You were on a crappy label.Most metal labels are indie and are fine.

I saw a video of him doing a drum solo a while ago, and it was pretty darn good. I'd never call him one of the greats, but he's not bad at all.

He's a decent drum soloist but a lot is just fast playing and fills, you should see one of Tomas Haake's solos they're actually structured.As a drummer in general he isn't too great.

Prblem is that the metal and pop worlds are quite different, I mean a lot of metal labels are started up either by fans in their own homes, or else by members of bands (like Mike Patton's Ipecac, Lee Dorrian's Rise Above, Aaron Turner's Hydrahead, Stephen O'Malley's Southern Lord, etc), there's not so many people who are in it with the sole interest of making money. Which isn't to say they don't want to make money, but generally they are also in it for artistic reasons, for wanting to help bands they just like and so forth.

But then being in a metal band and expecting to make any money is pretty naive really, if not downright insane!

I'm actually not in it for the money but to make my kind music you need money. Which is what i guess you're trying to say, right? That's why if you have a band already then the cost will run lower because you already have the instruments to make the music, you don't need the expensive computer.

srsly, why are we talking about indie labels in a thread about becoming a teacher?

oh ho ho, that's nice. By learning something completely irrelevant to the original topic, you begin to experience what the conversation at the beginning was meant to be about, education. lol