You Want Inhuman Heaviness? There’s an App For That

By: shane.mehling Posted in: contest, things andrew hates On: Thursday, November 11th, 2010

iBrutal

I don’t think I’ve ever personally beat up on Oceano. I’ve definitely attacked their chosen genre and I’ve lobbed bombs at many of the band’s contemporaries, but the alpha and omega of deathcore has never really crossed my desk… until the iPad.

See, to promote their new album, Contagion, they had a contest. What could the winner look forward to? A free cd and shirt? Maybe a signed guitar? Nope, a motherfucking iPad. Now I’m not typing this on a Smith-Corona, nor am I calling my parents on rotary phone, but come on, what in the fuck does a $500 Scarlet Letter of yuppie scum have to do with extreme metal? Why not just let the lucky winner flip through the latest copy of Sky Mall and pick out their favorite bluetooth foot massager? I understand record labels need new ways to get people to pick up albums but this seems so incredibly antithetical to what metal has at least facilely promoted since its inception.

Contagion “…is about a government-born virus that becomes an epidemic and spreads chaos amongst the population” which I interpret as the band reaching out to its audience with a treatise on the corruptibility of our leaders and their mercenary tendencies. Those who we place in power too often are swayed by what they see as nation-state exceptionalism, which leads to a zero sum game. This myopic outlook leads to creating unspeakable evils which, with few necessary variables, can quite easily turn against their creators and the civilians that, in the ultimate irony, were the ones who set about their own destruction by the seemingly equitable act of democracy. Or maybe it’s just about shopping at Whole Foods. I can’t tell nowadays.

  • Noyokono

    Independent record labels need to come up with ways to encourage physical sales of their albums. If that’s not “extreme” enough or “metal” enough for you, let’s see how you feel when Earache (or Relapse or any other big metal indie) goes out of business.

    (Last I checked, your publication needs these labels to pay for the advertising that pays your salaries.)

    • Albert

      If you only knew what we actually charged these labels for advertising, you’d see that revenue wasn’t paying for anyone’s salary.

    • http://twitter.com/AnimeNewsdotbiz Humberto Saabedra

      The blog is an extension of the magazine. The revenue generated by online ad sales is less than a tenth of what the standard rate is for a magazine ad with a circulation count the size of Decibel’s.If Decibel wanted to, they could reach out to major third-party ad networks for the blog and pretty much sit pretty, but the blog isn’t the main focus of the editorial team, it’s a portal to sell the magazine and to give people something different to read, at least from what I’ve seen in the past couple years as an active reader.

      • Kylesa777

        Yeah, they could stop being so dumb as to keep on losing the big revenue that an ipad app for their fucking magazine would do.

  • Derek Brewer

    I think really we can all agree that this is somewhat of a trifling complaint: Offended that a band is giving away an iPad as part of a contest to their loyal fans that pre-ordered the CD???

    Realistically I think the fact that the author of this article is even giving this criticism because of his disdain of the band. I mean to waste time talking about the fact that iPads are not Br00tal or metal enough? Really??

    I actually came up with this promotional idea (and Earache was more than happy to sign off on it) as we thought it was a creative way to encourage fans to get excited about the album and pre-order it ahead of time. Also it gave us all (band, label, fans) something to talk about on Facebook/Myspace. That’s all.

    I am sure that we will all agree that it is hardly BREAKING NEWS to see that it is getting harder and harder for labels/bands to sell CD’s and make any money in this industry. When the bands or the labels are not making money then it tends to have a trickledown effect on everyone else associated within industry (management, agents, promoters, record stores and perhaps even MUSIC publications). We were just trying to come up with a creative way to spark some interest, sell a few more CD’s, have some. I figured an iPad would be a cool and DIFFERENT prize for fans to get excited about rather than a signed poster/guitar combo that you see most bands offering up as a prize …silly me.. next time I will keep it more metal.

    • Agest

      What he was politely trying to say is that iPads are for hipster fags who obviously compose a large portion of this particular band’s fan base.

  • Jfury

    Butchering women in your promo photos — yeah that’s the ticket.

  • aaron turner

    giving away an ipad seems like less of a problem than glorifying violence against women by making and disseminating promo photos like those shown above. nice.

  • Alex13

    So, basically, this bands sucks to much that their label has to have this spiffy marketing contest to move units?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000836143460 Stan Johnson

    This seems like a douche’y complaint…..Metal is, above all else, supposed to be fun. What is more fun than a portable web surfin’ / gaming machine? It’s better than cd’s half filled with bullshit artists…..That’s right I said it.