Metallica’s Lars Ulrich Calls Guitar Hero the “New Model For The Music Industry.” Lars Ulrich is Wrong (Again).

“It seemed like the next step — a whole other platform for musicians to reach an audience. If we talk about this in five years, I think it will turn into an expected way to release an album,” Ulrich said.

No Lars, it won’t. It’s a good way to release a single or two like Rise Against and Bruce Springsteen have, but entire albums from every artist being channeled through Guitar Hero or Rock Band is just asinine.

Guitar Hero is a game played by kids, drunken college students and people who like to pretend they play guitar. It’s not the next iTunes or AmazonMp3 and as for a “new model for the music industry,” you must not know how industry models work. For Guitar Hero to work as a new way for your flailing industry to make money, it would need to tab out and release every song by every artists that’s coming out and have a sufficient amount skip the developers and go right back into artists’ hands which frankly isn’t going to happen. It takes too much to pay the artists and too much to pay the developers for them to charge a small fee to the game’s users and still have both the artists and the developers make their fair share.

I can’t exactly speak on how the money works between the artists and the developers making Guitar Hero and Rock Band but I imagine that it goes a little something like this:

Developer: “Hey Metallica, we’ll give you this amount of money to record your songs for our game.”

Metallica: “OK.”

Sure if the money was based on individual downloading than the money changing hands would be a bit different but for Ulrich to think that in five years Guitar Hero will resemble iTunes, that’s a little crazy.

First, Xbox Live would have to figure out that Microsoft Points would need to correspond to some kind of dollar amount that’s easy to calculate and second, enough bands would have to back this effort (with enough incentives coming back to their side) to begin to put out whole albums through Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii (another very, very tall order). Sorry Lars, this ain’t gonna happen.

Frankly, you’re not the best person to be speculating about the music industry. Didn’t you guys keep your music off of iTunes because you didn’t sell individual songs or something along those lines? But when iTunes became one of the top music retailers in the United States and Metallica realized that it wasn’t just a fad, you hopped right on board going, “Helllllo iTunes!”

Frankly Lars, you know nothing about the music industry other than the fact that you somehow make money from playing music. That’s all you get. You play drums, they give you money. Stick to that and stop spewing your retarded notions about “what’s coming next” because you have no god damned idea.

  1. zackshapiro posted this