M. Shadows Doesn’t Regret Surprise Release of ‘The Stage’ Anymore
It only took about eight years, but M. Shadows no longer regrets the surprise release of Avenged Sevenfold’s 2016 album The Stage.
The frontman addressed the surprise release on the album’s eighth anniversary. A fan wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “I remember this, M. Shadows said he liked how Beyonce secretly released her album, so he wanted to follow suit but ultimately regretted it and said he’d never do it again lol.” Shadows responded to the fan and wrote, “I take that back now…. It couldn’t have happened any other way and I’m so proud of this album and the way it was released.”
The Stage was the follow-up to 2013’s Hail to the King, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart selling 159,000 copies in its first week of release. Hail to the King went on to sell one million copies in the United States. Meanwhile, The Stage debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 album chart moving 76,000 units in its first week of release. However, The Stage has only sold 170,000 copies in the United States.
Surprise releases of albums were a massive trend in the mid-late 2010s. Beyonce’s self-titled 2013 album really helped this trend explode. Drake also made a splash with the surprise release of his 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
Perhaps the most notorious surprise release of an album came in 2014 with U2’s Songs of Innocence album. The band infamously partnered with Apple to give away their album for free to all of Apple’s iTunes customers. Bono touched on the controversial giveaway in his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.
Bono said he and manager Guy Oseary met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple executives Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller. The singer pitched the whole deal to Apple and said to Cook that the company would just buy the album and distribute it “…like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.” When Cook tells Bono Apple isn’t “a subscription organization,” he replied back to the CEO, “Not yet. Let ours be the first.” (Even if you’re not a fan of Bono, you have to give him some credit for allegedly seeing the future of music distribution.)
Bono writes of the album giveaway, “It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighborhood. Not. Quite. True. On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases, we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.”
Bono adds, “I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite.”
The singer continues, “As one social media wisecracker put it, ‘Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper’. Or, less kind, ‘The free U2 album is overpriced’. Mea culpa.”
Many may have been furious over a U2 album suddenly appearing on their Apple device, but the deal was a shrewd business move. Billboard reported in September 2014 that the album distribution was part of an overall deal with Apple that was worth $100 million. Additionally, it led to a massive spike in downloads of the entire U2 catalog with every single studio release from the band hitting the iTunes top albums chart.
