Iron Maiden's management: What went wrong?

Ascendingthethrone said:
For me, I have never understood their strategy in the first decade of the century. They seemed to make good progress with a tour and then follow it up with either a shorter tour or one with a concept not conducive to bringing more casual fans onboard.
  • GMETID followed by a shorter tour.
  • Ozzfest followed by a short AMOLAD tour with a new album played from start to finish.
  • SBIT followed by a tour of post-2000 material.
Now have loved seeing Maiden on these tours, but for me it is not hard to see why they took a while to build up in the USA again. They never built momentum.
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Regardless of their usual PR of believing in their new stuff, those shorter album/recent material tours were a tacit acceptance from 2003 to 2011 that the audiences in the USA were always going to receive a classics tour much better than one featuring newer songs.
 
Helmuth Von Moltke said:
I was also reminded that Steve may have had back surgery around the DOD era, perhaps also limiting that tour @GhostofCain was it you saying this?
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I've mentioned it a couple times. The information was taken from interviews with Steve during the Dance of Death cycle when I used to obsessively scrapbook such things. The weight of his bass had been determined the cause of spinal compression, and that's when they decided to cut back on the length of touring for that album. As for whether it was surgery or therapy that helped the problem and allowed them to extend the tours again, I never came across an interview where he addresses this.
 
GhostofCain said:
Regardless of their usual PR of believing in their new stuff, those shorter album/recent material tours were a tacit acceptance from 2003 to 2011 that the audiences in the USA were always going to receive a classics tour much better than one featuring newer songs.
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2006 seems to be a turning point for them considering their most extensive USA tour at the time ended up being a setlist focused entirely on new material (TFF 2010, opposed to the more hits oriented 2011 setlist that barely scraped the US). maybe there’s a realization that even if it’s widely known that they’re going to play new material, American audiences will still buy tickets (and complain after).
 
I could have sworn I'd commented here before, but apparently not.

If we're getting into why Maiden aren't as commercially, er, ambitious, as they could be, Steve Harris is very likely the significant decision maker. It's his band, his baby, in his preferred image. Given all that's speculated about him needing to have a major hand in video production, live sound, having an actual recording studio at one time, and wanting the band to be seen to 'keep it real', it's fair to assume he'd also be the person least in favour of either Frosted Eddie Flakes or being crowned the biggest band on the planet.

That said, I'm also of the opinion that Rod Smallwood isn't a hungry business strategist with dollar signs for eyes as some seem to assume. I've met members of Phantom Management before and find it a small and surprisingly low-key organisation, that leans towards cheap and cheerful rather than trying to build a business empire. Whether or not Steve ever wanted to go down that route, I suspect Rod never put pressure on him either. From all I've read of him, Rod's strength is the old school 70s manager thing of being bullish in negotiations and defending the band's cause to the hilt, but he's no entrepreneur or marketing genius.
 
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