Garbage singer Shirley Manson defended the Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich.
During a chat with NME, Manson discussed how leaked music can affect musicians. She mentioned the chart positions, who would access it, and how it would drop. Following the conversation, she was asked if the criticism towards Metallica’s words about leaking music criticism was justified. Manson defended Ulrich and replied:
“It was outrageous, because poor old Lars was painted as a greedy capitalist. To be frank, I was also in that fight, I was very vocal about it, and I received a lot of flak too. It’s not my story to talk about Lars, and I wouldn’t take anything away from him for being a hero, but I did have the foresight to see where this was going, and the people who criticised Lars did not.”
She added:
“We’ve seen a horror story develop, basically. Those of us who emerged in the ‘90s and before have been lucky enough to weather this with a lot of resentment in our hearts. We can still survive, but people have to understand that when you make music and it is taken from the musician for free by a record label who make billions of dollars from it and shares it with a streaming company who also make billions, then there’s some discrepancy here.”
Why The Criticism?
The whole thing started when Lars Ulrich showed up to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Napster’s copyright infringement in 2000. That started a big legal fight that ended with Napster losing. They had to take all the Metallica songs down in just three days because of a court order.
Even after that, Napster got hit with more legal stuff and ended up going bankrupt a few months later.
Even though Metallica won in court, Napster got tons of attention. As a result, Metallica faced criticism and was labeled as outdated keeping young people from accessing their music.
Ulrich Had More Comments About Leaking
Seven years after the case, Ulrich said a few words about their then-new record ‘Death Magnetic.’ He said if the album were to be leaked, he wouldn’t care because they were already ten days away from its release:
“Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.”
More recently, the drummer discussed the possibility of a leak of their latest record, ’72 Seasons.’ Apparently, Lars thought it would be leaked. But the unexpected happened: Although they are the biggest metal band now, not even a single picture or a song was leaked from the album. Ulrich said during an interview:
“We thought for sure this thing would leak. It hasn’t f*cking leaked.”
The reason? They never said a word about a new record right until the moment it was released.
Now that it’s officially out, you can hear ’72 Seasons’ below.