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Artist News Digital
Tool confirm back catalogue coming to streaming ahead of new album release
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 30 July 2019
When Tool announced that they would finally release their fifth studio album this year, many wondered if their back catalogue would also arrive on streaming services at the same time. Well, it won’t. Because while the new album, titled ‘Fear Inoculum’, is out on 30 Aug, the back catalogue will start streaming this Friday. And those are totally different dates.
The band are one of the last big streaming holdouts, with the streaming boom having happened, of course, during the thirteen year gap between their last album ‘10,000 Days’ and the soon-to-be-released follow-up. But yesterday the band confirmed on Instagram that they would finally relent and make their music available on those pesky streaming services.
Coinciding with this announcement, frontman Maynard James Keenan also appeared on the latest edition of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, explaining: “We’re a very difficult band. We’re very stubborn and kind of ignorant to what goes on in the rest of the world … and the whole Betamax thing didn’t work for us, and neither did LaserDisc, so we have this new thing called digital media streaming. We’re gonna try it out. It’s a new thing, streaming. It’s brand new. We’re going to put some songs on it”.
A common complaint about digital music from artists, of course, is that it allows albums to be broken up into individual tracks, meaning people often access them in a different order to that originally intended. But Keenan says that, while Tool did previously moan about that fact, concerns over the splitting up of albums were put to bed sometime ago.
“We tried that before [saying] ‘no no, we want you to hear a whole album in sequence’, and people were like, ‘…like you play them live?’ We’ve never played an album from start to finish live”. A good point well made. And duly well received by the band, it seems.
Keenan also suggested that it was his bandmates, rather than him, who had been opposed to putting the band’s music on streaming services for so long. Though he admitted that there had been “no discussion” about doing so until recently.
Anyway, ‘Fear Inoculum’ is out on 30 Aug, at which point it will join the other four Tool albums on streaming services. So that’ll be nice.
