Corey Taylor on Roadrunner Records: “They didn’t care” about pushing his solo album “CMFT”

Corey Taylor has spoken on his disappointment in how longtime label Roadrunner Records handled the release of his 2020 solo album “CMFT“. Even Slipknot, who were with Roadrunner since the late 90s, parted ways with them recently.

Taylor recently created his own label “Decibel Cooper” with BMG.

In a recent appearance on the ‘All Things Music‘ podcast, Taylor commented:

The rad thing about BMG is just how into everything I am and everything I do they are. Which is refreshing, because probably for about 10 years Roadrunner has not been that. Roadrunner was completely antithetical when it came to that stuff. They just had become this company that we didn’t even recognize anymore. So when our contract came up, we were, like, ‘1-800 See ya! I’m done with you.’ Because it had turned into a bunch of people we didn’t know.

They did this massive cull back in, like, I wanna say it was 2012. It was the ‘great firing.’ And they fired everyone we knew, everyone we had started out with… Jonas [Nachsin], the president, gone. By this time, Cees [Wessels], the old owner, was gone. So Roadrunner went from this juggernaut of a metal company to a hallway at Warner Bros.. I saw it with my own eyes. I was just, like, ‘Wow! Where did this go?’

It just became this thing that they owned the catalog. And that was it. They didn’t care. And the people who were left didn’t really care about us. So it really became this thing where we had to kind of rise to the challenge on that. And all kudos to our management company, 5B, because they really created all of these different departments around us to help us keep going. If it wasn’t for 5B, man, we would have been stalled; let’s put it that way. So we were able to continue going, really kind of almost in a weird, corporate DIY way.

So when the time came to do my solo thing, Roadrunner almost halfheartedly put the first album out. Didn’t push it. It’s insane that we even did what we could with that, even with the pandemic going on, because they didn’t care. So when the time came to kind of re-up with Roadrunner, they were, like, ‘If you wanna go somewhere else, we won’t stop you.’ I was, like, ‘That’s all I needed to hear, dude.’ I was, like, ‘Thanks for that.’

His forthcoming sophomore solo album “CMF2” is expected to be the first offering through his new label, Decibel Cooper.