man101 posted...
Mike Shinoda is actually the one who owns the name. Chester wasn't a founding member. Yes, he was the vocalist for all their releases and as such is sort of the face of the band but had no claim to the band name.
That doesn't really change what they said at all. Someone can be the soul of a band and the main reason for the band's success, even if they weren't one of the founding members.
The fact that Linkin Park was around for years before he joined doesn't really change the fact that he was already a member when they released their
debut
album, and pretty much every moment of their mainstream success only happened while he was a member. To nearly everyone other than the most obsessive fans, he
WAS
the face of the band.
There are also arguments to be made about whether or not a lead singer should have a disproportionate amount of credit/identity for any given band, but like it or not the lead singer is often seen as the face of any band - and the main focus of their identity. When any band loses its lead singer, it tends to mean far more than losing literally any other member.
Some bands
can
sidestep this (Chicago without Peter Cetera is still Chicago), and some bands have a built-in escape hatch (Van Halen is still Van Halen no matter who the frontman is, because the band is named after Eddie and Alex... and now Wolfgang), but most of the time, when a band that is strongly established loses their lead singer, they're never again seen as being anywhere near as popular or successful as they were before.
There's a reason why bands like The Doors (who
did
try to continue on after Jim Morrison died) tend to break up an album or two after their main figure leaves. They're just too integral to how the public sees the band, so the band without their iconic frontman isn't really the band at all.
(You can even see this with bands like Queen - in spite of the fact that they've doggedly continued on for decades post-Freddie Mercury, most people simply don't care, because Freddie will
always
be Queen to pretty much everyone. Or bands like Journey, who basically compensated for kicking Steve Perry out of the band by recruiting a new leader singer that literally sounds
exactly like him
out of a cover band.)
It also starts bands down the weird road of replacing members, where you start to get the thing you see with a lot of bands from the 50s and 60s that are still touring, where
none
of the original members are still present (or still alive), so the band is sort of a weird zombie thing. Or odd situations where you see multiple ex-members of a band all touring simultaneously with different groups of new people claiming to be the original band.