“Rock music as a form of music is not mainstream anymore,” Rob Zombie said, and he may be right.
There wasn’t a single rock act in Nielsen’s 2015 year-end top 10 albums, which was topped by Adele, who was followed, in order, by Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, the Weeknd, Drake, Meghan Trainor, Sam Smith, Sam Hunt and Fetty Wap.
Even touring, once dominated by rock, saw pop take the gold and silver medals in 2015, with Taylor Swift and One Direction coming in first and second for top-grossing tours (Maroon 5 placed seventh). Rock fared better there, with U2 and the Rolling Stones coming in third and fourth, respectively and Fleetwood Mac sixth and Billy Joel eighth. But with Kenny Chesney fifth, Shania Twain ninth and Luke Bryan tenth, there was no question pop and country challenged rock’s supremacy in the live setting in 2015.
But Zombie is cool with rock’s new place in the music hierarchy.
“Rock bands are sort of underground,” he says. “They’re still huge, but they’re sort of underground, which is fine by me, because that’s always sort of what it was anyway.”
Part of the reason for Zombie’s peace with the current state of rock music is it’s not slowing him down at all. The singer, who just released his new album, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser, is heading on tour with Korn this summer, and he tells us business is robust.
“The ticket sales for this tour with us and Korn are the biggest sales we’ve ever had when we’ve done a co-headliner tour,” he says. “It’s so weird, like double what we did last time, three years ago.”
According to Zombie, new fans find his work in many ways--from video games and interviews to his success as a filmmaker, where his biggest grosser, 2007’s Halloween, made over $80 million.
However, to him, one of the main reasons for his continued appeal is that unlike a lot of other heritage artists, who have given up on new music or are constantly bemoaning the fact publicly albums don’t sell anymore, he releases new music. And he sees new fans responding.
“We have a very young crowd. If you ever come to our shows and look at the front of the barricade these kids look like they’re 14. So they can love the old stuff, but the new stuff is what they’ll come excited about, which is funny,” he says. “It’s become so generational. Like maybe the guy who’s 40 doesn’t care about the new record, he’s got the record he loved when he was a teenager. But the kids in the front are young, they’re the ones yelling for the new songs cause maybe it’s the first record they ever bought.”
So, for those artists who have said they won’t release new albums, Zombie has no sympathy. “Everybody does a lot of complaining because the music business has changed so rapidly, but I don’t have time to complain, it’s just silly at this point,” he says. “The shows that we play are bigger than ever, this will be our biggest year of touring in 25 years. The shows keep getting bigger, the fans keep coming, everything’s bigger than ever. Okay, records as a physical thing you buy, that is like the dinosaur. Some people still buy it, people like vinyl, it’s cool, some people still buy CDs. But, for the most part, it’s not even worth thinking about anymore. I just want to make the music, and I want people to hear it. How they hear it I don’t give a f**k anymore.”
