Pop Punkers in the Boardroom: The Madden Brothers on Their New Lives
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Tattoos still spiral up the necks of Joel and Benji Madden, and they still dress in an upscale version of all-black skate wear in their forties. But these days, the brothers behind Good Charlotte spend more time in boardrooms than they do onstage, thanks to their management company, MDDN, and their Live Nation-backed live-streaming platform, Veeps, which just switched from pay-per-view concerts to an $11.99-a-month subscription model. They recently sat down to talk about the arc of their career, the future of concert streaming, their upcoming gig at the When We Were Young festival (alongside Green Day, Blink-182, and others), and much more.
You guys grew up with a lot of economic precariousness and uncertainty. In 2014 you started a management company, and in 2017 you started Veeps, which has become a huge live-concert streaming platform. To what extent is your turn towards entrepreneurship linked to your upbringing?
Benji: I think they’re majorly linked. We came into the music business without any mentors, and we really sought out mentors. And we were always inquisitive and entrepreneurial. I think that really came from that insecurity as well. We had moments in our life where things just evaporated instantly. So when you think about your career, you want to build it with a solid foundation so it can’t evaporate. So a part of that is, I think naturally, was diversifying.
Joel: There’s that, and then there’s also building families. Around 2014 is a good time marker for me personally. I have two kids. I have a wife and I want to be home with them and build a family, and touring isn’t really conducive to stable family life. So I think there’s that aspect of it as well. The first few years of the kids, I quickly realized touring was not going to be sustainable.
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Benji: With your whole family’s life having to revolve around your schedule.
Joel: Yeah, and so to be able to build businesses where we can be home for dinner every night and actually have a family life is really important to us, and I think that’s a big part of what drives us as entrepreneurs, is family.
You’ve made a good point, which is that thanks to TikTok and YouTube, concerts are essentially streamed to a certain extent whether artists like it or not.
Joel: The fans are already live-streaming your show in a fragmented way on all their socials. It’s not a premium experience, but it’s exciting for fans … What we’re seeing is on social media, everyone’s giving your stuff away, and they’re owning it through their channels.
Benji: But it’s really less about ownership and more about quality control, like actually giving people an elevated experience.
Joel: The live show is always going to be the magic, but we know we all can’t go to the live show. The tickets sell out. But we can bring it to the rest of the world and they can participate, and in a way that’s a good experience and it’s honoring the work and the show. There is going to be a day very soon, if not already, where you’re always considering, what’s my live-streaming plan for this tour? And will there ever be a day where all shows are live-streamed? I don’t know. I think so.
The original idea for Veeps was more of a bonus experience for superfans, but it changed during the pandemic, right?
Benji: There’s certainly a tier of artists that can survive through a pandemic without having to be on the road, which is a blessing. When the pandemic came about, I think we did a thousand shows [on Veeps] that year because artists needed it and the fans who wanted to be connected showed up and support them. It went from being a VIP ticketing platform to being fully focused in that year on live streams and ticketed shows. And then what we saw around was the lack of a good experience. So we focused on the product. We focused on making the platform and making that a Netflix experience for fans.
Joel: Which is why we always knew we would have to go to subscription at some point so that a bigger group of people could participate at a lower price.
You’ve said that bands have to realize that they’re CEOs of their own business. What did it take to make you guys realize that you had to be that way in your own career?
Joel: You come into this as kids with this dream that you’re going to meet a fairy godmother, and they’re going to wave a wand and then everything’s going to be better, and the pain of life is going to go away. And actually what we were running from was a tough childhood and poverty and all those things. But instead of going, “Oh, no, I need to go and actually work on myself and unpack all that stuff,” we ran to music and we were like, “We’re going to make it and everything’s going to be better.” I learned on the other side of the success of Good Charlotte that I still had to do the work on myself, and I still had to unpack a bunch of shit.
Benji: You’re actually maybe more confused because your self esteem was no better.
Joel: If anything, I had an inflated sense of myself in some ways, but I think I learned a lot, and then what I always say is we can do the work now and learn, or we will learn the hard way, and we’ll learn, life will teach us. I think we learned some lessons the hard way. And I think, ultimately, what we were afraid to do was to take full ownership and responsibility for everything. Good and bad. I think that led us down the road of working on ourselves, and then working on our businesses.
Benji: No magic manager was going to come in and solve all the problems.
Joel: And we don’t need to win all the time. We can actually just make music we like. We were pretty angry when we were young. And I understand why when I look back. But I don’t think that we’re angry at all anymore, and very hard to offend. I think we love what we do.
Benji: I do think you start to reach the end of your twenties, and you start to go like, “Where am I going? Who am I? Am I just a guy in a band? Is that what I’m worth? Is the only thing I’m worth if I have a hit? And if I don’t have a hit, what does it mean? And I think like we really felt no, that’s not what defines me. What defines me is what kind of brother am I with? What am I giving?”
You also said that you realized the hard way that you need to keep commerce out of the studio. What was the moment of realization for you guys?
Benji: Man, there were so many when I look back, but then you realize them later. I guess you look at like, “Where did I feel really did I feel really like in line, and then where did I feel off? Where did I feel like birthday clown?”
Can you name a real birthday-clown moment?
Joel: I’ll give you a moment. I mean, it’s gonna haunt me forever for saying this for no other reason than I just don’t think we should have done it. Remember we did that commercial? We did a KFC commercial in Australia. A lot of money. We got talked into it, because it was a lot of money. And I know why the people around talked us into it. Because it was a lot of money!
One of you had been a vegan at some point, too, and that became a whole thing, right?
Benji: I was vegan for two years, [because of a] heavy influence in my life, someone I really looked up to at a really impressionable age.
Joel: I was never a vegan.
Benji: When you’re 22 years old, you’re very impressionable. And I think it’s unrealistic to look at artists who are 21, 22, 25, and expect them to be, like, Obama. But I take full responsibility for every decision we ever made. I have no regrets either. But you do look back and you go OK, “What’s the game tape? What are we doing? Are we getting better? Are we getting more are we getting more like ourselves? Are we being more ourselves or less ourselves?”
You guys are twins, and obviously in a long tradition of famous rock & roll brother teams. And now, a lot of the other ones don’t get along as well. What is different about you guys as brothers that you weren’t punching each other in the face and breaking up?
Joel: I can say, a lot of therapy. A lot of therapy. We definitely had our moments and I could see it, where it could have gone wrong for us. I don’t know Noel and Liam Gallagher personally, so I couldn’t even speak to their relationship at all, only what we see the headlines. But having a brother is really special. And I know that we survived together our youth and our adolescence.
Benji: In my opinion, when you have your brother by your side, you have a superpower through every hard situation. Because you have a cheerleader when you need it and they have a cheerleader when they need it. When I see brothers out there, I root for them. Man, I hold out hope for Liam and Noel. I really do. Oh, yeah. In my heart of hearts. Our heroes. I hold out hope for them. I hold out hope that they get in a room with somebody.
Joel: There was definitely a period where we came to a head and we’re like, we got to figure out how to work this out. And we started working on it. Every now and then, we still have a joint therapy session and work some stuff out, whether it’s a work thing or personal. We’re not shy about it. It helps.
Benji: Yeah. And we had trauma and most people have had trauma. We have this theory: If we put our marriages and our kids first and our personal health, we put all that shit first, we’re sorted.
Pop punk is having a huge moment including with very young fans — and so is Blink-182, specifically, who you’ve had a long relationship with. How does that affect your future plans?
Joel: I think that we acknowledge that we have a place in that landscape. I don’t necessarily feel like we need to participate in it maybe the way that other people would expect us to.
Benji: And not in a bad way. Like, I think the reason we’re going to do When We Were Young [the pop-punk festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 21 and 22] is out of love and appreciation for the fans.
Joel: We really look at Good Charlotte as this special thing, It’s this classic car. It’s one of one and it saved our lives. It’s our baby. It’s become more. Honestly, it’s more than a song or a record. And so we don’t ever want to present it as part of a wave of something. We want to present it as one of one and the people we care the most about as it relates to good Charlotte are the fans that made it what it is.
The lineup of When We Were Young is crazy.
Joel: It’s a party we got invited to that we’re happy to go and be a part of. We played a Veeps secret show the other night, and it was a small, packed room. And it was probably one of the most happy, joyful shows that I’ve been to in the last five years. It was like we were all back in some other time. And it made me really excited for what is that going to be like for 100,000 people. It’s going to be fun.
What do you remember about writing “The Anthem”?
Benji: From the first record on, movies started picking up our songs. And a big movie called, and they said we want a song for the movie, and they were like “another one of your loser anthems.”
Joel: And then we wrote a song, we had halfway written it, and they rejected it.
Benji: They ended up using another song, but we finished this song and we loved it. And it became a joke, like, “Here we are, losers with our loser song, and you don’t even want our loser song.” It became our biggest song over the years, which it wasn’t at the time. Fifteen, 20 years ago, it was not anywhere near our biggest song. It was a fan favorite. The song made it onto Madden Football, and over the years it unfolded. So it’s really interesting, that one. Fun song.
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