News

Not that long ago, I wrote about the launch of Mission: Metallica, a new website offering a kind of "music as a service" plan for fans of the veteran metal band, including everything from high-quality downloads of the upcoming album (and without any digital-rights management restrictions) to behind-the-scenes photos and videos from the recording studio, limited-edition lithographs and so on. A pretty smart offering, in a lot of ways - and certainly a nice surprise coming from the band that was noted for going after Napster in the early days of the digital-music revolution.

Metallica's latest move, however, seems a lot more like the Metallica of old. According to several recent reports, the band (or rather, its management) set up a "listening party" with several prominent music bloggers, including the staff of a British music site called The Quietus, and played them early versions of tracks from the upcoming album (which is expected in September). Not surprisingly, some of these bloggers wrote up their impressions of what they heard - at which point they got nasty phone calls from Metallica's management, asking that they remove the commentary.

Why would the band do such a thing? No doubt out of concern about potential repercussions for album sales if fans get a sense from the early versions that they might not like the record. So then why play it for the bloggers at all? It's like giving with one hand and then taking with the other - whatever goodwill was gained by having the listening party was immediately nullified by ordering the bloggers to take down their comments (which still survive at Techdirt.com).

Not a great PR move by Lars Ulrich and the boys, but then not that surprising either.

For more details and links,

see the Ingram 2.0 blog at

globetechnology.com.