ALICE IN CHAINS' DUVALL: Illegal Music Downloaders Are 'Sticking It To Themselves'

KLAQ's Lisa Sanchez conducted an interview with ALICE IN CHAINS members Sean Kinney (drums) and William DuVall (vocals) on August 31 at Revolt On The Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You can now listen to the chat in the YouTube clip below.

On the state of the music industry, how the Internet affects musicians, and where they think the record business is going:

Kinney: "Any music that can generate money will be the dumbest, shittiest lip-syncing crap that's made for the lowest common denominator, made for the masses, just kind of like reality TV — cheaper, shittier, dumber, dumb it down.

"The next LED ZEPPELINs and everybody they're playing right now, they'll never get a chance because if you don't support these things, there's no infrastructure to let a band turn into a band and mature and grow. It's financially impossible. I mean, we're out here doing this. We get paid for what we do, but we'll spend almost every penny we make to do this. We spend almost all our money to do this, and we're fortunate. To move six semis and twenty buses. Each bus costs 30,000 dollars a month. That's not counting gas. It costs millions of dollars to do this stuff at a certain level. And it's what we love to do. And we're fortunate that we kind of make it work."

"The record companies fucked every human that ever recorded music in the history of music. Every single person — [from] the first recordings — has been permanently fucked because the record companies didn't get their shit together and nobody regulated anything and found a way to distribute [digital music] right."

DuVall: "It'll get harder and harder to run that business the more this, sort of, ripple effect takes hold in the culture.

"People think they're sticking it to 'the man' by not paying for a record, BitTorrenting and all this stuff. They're not [sticking it to 'the man']. They’re sticking it to their favorite band, they're sticking it to their favorite artist, and ultimately, they're stucking it to themselves. Because eventually, those [artists] won't be able to tour so readily. A lot of bands are gonna break up. A lot of bands already have broken up.

"When you talk about your top-tier groups that are able to operate, we're somewhere in the fortunate category in that at least we can have a serious conversation about moving all these semis and all these people around the world and flying the gear everywhere and feeding everyone that works for this group and everything, and feeding ourselves. We can at least have that conversation, but there are a lot of bands that were able to survive 15-20 years ago at the mid-level — [like] your punk bands that were on Epitaph, those bands that sold around 100,000 records and they could rely on that, they could make their records cheaply, they could tour in a bus, they could make a living. Now those bands can't do that anymore. That whole mid-level, it's just like what's happening in a larger sense in the country and in the world. Like, this middle-class things is just getting routed; they are the ones getting routed."