Photo (Morgoth Beatz and Cameron Almasi) by Natasha Austrich
For industry veteran Cameron Almasi and deathcore vocalist Eddie Hermida (Suicide Silence, All Shall Perish), longstanding friendship and circumstance would ultimately give rise to collaboration.
Bringing their own, unique vantage point to the table, Almasi is a music industry professional that has spent years cultivating better business in the world of pop, dance and hip hop. For Hermida, the rigors of being a touring musician in metal, has meant a complicated and at times, contentious relationship with the bigger business of heavy music.
Given the different perspectives, combined with the same passion, the two would eventually convene to forge ahead with their own artist-first business model that remains the pulse of Arson Theory.
Encompassing a broad range of services including, but not limited to, distribution, publishing, rights management, sync, marketing, merchandising and catalog acquisition, the MO of Arson Theory and the two renegades at the helm is simple - better business acumen, artist-focused advocacy and the preservation of autocracy for creatives investing the sweat equity into their craft.
Intent on challenging the status quo in heavy and alternative music, Almasi and Hermida's collective approach is less about disruption and more stewardship. Leveraging their collective experience and distinct expertise in an effort to better modernize metal, the mission statement of the company is one that priorities independence in a way that makes it sustainable for artists at all levels.
In the spirit of constructivism, Almasi recently took up the pen to document some of the talking points confronting the modernization of metal music. Referencing lessons learned from other genres and previous test-cases, Almasi's assertion of stronger business acumen and artist advocacy is one that is ultimately intended to loft metal to the global powerhouse we all know it to be.
Heavy Music Has a Publishing Literacy Problem
Cameron Almasi - One of the biggest misconceptions I see in heavy music is that if you’re affiliated with BMI or ASCAP, register your songs, and collect your checks, then your publishing is handled. It’s not. That misunderstanding alone can leave a tremendous amount of money uncollected.
The first thing artists need to understand is that a composition and a master sound recordingare two completely different copyrights. They work together, but they are not the same thing. The artist performing the recording is not necessarily the person who wrote the composition.
One of my favorite examples is Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Aerosmith made the recording famous, but Diane Warren wrote the song entirely herself. On the other side, another artist can cover a song and create a completely new master without owning the underlying composition, such as Maphra’s popular cover of Bring Me the Horizon’s “Doomed.”
Heavy music has historically been very master-focused: record an album, release and distribute it, tour for one or two years, and sell merch. Publishing often becomes an afterthought, largely because nobody ever taught bands what they actually own as songwriters, let alone what it could be worth. That’s something we’ve tried to solve at Arson Theory.
We don’t think bands should have to become copyright attorneys just to understand how they get paid. Part of our job is building the infrastructure around the artist, but another huge part is making sure they understand what they own, where the money comes from, and why protecting the composition is just as important as protecting the master.
Heavy Music Is Global, but Publishing Collection Is Fragmented
CA - Heavy music is incredibly global. A band from the United States can wake up and discover that a huge percentage of its audience is in Germany, Australia, Japan, the UK, France, or South America.
The problem is that the royalty collection infrastructure behind that audience is still incredibly fragmented. Different territories have different collection societies, copyright frameworks, registration systems, and ways of matching usage back to a songwriter. Many of these societies operate with some form of government recognition or statutory authority, or within tightly regulated national copyright systems. Each can have its own barriers to entry - whether that’s citizenship, local business presence, publisher affiliation, repertoire requirements, or other eligibility standards.
Globally, there are roughly 130 music-focused societies an artist or publisher may need to navigate to collect as directly and efficiently as possible. They include SACEM in France, GEMA in Germany, PRS in the UK, IMRO in Ireland, JASRAC in Japan, SOCAN in Canada, APRA AMCOS in Australia and New Zealand, KOMCA in South Korea, and many others.
Technically, domestic PROs have reciprocal relationships that allow money to move internationally, but that doesn’t mean the process is always fast, transparent, or perfect. Every additional layer creates another opportunity for metadata to mismatch, claims to go unidentified, registrations to be incomplete, or income to sit somewhere without finding its way back to the writer.
A friend of mine at BMI once told me that an internal rule of thumb they sometimes reference is that when BMI is relied upon to collect a writer’s performance income globally, only around 20% of what may ultimately be collectible makes its way back. Whether that exact percentage applies in every case is beside the point; the broader issue is that relying entirely on reciprocal collection can create enormous inefficiencies. That’s why direct global administration, accurate registrations and active auditing matter so much.
That’s where a publisher’s infrastructure becomes valuable. At Arson Theory, the goal is to make sure our writers are properly represented across territories, registrations are accurate, missing income can be identified, and someone is actively auditing what should be coming back. Heavy bands have global audiences, and they deserve rights infrastructure that operates globally, too.
Mechanical Royalties Are One of the Biggest Blind Spots
CA - If I had to identify one area where I consistently see songwriters leaving money behind, it’s mechanical royalties. When a band tells me, “Don’t worry, we already registered everything with BMI orASCAP,” it makes me want to slam my head against a wall, because I immediately know there is an entirely separate pool of publishing income they are not collecting.
In today’s streaming-driven landscape, digital mechanical royalties can represent an extremely significant portion of the publishing income generated by a song and, depending on the usage and territory, they likely outweigh the performance income generated from those same streams. Yet so many artists know what BMI and ASCAP are and have never even heard of The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the “MLC.”) That’s such a critical distinction.
BMI and ASCAP primarily deal with performance royalties. The MLC administers blanket mechanical royalties from eligible U.S. digital music services. So even if a songwriter did absolutely nothing else sophisticated with their publishing, no global administration, no extensive foreign registrations, no publisher actively auditing dozens of territories, simply making sure their works are properly registered and matched at both their PRO and The MLC can make an enormous difference.
And that’s what frustrates me.
Bands will spend years fighting for streams, playlist placements, YouTube views, social traction, and every additional listener they can find while potentially ignoring one of the most valuable publishing income streams those exact same plays are generating.
Heavy music has historically done a terrible job teaching artists how to distribute records, and an even worse job teaching songwriters how to monetize their compositions. At Arson Theory, we want to close that gap. If we’re helping you grow the record, we also want to make sure the writers behind that record are actually collecting the money the composition is generating.
Heavy Music Has Been Slow to Embrace Independence
CA - One of the biggest differences I noticed when I began working more deeply in heavy music was that the culture around independence hadn’t evolved at the same pace as other genres.
Most of my career was spent around pop, hip-hop, and dance music, so I had already watched this evolution happen in several different ways. When I was working with electronic artists around 2014 and 2015, some of the most influential labels in the genre were themselves artist-run: Mad Decent with Diplo, OWSLA with Skrillex, and mau5trap with Deadmau5. A lot of those deals were incredibly simple: one single, maybe an EP, a short-term license, and no option terms. The value wasn’t necessarily that the label needed to own the music forever. The value was the co-sign, the community around the label, and the ability to create opportunities around the record.
Then hip-hop took the idea of independence and turned it into a cultural movement. Artists like Nipsey Hussle, Young Dolph, Russ, Chance the Rapper, 21 Savage, and others helped an entire generation start thinking about ownership differently. Some artists built their own infrastructure, some worked through independent distributors, and others became powerful enough to negotiate partnerships with major labels that would have been almost unthinkable under traditional artist deals years earlier.
Eventually I watched that philosophy increasingly make its way into pop as well. Licensing became more common, artists became more protective of their masters, and the relationship between an artist and a label started becoming much more flexible.
Heavy music, in my experience, has been one of the last genres to fully adopt that mentality. There is still this psychological attachment to the idea that getting “signed” is the finish line. Bands want the logo, the co-sign, and the validation that comes with being associated with a recognizable label. I understand why, that validation has historically carried tremendous weight in this genre, but sometimes artists surrender ownership and long-term equity simply because they still believe a traditional label relationship is the only path to having a real career.
There are still very few case studies showcasing the power of independence in heavy music, such as Shadow of Intent. At Arson Theory, we want artists to understand that independence doesn’t mean doing everything alone. Independence means having the ability to choose your partners without unnecessarily surrendering ownership or control.
You can have infrastructure. You can have A&R. You can have marketing, PR, sync, and people actively helping grow your career while still protecting the equity you’ve spent years creating. Being independent shouldn’t make you feel like you’re unsupported.
Heavy Music Deserves Better Distribution Partnerships
CA - The other side of that problem is that I don’t think the heavy-music business itself has completely caught up with what modern independence is supposed to look like.
For a lot of artists in this genre, “distribution” seems to exist at two extremes. At one end, it means uploading your record through a completely self-service platform and essentially handling everything else yourself, through DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, or a similar service. At the other end, companies offer minimal hands-on distribution but ask for economics, exclusivity, or control that I would have considered completely unacceptable for clients I represented in other genres. That shocked me.
In all my years working throughout the broader music business, the most aggressive distribution terms I ever encountered were inside heavy music. Deals were being presented as distribution relationships while asking for excessive royalty participation, exclusivity, or licensing terms that blurred the line between being a distributor and effectively behaving like a record label, without necessarily providing the investment or infrastructure that would justify those economics.
That’s the gap we’re trying to close with Arson Theory. The distinction between a record label and a distributor is becoming increasingly blurred anyway. Historically, you could draw a fairly clean line: labels owned masters and had the right to exploit and monetize them, while distributors obtained licenses to distribute them.
Today, licensing has become increasingly common across the entire business, so I think the more important question is: What actual value is your partner bringing to your career in exchange for what you’re giving them? That’s how we think about distribution. It shouldn’t just be delivering a WAV file to Spotify and Apple Music. It should be strategy, A&R, pitching, analytics, rights infrastructure, problem-solving, accessibility, and people who are genuinely invested in helping the artist grow.
Our goal with Arson Theory is to bring the standards of partnership I’ve seen work in pop, hip-hop, and electronic music into heavy music without asking artists to unnecessarily give away the thing they’re working so hard to build.
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