Opethin vokalisti kertoo yhtyeen taloudellisista asioista tuoreessa haastattelussa

Ruotsalaisen progressiivista rockia soittavan Opethin vokalisti / kitaristi Mikael Åkerfeldt on antanut hiljattain varsin mielenkiintoisen haastattelun Music Business Facts -nimiselle sivustolle, jossa mies kertoilee bändiinsä liittyvistä taloudellisista asioista. Mikael Åkerfeldtin mukaan yhtye olisi tänä päivänä varmasti aivan kusessa jollei olisi aikoinaan hommannut hyvää managementtia sekä agenttia huolehtimaan asioistaan. Voit lukea Mikaelin mietteitä aiheesta tästä:

”Yeah. I mean, obviously, music comes first, and I’ve never been too interested in the business side of things. I don’t want it to have the upper hand on me, because I feel like friends of mine who got too much into the business side of things, they seem to lose a little bit of creativity, which I’m afraid of that happening to me. But it does… I mean, especially nowadays, it’s a completely different scene from what it was just ten or fifteen years ago. I mean, when we started out, there were people still selling records, there was more streams of income… there were more set streams — like, secure streams — of income then, even if we didn’t really make much the first ten… we didn’t make a living the first ten years or so. But definitely now, I think you have to be on top of things. We are in this position where we can employ people, so we have a management, we have an agency, etc., so we don’t really have to take care of a lot of the business side ourselves — luckily. Because if we would have, we would have been fucked, basically.”

Mikaelilta kysyttäessä miten hän itse näkisi Opethin tulevaisuuden jos bändi olisi vasta parhaillaan alottamassa, että tulisiko siitä yhtä menestyvä kuin nyt:

”I don’t think so. I’m not business minded, really. Like, for me, these days, I don’t know how you promote bands these days. I mean, you have things like pledge [campaigns] happening, where you kind of involve the fans and those kinds of things, but I’m old school — I like the idea of signing to a record label and doing it the old-fashioned way: selling records and touring. That’s the bread and butter for us.”

Kysyttäessä Mikaelilta uskooko hän siihen, että joutuisi joskus töihin muusikkona olemisen lisäksi mies kommentoi seuraavaa:

”Yeah, that’s a very valid question, because I’m not yet in that position. I can say, like, we do whatever we want and fuck you — we put out the records that we wanna hear — but if the sales would go down completely and if we wouldn’t have an income, maybe I would actually sell out — who knows?! But I’m hoping that’s never gonna happen. I think that people will see right through me anyway, if I try to cater to the needs and the wishes of the fans, which we don’t really do now — we just do music that we wanna hear, and we’re fortunate enough to have people around who are also interested in our music. But if we would end up in that position, I think I would have to reconsider my life and maybe change it around completely. I would not want something that I love so much, as I love music, I wouldn’t want that to become a way for me to put food on the table without having the passion and love in the music that I put out. That would be disastrous for me. So I would probably move away from music if that happened. I’d still write music, of course, but I wouldn’t want OPETH to end up in that position where we just put out music to pay the bills.”

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