Photo Credit: Alfred Nitsch / CC by 3.0
Avenged Sevenfold frontman M Shadows took to Twitter to discuss his opinion on album repackages. He inadvertently ended up in a fight with Swifties.
“Selling multiple versions, repackages and bundles of your album to the same fan so that you can get a chart position that no one cares about is manipulated and should be called out for what it is… fan abuse,” M Shadows wrote on November 7.
He elaborated: “I’ll expand–many options are fine. It’s when it becomes buy the vinyl for ticket discounts, buy the cd version 1 for an extra track. Buy first week 8 track for an exclusive t-shirt. Its all bullshit to make you buy the same shit to pump the numbers. That’s f*cked!”
While the initial comment contained no references to any specific artist, fans asked M Shadows if he had anyone in mind with the comment. He finally added that his comments were for “everyone, the system, music as a commodity.” He says. “No art left to it, total joke.”
Taylor Swift’s fans immediately began responding to the series of tweets. “Taylor Swift would’ve topped the charts on streams alone (confirmed by the Billboard charts) but sure go off,” one Swiftie replied to the threat.
M Shadows responded, “Hell yeah. A truly huge artist and she deserves it. Btw. I wasn’t even talking about Taylor literally the furthest thing from my mind. We are getting ‘options’ from our label but its all a cash grab (hence the tweet) but don’t you find it strange one fan base is so upset about my tweet which names no one?”
That comment prompted even more Taylor Swift fans to chime in with their opinion. M Shadows finally addressed the issue by saying, “I see all of Taylor’s fans think I’m talking about her because they all bought multiples of the same album. Gotta love the Twitter cults!”