We've heard some sob stories before about music royalties. Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell calls his former label owner a Danish devil, Metallica lament that they can't live off their royalties anymore and this eloquent rant from Randy Blythe of Lamb of God. But what I'm about to show you is truly shocking. In a new interview with The Morning Call, Slipknot guitarist Jim Root claims that he's never seen any sort of royalties from the music that Slipknot has made: “ You don’t even know are we going to have a career. Are we going to be able to sell records? Are we going to have a label? I mean, labels are [shutting down] all the time. It takes like pop and rap to keep these labels going because those are the only people that are buying records anymore. To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold [the first-week sales of “.5: The Gray Chapter“] is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you’d have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things. And now it’s a fraction of that. So it kind of really shows you the state of where everything’s at. I don’t put too much into that anyway because we don’t see a penny off of record sales and we never have. For us it’s all about touring.” I really hope that Root was exaggerating. Slipknot has sold a lot of records, not just by metal standards. Their albums have gone platinum. It's hard to believe that Slipknot, as a corporation, has not profited from these millions of album sales with direct royalty checks. Where could that money be going? Could it be that a band with nine members has excessive spending for producing a record? Maybe their budgets to produce the records are so high that it takes really long to recoup the value. So while Root might not be seeing royalties after the albums come out, he's not complaining about the advances he gets before he.
Slipknot‘s ongoing European tour has netted them another plaque. Drummer Jay Weinberg has shared the following picture of a platinum plaque the band were awarded with this weekend for their latest album “.5: The Gray Chapter” reaching 10,000 copies sold in Russia. On a side note, Russia has a differing system where platinum sales for foreign artists are hit at 10,000 copies sold, while domestic artists must hit 50,000 copies sold to attain the goal.
SLIPKNOT's long-awaited fifth studio album.5: The Gray Chapter, sold around 132,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD arrived in stores on October 21 via Roadrunner. The is the second No. 1 album for SLIPKNOT, whose fourth full-length effort, 2008's All Hope Is Gone, topped the Billboard chart after an extraordinary Sound Scan recount. The album was initially announced as a No. 2 debut, a mere 13 units behind THE GAME's No. 1 debut, marking the closest margin in Sound Scan history. The chart positions resulted from a reported 238,272 copies of All Hope Is Gone its first week in stores, while THE GAME's LAX reported 238,285. With such an unprecedented margin, Roadrunner Records and WEA requested an historic recount. Sound Scan obliged and chart positions were reversed, with SLIPKNOT claiming No. 1 and a new margin of 1,134 albums. Final recount numbers are 239,516 for All Hope Is Gone and 238,382 for LAX sold during first week of release.5: The Gray Chapter caps a very turbulent period for the masked rockers in which they dealt with the death of Paul Gray and the firing of drummer Joey Jordison, both longtime members and songwriters. Despite it all, singer Corey Taylor told The Pulse Of Radio he's proud of what the band has accomplished this time out. The fact that we were able to kind of pull ourselves back up and not only go in and make a really good album, but make an exceptional album, in my opinion, I think it's a testament to just how talented this band is, he said. It's a testament to how much passion we have for it. It's a testament to how much we're willing to fight to accomplish everything that we want to accomplish. I'm excited for people to hear this, because to me I think it's one of the best albums we've ever made. Gray died in 2010 from a drug overdose, while Jordison.
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