I read your interview from earlier this week on www.artistdirect.com in which you state that you are standing up for the right of the artist. You were not asked by Napster for permission to trade freely your material online. Napster.com is backed by big money and tries to play their side of the story as if they are doing something pro bono, for the good of all people, when they are really a corporation of paid employees hoping to strike it rich with an IPO.
I agree with on those points. I also applaud your efforts and look down the road and see that even though Napster is not having a significant market impact now, five years down the road it will, and it will take five years to get laws passed to protect musicians.
My concern regards the material that Napster is used to trade. It seems to me that if I turn on the radio, I regularly hear the same songs. For instance, I know that my local rock radio station (which sucks) is playing Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" right now, for the 3rd time today. Before the hour's end, I'm confident they will play a song of yours that they play everyday, such as "Hero of the Day". They will probably follow with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to make sure that they get their daily quota of 5 plays of that, then Santana's "Supernatural" for the 7th time today followed by Kid Rock.
Now, the radio station plays some of your songs, which I hear for free, but the selection is limited; they rarely play more than two songs off any given album. So I could tape a subset of your songs off the radio, albeit at somewhat lower quality than an MP3.
I do own one of your CD's, but my favorite band is Dream Theater, and I own every album, plus several bootlegs, plus several t- shirts. The band's drummer has his own web page on which he has placed concert recordings, demo recordings, and "material from back when the concert audiences were smaller than the band" in mp3 format.
My question is: once you win the lawsuit or at least make your point, do you plan on releasing some of your material in MP3 format? Since people can record a certain subset of your songs from the radio already, why not right now make those songs available in MP3 format from an official Metallica web page and/or encourage Napster users to only trade your songs that make radio cuts? That way, you have free publicity provided by the internet and Napster, but can still rest assured that people who like your music will still buy your CD's in order to have those songs that didn't make singles, and contributing to the recording costs and putting food on your table. This is similar to the philosophy of several software companies including Eudora, which releases a free, good email program with basic features, but charges for the advanced version with the most and best features.
Hypothetically, if there were a piece software that allowed people over the internet to freely trade those select songs that were normally played as radio singles (the songs played repeatedly on the radio), would Metallica release its radio singles and perhaps other special material to be traded by that mechanism?
I would also like to point out that I have both chosen to buy and chosen not to buy several bands' CD's based on songs I download via Napster, bands that I only learned of through internet mailing lists because they would never get air time on my local radio stations, radio stations which suck so bad, they suck the "metal up your a$$" (in 1980's Metallica terminology).
Signed, Someone who believes free software and free music both have their places alongside commercial software and at-cost music.
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I read your interview from earlier this week on www.artistdirect.com in which you state that you are standing up for the right of the artist. You were not asked by Napster for permission to trade freely your material online. Napster.com is backed by big money and tries to play their side of the story as if they are doing something pro bono, for the good of all people, when they are really a corporation of paid employees hoping to strike it rich with an IPO.
I agree with on those points. I also applaud your efforts and look down the road and see that even though Napster is not having a significant market impact now, five years down the road it will, and it will take five years to get laws passed to protect musicians.
My concern regards the material that Napster is used to trade. It seems to me that if I turn on the radio, I regularly hear the same songs. For instance, I know that my local rock radio station (which sucks) is playing Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" right now, for the 3rd time today. Before the hour's end, I'm confident they will play a song of yours that they play everyday, such as "Hero of the Day". They will probably follow with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to make sure that they get their daily quota of 5 plays of that, then Santana's "Supernatural" for the 7th time today followed by Kid Rock.
Now, the radio station plays some of your songs, which I hear for free, but the selection is limited; they rarely play more than two songs off any given album. So I could tape a subset of your songs off the radio, albeit at somewhat lower quality than an MP3.
I do own one of your CD's, but my favorite band is Dream Theater, and I own every album, plus several bootlegs, plus several t- shirts. The band's drummer has his own web page on which he has placed concert recordings, demo recordings, and "material from back when the concert audiences were smaller than the band" in mp3 format.
My question is: once you win the lawsuit or at least make your point, do you plan on releasing some of your material in MP3 format? Since people can record a certain subset of your songs from the radio already, why not right now make those songs available in MP3 format from an official Metallica web page and/or encourage Napster users to only trade your songs that make radio cuts? That way, you have free publicity provided by the internet and Napster, but can still rest assured that people who like your music will still buy your CD's in order to have those songs that didn't make singles, and contributing to the recording costs and putting food on your table. This is similar to the philosophy of several software companies including Eudora, which releases a free, good email program with basic features, but charges for the advanced version with the most and best features.
Hypothetically, if there were a piece software that allowed people over the internet to freely trade those select songs that were normally played as radio singles (the songs played repeatedly on the radio), would Metallica release its radio singles and perhaps other special material to be traded by that mechanism?
I would also like to point out that I have both chosen to buy and chosen not to buy several bands' CD's based on songs I download via Napster, bands that I only learned of through internet mailing lists because they would never get air time on my local radio stations, radio stations which suck so bad, they suck the "metal up your a$$" (in 1980's Metallica terminology).
Signed,
Someone who believes free software and free music both have their places alongside commercial software and at-cost music.