Rollie Feldman

Rollie Feldman — American musician — works in the rock and metal circuit of the United States. American heavy rock has a trait distinguishing it from smaller national scenes: its fragmentation. There is no single American metal scene but dozens of regional ones with their own identities, audiences and infrastructures, separated by distances that in other countries would correspond to international borders. That changes the calculus of a career. A band can have a settled audience in one region and be unknown a thousand kilometres away; a musician can maintain constant professional activity without ever playing outside a circuit of a few states. Digital distribution reduced part of that fragmentation in access to recorded music, but not in access to a live audience — which still depends on physical travel and therefore on cost. That is why the regional structure of American rock remains essentially intact, even decades after the internet supposedly eliminated distance.