Maiden on the radio

That was one way to get to know a lot of cool bands. You'd watch their music videos on headbangers ball or watch an interview/tour footage etc. I got into a lot of the harder metal around that time. I remember the last hour or so of Headbangers Ball was always dedicated to the more extreme metal. You had one hour of hard rock and metal and then the last hour or 40 min would be death metal or thrash etc
 
Yeah, that is the main problem today .. there are some good younger bands out there ... I am more a hard rock guy than extreme metal, but you really have to search them out. Headbangers Ball turned me onto some bands I might not ever gotten into/heard of otherwise. Same with the local metal radio show, think it was called "Metal Shop", first time I heard Guns and Roses for example, a few months before Appetite came out.

Now, it is recommendations from friends/music forums like this, scanning the new releases on Spotify, and the "if you like this band, you might like that band" kind of recommendations. A bit more of an effort than watching TV a few hours a week.
 
There's a bigger market today but it also makes it harder to find the good stuff. I get a lot of my recommendations from friends and forums..and blogs! There's music blogs for everything, and if you know what you like and find that one blog that specializes in just the exact music genre you love, you're golden! (if the music blog is good that is) But yeah, there is a lot more self discovering going on today...I have like 5-6 reliable blogs/sites that I visit on a regular basis and they're all about new music.
 
There's a bigger market today but it also makes it harder to find the good stuff. I get a lot of my recommendations from friends and forums..and blogs! There's music blogs for everything, and if you know what you like and find that one blog that specializes in just the exact music genre you love, you're golden! (if the music blog is good that is)


True, but the issue with that, to me, is how specialized everything is ... not so much with the blogs, because you can just read more than one, but I think a lot of bands shoehorn themselves into certain types of metal/rock and keep their music in that range. I am thinking more so of newer bands than the older ones. But it seems many newer bands are less likely to take chances because they do not want to loose the segment of fans they might have with little opportunity to expand into new fan bases. I admit I am generalizing here and there are exceptions, but it is not a good trend IMO
 
I only heard Wasting Love, once, in a São Paulo dedicated rock station. Here, I never heard nothing of Maiden, except ads for the show next Saturday
 
True, but the issue with that, to me, is how specialized everything is ... not so much with the blogs, because you can just read more than one, but I think a lot of bands shoehorn themselves into certain types of metal/rock and keep their music in that range. I am thinking more so of newer bands than the older ones. But it seems many newer bands are less likely to take chances because they do not want to loose the segment of fans they might have with little opportunity to expand into new fan bases. I admit I am generalizing here and there are exceptions, but it is not a good trend IMO

There's a lot of interesting debates in this post I think. So many interesting points that it's actually hard to answer :lol: but yes...if some genre sees a revival of sorts like what happened with the Black Sabbath inspired stoner rock....you'll see hundreds of young bands trying to join the bandwagon etc..Only a few of them might actually be awesome.. I think that since the "dissolving" of radio and TV, metal music pretty much has it's own life and isn't the same unified genre that it used to be...But yes overall I agree that many newer bands are less likely to take chances, but only because they're trying to fit into X subgenre because it may be their way to success. It's hard to find metal bands today that appeal to everyone in the metal community like old metal bands used to do.
 
On some of our local radio stations (those rock/metal oriented) you quite often get album cuts of any band, so it's actually not that uncommon to get Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull, Root of All Evil by DT etc., so we get songs like Powerslave, Revelations or Brave New World along with the usual NOTB, 2M2M, RTTH... On the other hand, I haven't listened to any rock radio in quite some time, so it might have changed.

Also - on the same rock/metal radios - you usually get the singles during the anticipation period for the new album, so we got plenty of Rainmaker, Breeg, El Dorado/TFF or Speed of Light when those songs were "fresh".
 
I was just rambling and really to tie it back to radio and the entertainment industry at large .. there are good bands out there (including young bands) that are coming out with some good music that in the pre-2000s would have probably broken out pretty big and that opportunity does not really seem to exist any more .. of course I am looking at this from a US-centric viewpoint.

Royal Blood being a case in point, they released a really good first album, it had a few radio friendly songs on it and while they have had some success and at least some airplay... in past times, they could have had been a "hit", probably not Guns and Roses level hit, but their songs would be all over the place and have a good following. The infrastructure to break new rock bands does not seem to exist anymore like it does for country and hip-hop/dance music.
 
The infrastructure to break new rock bands does not seem to exist anymore like it does for country and hip-hop/dance music.

Young rock/metal bands needs to do most of the work themselves through social media, bandcamp, soundcloud etc. I mean it's cool in the the way that YOU decide what bands you would like to follow....you aren't forced to listen to whoever the big labels are pumping money into. In the past, looking past and away from he big record labels was much harder, Today you can follow, "Like" , stream, support, all of the independent record labels out there who are trying to put out alternative music.
 
No, it's pretty much dead. Young rock/metal bands needs to do most of the work themselves through social media, bandcamp, soundcloud etc. I mean it's cool in the the way that YOU decide what bands you would like to follow....you aren't forced to listen to whoever the big labels are pumping money into. In the past, looking past and away from he big record labels was much harder, Today you can follow, "Like" , stream all of the independent record labels out there who are trying to put out alternative music.


For sure, there are pluses and minuses of the new way music is distributed and promoted, but a few negatives in my mind are that some bands would probably benefit from a good producer and that bands tour so much for the most part, saturate the markets, end up with tons of double bills without spots for newer bands (of course there are exceptions, but that is mostly the rule now). The obvious plus is that they have more creative control over their music.
 
Yeah. it's the difference between "being discovered" in the 80s by the man with all the money...and today where you have to "go get it" yourself....
 
We don't have a rock station. Last month, the radio station that is promoting the show here, ran a Maiden special. They played the audio from Maiden's show on Rock Am Ring in 2014. It was really nice and I wish they would do another special now that the show is approaching. So, this was the only time I heard Maiden on the radio.
 
No Maiden on the mainstream channels. However, the biggest rock radio channel plays some Maiden now and then (I've heare The trooper, Run to the hills and aces high), and I'm sure they played Speed of light regulary now, and probably also played the whole new album on the release day, they tend to do that on some new albums wheb they are released
 
Thanks for the replies -

You know I've always found it interesting that Maiden have sold so many albums (I can never get an accurate number as it always varies depending on the source, but it's somewhere between 70 million and 90 million worldwide), and yet they've gotten limited to no airplay their entire career. Pearl Jam have sold about 60 million, and not a day goes by that I don't hear "Alive", "Jeremy", "Better Man" or "Daughter" on the radio (at least here in the States).
 
I've only ever heard Flight of Icarus on my local station. Maybe Number of the Beast once. My dad heard ROTAM in it's entirety a few years ago. Also my friend swears he heard WTWWB.
 
1) Do you ever hear Maiden on your local rock station?
2) If so, do they ever play anything other than Run to the Hills?

We're a small country so we don't have exclusive rock stations. Local stations do have rock/metal shows and Maiden can be heard there. Last song I heard over FM was Infinite Dreams.
 
Not even going to joke, aside from being in my parents' car, I haven't listened to the radio in over 10 years.
 
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