TheBrag.com has recently interviewed Jeff Stinco from Simple Plan about his upcoming plans and his views on the music industry. Check out the excerpts from the article of some very interesting topics that Jeff talked about in the interview (for the full article, go here):

On critics labeling music:

“I have nothing against journalists and critics – I believe that they are an important part of the process of appreciating music – but there’s something very limiting about tagging a genre to a band’s music. When I hear that my band’s a pop-punk band I just want to reference our songs that aren’t at all like that, and I feel there’s a lot of them too. It’s about writing the best songs possible for us and it just so happens we often use a certain sounding guitar or drum to get that. There’s just so much music out there that people need to somehow make sense of it all. I totally understand that and I do the same thing. There’s very little music out there right now though that is purely one thing. There’s so much cross-talk between the genres these days and it shows that the close-mindedness has gone. As a music lover I doubt that any serious artist only listens to the genre of the music that they are or were making. I’m pretty sure that Bob Dylan has heard an N.W.A song.”

On Simple Plan staying true to themselves:

“We released a book, kind of a retrospective, and it reminded us about how little we understood the music industry and how we were just thrown into a big whirlpool, or cyclone of interviews, shows and travel. We never got to perceive the magnitude of what the band was all about, and at a point I think that lack of knowledge made this band more real and more appreciate of what we have. In this day and age in the industry it’s very fickle. I don’t live in the day-to-day world where I’m dealing with chart positions – I’m dealing with the fans and that’s what I really try to make it about. Social media has really made us able to do that a lot more and when I look at the music industry, I don’t know, it allows us to put records out and play shows but there’s always being something very DIY about this band. A lot of decisions are made within this band; 99 per cent of the time we’re making the decisions and in the one per cent that we’re not, we’re reacting to something and that’s when you’re not making an entirely free decision. I try to avoid speaking about numbers and I’m really still – it’s hard to say without sounding pretentious – but I’m still in it for the music. During my career I’ve seen so many people in it for the wrong reasons, guys just starting bands to get laid or to make the big bucks, but I’ve also met real artists and those are the guys I look up to and that is what I aim for with this band.”