Metallica is so tired. Can they please go away? Funny, the way they shut down Napster and submitted info on people who downloaded music, if they were in the hip-hop community, we would not even be talking about them-no one would be.
Maybe if we stop talking about them they will go away. I suddenly feel the urge to download Megadeth tracks.
Music
· 1 year ago
That's crazy
Mike
· 1 year ago
does anyone else think that lars looks like adam savage from mythbusters in that picture
adamw
· 1 year ago
You guys are just being ridiculous haters for no reason. ... Metallica didn't tell their record company to pull the reviews - Metallica told the record company to chill out and let the reviews go back up ....
I watched the interview, and Lars was being sincere about the leak. Chill the hell out. Metallica has been ridiculously generous with its fans with all the extras and freebies and early releases it's been giving to its fans ... Please get a clue.
Go listen to Megadeth if you want. The album is frickin' incredible - and I defy anyone with a lick of integrity to say otherwise. Myself and thousands of others have heard 128kbps versions because of the leak, and will all be buying the CD anyway. Get over the Napster stuff guys. Geesh.
adamw
· 1 year ago
yeah, yeah - replying to my own post - to add that you guys are really out to lunch on Lars and Metallica. Get pissed on him because of Napster if you want -- fine. I personally think he was right about it. ... But to say he doesn't care about his fans is completely and utter bullcrap. They tour endlessly - still - put on amazing shows - are incredibly gracious to the fans - and like I said, have given out tons of freebies and extras, both online and in their CD packaging. They have also not raised ticket prices on this tour over their 2004 level.
Sean P. Aune
· 1 year ago
"They tour endlessly"
You do realize the reason for this is that is where bands make the majority of their money, right? That's why bands have taken to giving away their material so that they can drive more butts into the seats at shows. The ROI on concerts is insanely higher than on a CD as they only receive a small percentage of each CD sold.
So, touring endlessly isn't a gift to their fans, it's a money making machine.
adamw
· 1 year ago
WHAT???? ... Could you please get some facts straight. Metallica is legendary for their touring. They've been that way since they started - which is how they grew such a fanbase despite ZERO airplay until the Black Album in 1991.
Magnum
· 1 year ago
I wouldn't call seeing "One" every hour on MTV from 1989 - 1990 "zero" airplay.
The fanbase also grew via people trading tapes, which is how Napster got started. Granted, selling bootlegs is illegal, but non top 40 bands like Metallica owe part of their popularity to fans trading music.
adamw
· 1 year ago
all true
but the guy above tried to say the only reason the tour endlessly now was because it was the only way to make money. bzzzzzt.
TH
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the post, I had no idea the album was already being pirated left and right on the pb... It's not bad at all!
Brian Sherwin @ Myartspace
· 1 year ago
I have no prob with Metallica. That said, it is obvious why they are not making a big stink about this-- they don't want to lose fans like they did last time. When you have built careers on the 'bad boy' or 'rebel' image you can't get upset when others do the same by their actions. In other words, you can't go off crying foul when fans decide to rebel against the music industry. As Billy Corgan once suggested, maybe it is time for popular bands to focus on creating music that will sell concert tickets instead of being worried about pushing CDs.
Jim
· 1 year ago
Oh NOW Metallica is okay with releasing their album early .. Rite.. watch them get upset about later.. they're such big babies. But hell I still like their songs.. Remember SONGS, not their personalities. haha
Anonymous
· 1 year ago
"The ROI on concerts is insanely higher than on a CD as they only receive a small percentage of each CD sold. "
That doesn't make any sense. The ROI is not higher on a concert vs a CD. That's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what ROI means. Which concert of Metallica's had a higher ROI than the Black album?
Cabezas Comm
· 1 year ago
I think 'Sean P. Aune' mistakenly used the term ROI. The current state of the music industry allows for artists to make much more money from touring than from CD/digital download sales. In terms of ROI, it is difficult to say b/c each artist is different, some artists are bigger internationally-others domestically. This and other variables such as production costs and transportation influence the ROI on touring.
More than likely, with technology advancing and the cost of recording high quality music not expensive at all, it is more than likely that artists would get a better ROI from CD/digital download sales, but there are less CD/digital downloads that are successful in relation to tours that are successful.
BitChain
· 1 year ago
i'm sorry, am i missing something? i don't quite understand why it's a bad thing when an artist sticks up for their art being stolen. oh because they are already rich you say? so what! they got rich because people bought their records. being rich is no justification for arguing that they should not make further income from their art. you guys are ridiculous and if you were artists you would understand. i for one will be buying the new album (and if any of you cared to actually listen to it, it's great stuff). i will also continue to buy music and not steal it and if i ever steal music, i accept any artists who shouts at me. theft is theft.
The Planes
· 1 year ago
Very Nice Article, I learned a lot, especially form your review of how to. I would like to apply to my site
gigdoggy
· 1 year ago
This isn't the first time Metallica appears to be flip-flopping on this issue, ten years ago they were actually encouraging their fans to bootleg their music: http://gigdoggy.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/metall...
Still, it's a good indication of how much the music industry is changing, when the most "conservative" group out there recognizes the inevitable.
kemeny
· 1 year ago
please! HAHA HAH ! yeah i hope everyone just downloads the album. Metallica really really needs to make it up to the internet community... they messed it really big... we should mess it up for them now.!
PJ
· 1 year ago
Concerts are where musicians make money. They split ticket sales and tshirt sales about 50/50. On cd's, an artist generally makes 25% of the actual selling price of the cd and that's only for the big name artists. Newer artists can make less than a dollar on a cd selling for $15. That's just how the industry works. That's why bands dont mind touring because they make a lot more money.
While I can't guess at the actual ROI on cd sales versus concerts, artists do make more income from concert sales.
The Police, the top grossing act of 2007, grossed 131 million dollars from ticket sales alone. Add in the tshirt sales and all the other incidentals and they will be earning probably close to 100 million. Do you really think they'll make that much from a cd? Heck no. And neither does Metallica.
Tiran Dagan
· 1 year ago
As the value of a "hit" song decreases, music groups will have to figure out how to capitalize on the long tail. That means that you need to make your music more accessible to your audience. It's a hard lesson to learn when the traditional model calls for loading a CD with 10 crappy tracks and one or two "hits" and forcing consumers to buy it for $29 versus letting users buy only what they want (iTunes).
Cabezas Comm
· 1 year ago
Well written, Tiran Dagan. Metallica were beneficiaries of a system tilted towards the producers of music: music labels, artists and publishing companies. As we have experienced the democratization of the music industry, the consumer has become the beneficiary.
It would be interesting to speculate the amount of 'Black' albums that would have been sold if digital downloads were readily available in the early '90s. I remember how the mainstream rock public abhorred Metallica in the mid & late 80's, until the 'Sandman' came out and changed everything.
Most of the millions of people who bought the Metallica 'Black' album did so for one song. One song.
It is sad to see Lars and Co.'s adverse reaction to change, especially a change that would benefit the supposed fans they claim to care so much about. What they have done now, for many, it too little, too late.
I can't understand how someone can support a group who did so much to undermine their fan base, the same fan base they purported to be 'One' with.
adamw
· 1 year ago
That post is the long piece of poppycock I've seen in a while. Where to begin. Oy!
Undermine their fan base? Why don't you ask their fans what they think instead of purporting to know.
I love the concept of Web 2.0 - I'm a web development professional and deal with it all the time. But the kinds of of opinions you espouse are just excuses to steal stuff, wrapped up in high-falutin' buzzwords. The "democritization of the music industry" ??? i.e. Stealing. I've done it, you've done it - not saying we haven't. But please don't kid yourself. It's stealing. "consumer has become the beneficiary"? Yeah, by getting things for free.
"The mainstream rock public abhorred Metallica"?? - yeah, good. Highly debatable - but so what. Metallica gained the reputation as the best, hardest-working band in heavy metal prior to most people even knowing who they were. This is considered a good thing. Their 4 albums prior to The Black Album are in the pantheon of all time classics. Whether it's your cup of tea or not is irrelevant.
Metallica had millions of fans and sold millions of records before The Black Album existed. If millions more bought the next record because of one song - so be it. Name one band where the same thing cannot be said. What's the point?
RC
· 1 year ago
Democratization of the music industry doesn't mean stealing. It refers to the distribution of product.
Let's say Metallica was a new band starting out. As good as they are (were), at writing music, they would probably create quite a following through online channels and through touring.
Now let's say they start selling albums on their website, a song at a time. Let's say they also get their debut album on iTunes Music Store.
At the time their first album was out, the royalty per song was 6.25 cents, up to ten songs. All songs after number ten were free and you didn't get paid for them. This is fact, look it up if you don't believe me. I actually went to school to learn this shit.
Ok, so now, as opposed to then, you can sell your songs yourself, distributed with very little cost other than bandwidth and hosting, and make say... $.50 per song. Music recording software has made it cheap as hell to record a professional quality album for a fraction of the cost of analog equipment like they used on their first albums. Let's say now, instead of $50,000 to record Kill 'Em All, It costs... $1000. Let's say they have to shell out $300 a year for site hosting and bandwidth (probably really high for bandwidth, but I'll give you a high number to illustrate my point). That's $1300 to make and distribute their album. They only have to sell twice that number, 2600 copies of songs (NOT ALBUMS, but SONGS) to break even.
If you're talking about the old royalties, and the costs of making an album like Kill 'em All, you'd have to sell 50,000 divided by 62.5 cents (that's 10 songs x 6.25 cents) = 80,000 copies of their album. ALBUM. Not each song. Just to break even. Not to make any money at all. The record company advances you money, and you don't get any from them until the advance is paid off. So Metallica would HAVE to tour to eat.
Democratization of the music industry means that the money and the risk is in the hands of the artists and the consumers of the product. The record companies are irrelevant. Unnecessary. Just ask Trent Reznor. He has sold fewer albums and made more money than he ever had when under contract with any record label.
Democratization means artists can make the music they want to, and the fans can choose what music they want to pay for, and not have an album with one or two good songs on it that they paid $16 for and the artist makes $.80 or whatever the going royalty rate is nowadays for that one album.
This has nothing to do with theft, other than the theft the record companies have been getting away with for the last 80 years or so. This has to do with a new paradigm.
Cabezas Comm
· 1 year ago
I am of the opinion that if you encourage fans to 'bootleg' your music when you are starting out, you really should not be a 'cyber-narc' years later; it is rather hypocritical.
'Bootlegging' recorded music on cassettes was illegal, under the law it was considered stealing.
I grew up in the mid 80's with groups like Metallica, Antrax, Slayer, Overkill, Megadeth, etc. I was at concerts in the Meadowlands, NJ, when Metallica stole the show from Ozzy's headlining show as well as at infamous shows at the now-defunct, temple of heavy metal/nightclub, L'Amour in Brooklyn.
The mainstream rock crowd was not enamored with Metallica in any way. I distinctly remember when people who did not like any thrash groups started getting into Metallica b/c of the MTV airplay of 'One'. That was the end of Metallica for me, as it was for many others. Part of Metallica's allure was that nobody liked them other than the true fans! They were even a group who bad-mouthed most rock/heavy metal groups. Once the rock fans started liking them, it was not the same, the music was not the same and the allure was gone.
In regards to my comment about one song, I was merely stating that many people bought the Black album for one song-in today's marketplace they may not have sold as many records, but rather an insane amount of digital downloads for the song 'Sandman'.
No one can disparage Metallica's success. It is tremendous. I, like many people (but not all people, not all 'millions' of fans), refuse to support a band that has the gall to complain and narc on fans because the paradigm has changed, instead of welcoming it and finding/inventing new revenue streams (which they are now forced to do). When I hear bands like Metallica and Kiss say how much they love their fans, it makes me laugh. They love their fans when they can maximize their profits off of them, yet when they can't any longer b/c of the evolution of technology/markets, they damn the system, damn the universe, and present the names of fans who have spent money on them in the past, to authorities b/c they downloaded some of their music.
It's actually comical-they are actually upset b/c they can't be on a pedestal anymore. Someone needs to tell them that, "...the only constant is change".
So, my apologies, if I disgraced your favorite band. I was just stating my opinion. I just think that either you don't remember Metallica when they started out or you weren't a fan of theirs in the early days b/c their actions against fans in '00 was so anti-Metallica ethos-they had a strong bond with their fans, you have to remember, they spit in the face of the Motley Crue's, the Ratt's, the Quiet Riot's-all those other group where the standard for 'metal'-they were the exact opposite.
They were so hungry, they were so street, as I said, I knew people who would have Metallica bootlegs-I used to buy them in NJ! There were even 'white-label' records! They did not care, they knew they needed it and it was sort of their way of connecting with the fan base and creating more hype for the group. And, boy, did it work. A Metallica fan was much more dedicated than any other fan for the aforementioned groups. They developed a kinship with their fans which was the reason they grew.
Perhaps they should have broken up after the Black album? I mean, The Beatles as a group only stayed together for 10-13 years...maybe there was no place for them to go other than a downward trajectory, since they started so strong, so revolutionary. Again, just an opinion.
bump
· 1 year ago
Newsflash: People are allowed to change their minds. It's especially good when their initial opinion is wrong, and their new one is more correct.
Dear reporter, as a fellow reporter I implore you to please stop smearing our profession. You see, your information is blatantly incorrect and actually contains information that you, the writer, fictionalized. Now, I suggest you go back through your article with a fine toothed comb and correct some of your major errors.
Perhaps in the world of the Internet, fact checking is not important, but even if you are a half-assed journalist at best, you should still make an effort.
Fact: Metallica's management asked for the reviews to be taken down. Fact: Metallica was out no tour during this time. Fact: Days later, Metallica asked for the reviews to be allowed. Fact: Napster and Metallica are business partners. Fact: Metallica has been giving material to their fans for free, via the Internet, since 1999.
David Gerard
· 1 year ago
"It's the way business is done these days," Mr Ulrich said. "And there's the novelty of anyone wanting to listen to a new Metallica album." http://tinyurl.com/5vn4r4
Well, hey, if they're ok with it, that's their decision.....
And besides, from what I hear, they do make plenty of money from all their touring, and if people who pirate this stuff like the sound of their music, they may go to the concerts, leading to more revenue for the band. Sounds logical to me.
All the same, that's a lotta 'happy' in the quote, haha..
Adam
· 1 year ago
All of your negative opinions of Metallica doesn't mean a pinch of rat shit because while u sit here making negative judgments about what you REALLY do not know 100% about, the rest of the world is enjoying their music and BUYING there album more than ANY other album in the world. If you don't believe me, do your research. Must make you all feel a little stupid knowing you wasted your time writing this immature shit. Now go find someone else to bitch about, because the other 98% of music enthusiasts love Metallica.
All Comments
Maybe if we stop talking about them they will go away. I suddenly feel the urge to download Megadeth tracks.
I watched the interview, and Lars was being sincere about the leak. Chill the hell out. Metallica has been ridiculously generous with its fans with all the extras and freebies and early releases it's been giving to its fans ... Please get a clue.
Go listen to Megadeth if you want. The album is frickin' incredible - and I defy anyone with a lick of integrity to say otherwise. Myself and thousands of others have heard 128kbps versions because of the leak, and will all be buying the CD anyway. Get over the Napster stuff guys. Geesh.
You do realize the reason for this is that is where bands make the majority of their money, right? That's why bands have taken to giving away their material so that they can drive more butts into the seats at shows. The ROI on concerts is insanely higher than on a CD as they only receive a small percentage of each CD sold.
So, touring endlessly isn't a gift to their fans, it's a money making machine.
The fanbase also grew via people trading tapes, which is how Napster got started. Granted, selling bootlegs is illegal, but non top 40 bands like Metallica owe part of their popularity to fans trading music.
but the guy above tried to say the only reason the tour endlessly now was because it was the only way to make money. bzzzzzt.
That doesn't make any sense. The ROI is not higher on a concert vs a CD. That's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what ROI means. Which concert of Metallica's had a higher ROI than the Black album?
More than likely, with technology advancing and the cost of recording high quality music not expensive at all, it is more than likely that artists would get a better ROI from CD/digital download sales, but there are less CD/digital downloads that are successful in relation to tours that are successful.
Still, it's a good indication of how much the music industry is changing, when the most "conservative" group out there recognizes the inevitable.
While I can't guess at the actual ROI on cd sales versus concerts, artists do make more income from concert sales.
The Police, the top grossing act of 2007, grossed 131 million dollars from ticket sales alone. Add in the tshirt sales and all the other incidentals and they will be earning probably close to 100 million. Do you really think they'll make that much from a cd? Heck no. And neither does Metallica.
It would be interesting to speculate the amount of 'Black' albums that would have been sold if digital downloads were readily available in the early '90s. I remember how the mainstream rock public abhorred Metallica in the mid & late 80's, until the 'Sandman' came out and changed everything.
Most of the millions of people who bought the Metallica 'Black' album did so for one song. One song.
It is sad to see Lars and Co.'s adverse reaction to change, especially a change that would benefit the supposed fans they claim to care so much about. What they have done now, for many, it too little, too late.
I can't understand how someone can support a group who did so much to undermine their fan base, the same fan base they purported to be 'One' with.
Undermine their fan base? Why don't you ask their fans what they think instead of purporting to know.
I love the concept of Web 2.0 - I'm a web development professional and deal with it all the time. But the kinds of of opinions you espouse are just excuses to steal stuff, wrapped up in high-falutin' buzzwords. The "democritization of the music industry" ??? i.e. Stealing. I've done it, you've done it - not saying we haven't. But please don't kid yourself. It's stealing. "consumer has become the beneficiary"? Yeah, by getting things for free.
"The mainstream rock public abhorred Metallica"?? - yeah, good. Highly debatable - but so what. Metallica gained the reputation as the best, hardest-working band in heavy metal prior to most people even knowing who they were. This is considered a good thing. Their 4 albums prior to The Black Album are in the pantheon of all time classics. Whether it's your cup of tea or not is irrelevant.
Metallica had millions of fans and sold millions of records before The Black Album existed. If millions more bought the next record because of one song - so be it. Name one band where the same thing cannot be said. What's the point?
Let's say Metallica was a new band starting out. As good as they are (were), at writing music, they would probably create quite a following through online channels and through touring.
Now let's say they start selling albums on their website, a song at a time. Let's say they also get their debut album on iTunes Music Store.
At the time their first album was out, the royalty per song was 6.25 cents, up to ten songs. All songs after number ten were free and you didn't get paid for them. This is fact, look it up if you don't believe me. I actually went to school to learn this shit.
Ok, so now, as opposed to then, you can sell your songs yourself, distributed with very little cost other than bandwidth and hosting, and make say... $.50 per song. Music recording software has made it cheap as hell to record a professional quality album for a fraction of the cost of analog equipment like they used on their first albums. Let's say now, instead of $50,000 to record Kill 'Em All, It costs... $1000. Let's say they have to shell out $300 a year for site hosting and bandwidth (probably really high for bandwidth, but I'll give you a high number to illustrate my point). That's $1300 to make and distribute their album. They only have to sell twice that number, 2600 copies of songs (NOT ALBUMS, but SONGS) to break even.
If you're talking about the old royalties, and the costs of making an album like Kill 'em All, you'd have to sell 50,000 divided by 62.5 cents (that's 10 songs x 6.25 cents) = 80,000 copies of their album. ALBUM. Not each song. Just to break even. Not to make any money at all. The record company advances you money, and you don't get any from them until the advance is paid off. So Metallica would HAVE to tour to eat.
Democratization of the music industry means that the money and the risk is in the hands of the artists and the consumers of the product. The record companies are irrelevant. Unnecessary. Just ask Trent Reznor. He has sold fewer albums and made more money than he ever had when under contract with any record label.
Democratization means artists can make the music they want to, and the fans can choose what music they want to pay for, and not have an album with one or two good songs on it that they paid $16 for and the artist makes $.80 or whatever the going royalty rate is nowadays for that one album.
This has nothing to do with theft, other than the theft the record companies have been getting away with for the last 80 years or so. This has to do with a new paradigm.
'Bootlegging' recorded music on cassettes was illegal, under the law it was considered stealing.
I grew up in the mid 80's with groups like Metallica, Antrax, Slayer, Overkill, Megadeth, etc. I was at concerts in the Meadowlands, NJ, when Metallica stole the show from Ozzy's headlining show as well as at infamous shows at the now-defunct, temple of heavy metal/nightclub, L'Amour in Brooklyn.
The mainstream rock crowd was not enamored with Metallica in any way. I distinctly remember when people who did not like any thrash groups started getting into Metallica b/c of the MTV airplay of 'One'. That was the end of Metallica for me, as it was for many others. Part of Metallica's allure was that nobody liked them other than the true fans! They were even a group who bad-mouthed most rock/heavy metal groups. Once the rock fans started liking them, it was not the same, the music was not the same and the allure was gone.
In regards to my comment about one song, I was merely stating that many people bought the Black album for one song-in today's marketplace they may not have sold as many records, but rather an insane amount of digital downloads for the song 'Sandman'.
No one can disparage Metallica's success. It is tremendous. I, like many people (but not all people, not all 'millions' of fans), refuse to support a band that has the gall to complain and narc on fans because the paradigm has changed, instead of welcoming it and finding/inventing new revenue streams (which they are now forced to do). When I hear bands like Metallica and Kiss say how much they love their fans, it makes me laugh. They love their fans when they can maximize their profits off of them, yet when they can't any longer b/c of the evolution of technology/markets, they damn the system, damn the universe, and present the names of fans who have spent money on them in the past, to authorities b/c they downloaded some of their music.
It's actually comical-they are actually upset b/c they can't be on a pedestal anymore. Someone needs to tell them that, "...the only constant is change".
So, my apologies, if I disgraced your favorite band. I was just stating my opinion. I just think that either you don't remember Metallica when they started out or you weren't a fan of theirs in the early days b/c their actions against fans in '00 was so anti-Metallica ethos-they had a strong bond with their fans, you have to remember, they spit in the face of the Motley Crue's, the Ratt's, the Quiet Riot's-all those other group where the standard for 'metal'-they were the exact opposite.
They were so hungry, they were so street, as I said, I knew people who would have Metallica bootlegs-I used to buy them in NJ! There were even 'white-label' records! They did not care, they knew they needed it and it was sort of their way of connecting with the fan base and creating more hype for the group. And, boy, did it work. A Metallica fan was much more dedicated than any other fan for the aforementioned groups. They developed a kinship with their fans which was the reason they grew.
Perhaps they should have broken up after the Black album? I mean, The Beatles as a group only stayed together for 10-13 years...maybe there was no place for them to go other than a downward trajectory, since they started so strong, so revolutionary. Again, just an opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE
...Never forget!
Perhaps in the world of the Internet, fact checking is not important, but even if you are a half-assed journalist at best, you should still make an effort.
Fact: Metallica's management asked for the reviews to be taken down. Fact: Metallica was out no tour during this time. Fact: Days later, Metallica asked for the reviews to be allowed. Fact: Napster and Metallica are business partners. Fact: Metallica has been giving material to their fans for free, via the Internet, since 1999.
http://dailybuzz.mobuzz.tv/shows/metallica_and_...
And besides, from what I hear, they do make plenty of money from all their touring, and if people who pirate this stuff like the sound of their music, they may go to the concerts, leading to more revenue for the band. Sounds logical to me.
All the same, that's a lotta 'happy' in the quote, haha..
Must make you all feel a little stupid knowing you wasted your time writing this immature shit.
Now go find someone else to bitch about, because the other 98% of music enthusiasts love Metallica.