Thursday, June 12, 2008

Metallica Pointing Fingers at Management Company

Metallica has issued a statement that questions the actions of their management company regarding the censoring of blogs that posted negative reviews of the bands latest rough tracks.

The band stated that "...after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites. Our response was 'WHY?!!' "

According to the Globe and Mail's Mathew Ingram: the band (or rather, its management) set up a "listening party" with prominent music bloggers, including the staff of UK music site The Quietus, and played them early versions of tracks from the upcoming album (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.

Now the band, who infamously sued digital music trader Napster back a few years ago, must know the answer to why their management company told those bloggers to take those negative reviews off their sites: it's because the band must have wanted that way. And now that they got negative feedback for it, they are directing blame to their management.

Boneheads...the lot of them!
Read the arstechnica.com story

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