Dethklok’s Brendon Small: “Lars Was Correct” About Napster and Streaming
In a new interview discussing Dethklok‘s latest release Dethalbum IV and the new movie, Metalocalypse: Army Of The Doomstar, Dethklok mastermind and Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small was asked about the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes currently going on. Small expressed his support for those on strike, drawing a parallel between their actions and Metallica‘s protest of file sharing in the 2000s.
“Do you know what this time feels like to me? This is like when Napster started 20, 25 years ago and there was file-sharing. Everyone was like, ‘What happened?’ except for Lars [Ulrich]. It reminds me of, ‘Oh man. I wish musicians could have gotten together and moved the needle the way actors and writers are.’ Everything could go away. Corporations aren’t known to be sensitive to all these things. They have to be told to negotiate. That’s what Napster and Spotify could have been. Music would stop being promotional. People had to leave the business years ago and get different jobs. Everything stopped, including the monetization of music. The same thing is happening right now. The streaming world is different from the legacy TV world where I started.”
The Blabbermouth interviewer recalls that Ulrich and Metallica literally printed out the names of hundreds of thousands of Napster users who downloaded at-the-time unreleased single “I Disappear.” Small says Ulrich would probably do it differently now, but he was right.
“He was correct. I’m sure he wouldn’t go to Congress and name names if he had a time machine. He would probably say there’s a better way to do it since it was terrifying to those people. When I grew up, you’d tape people’s tapes because you couldn’t afford something. But when I did have money, I remember saving money, making up a plan, going to a record store with perfect change, adding in the tax and pledging my allegiance to Guns N’ Roses.”
Anyone who follows music blogs or magazines knows the effect Spotify has had on payouts. Maybe Small and Ulrich are right, but is there any way to put Pandora back in the box?
