Goo Goo Dolls’ cofounder John Rzeznik has sold a lot of records over the years. ‘A Boy Named Goo’ (1995) sold two million albums in America. ‘Dizzy Up The Girl’ (1998) sold five million. The single ‘Iris’ (1998) did 10 million in sales.
John Rzeznik tells Noise11 there is just no money in music sales anymore and he knows, ‘Iris’ has been streamed over two billion times.
John says, “Nobody makes any money out of selling records anymore because nobody buys records anymore. You make crap for streaming. People stream your songs and you make no money. You’ve got to go out and play live. That takes a lot of time. I just think the business has changed so much. Its not as much fun as it used to be. We get to play live and that’s how we earn a living”.
John didn’t race out an buy a Ferrari with his first big royalty cheque. “I don’t have a Ferrari. I have a platinum record Ford Bronco and from my Spotify billion streams of have a Matchbox car of the Bronco I drive around. That’s my life”.
Goo Goo Dolls learned to play live by performing in front of next to no-one every night of the week. “We were really lucky that we came up much the same ways as those Australian bands in the pub culture. We would go out and play four nights a week. You were constantly playing, playing, playing, playing in front of 10 people, 20 people, hopefully 30 people showed up the next time. We were brought up in a culture where record making was important. You created a whole body of work from beginning to end and going out in support of the record to sell those records. The business has flipped on its head now. Theres a handful of very wealthy tech bros that are making all the money”.
He says something has to change with the way streaming companies compensate artists. “It’s a way of screwing artists out of what they deserve,” John says. “I would like to remind the people who run Spotify that without artists they have an empty vending machine. I wish all the artists could get together and say ‘no, we aren’t doing this for this crap money’. The truth is if the 10 biggest selling artists in the world said ‘no, we are pulling all of our music until you give us a fair deal’. Then you would see change but that ain’t gonna happen because they are making all the money”.
Watch the Noise11.com interview with John Rzeznik:
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