to go that route?" with "I'm not a believer in just selling music as NFT's. For the consumer I believe streaming is king. NFT's are great for community around the band, ticketing, digital events, streaming authentication and fractionalization as well as accounting and IP distribution."

M. Shadows responded to a bunch of questions on Twitter, including, "Wait isn't web2 about commodifying everything, or rather, financializing." He tweeted in response, "Web3 is about detached from centralized entities... and that could be social media, data, music streaming... and giving ownership to the creators and or communities... either way it's your choice, not someone else's."