Mike Kroeger and Ryan Peake, Nickelback guitarist/keyboardist and bassist chat with Ben Jones about their musical career and about the band’s relationship with radio and media.
When the band was young and broke, radio was their only source for music and inspiration. Their first song to play on the radio was “fly”, which played on C-fox at 11:30 at night. Mike Kroeger tells us that he was at a Christmas staff party at a restaurant, knowing that their song would be on the radio. As he turned it on, he thought: “I might not work here any more and that’d a good thing!”. The band could not know then that only a few years later, “on earth, at that time, there was no moment where our song was not played somewhere” (Mike Kroeger).
The band signed with Roadrunner Records, originally a metal-label. This sparked some of the first controversies around the band which would later be called “part of cancel culture before we had a name for it” (Nickleback documentary).
“We haven’t really shared very much and it’s no wonder that so many people have formed those narratives[…]. If you don’t form your own narrative, other people will do it for you”. For this reason, nickelback not only opened up in their documentary, but also built a presence on social media. Even though they like to keep their personal life private, the band tries to show their audience who they really are: “you get to see the human beings when the camera’s rolling but we’re not acting” (Mike Kroeger).
Nickleback is still big. The band now has nearly 20 million monthly listeners on spotify. They even tried out Tik-Tok dances “as a joke” (Mike Kroeger). But just like that, they stay on track of time, and – most importantly – on the radio.
