Lars Ulrich says “nobody knows” what the future holds for the music industry – which he describes as being like “the Wild West.”
The Metallica drummer says the lack of predictability in the music business influences their laissez-faire approach to band activity nowadays.
Ulrich tells MSNBC: “I think you have to sort of accept that nobody really knows where it’s going, so there has to be a lot of impulsive kind of attitudes.
“It’s like a train that’s moving, and you don’t quite know where it’s going, but you sort of try to steer it in the best way you can, realising that it may go in different places that you had no idea.”
He continues: “The music business, or what’s left of it, is very like the Wild West now. 15 years ago, when you put out a record, there was a particular way that you did everything. Now it’s just whatever works for you.”
Speaking of the lead-up to their forthcoming album Hardwired… To Self-Destruct, Ulrich says: “We’re just doing whatever we feel is right. There’s no particular way that it should be.”
Last month, the band admitted that they fear for the future of rock music after they’ve gone. Their manager Peter Mensch also described YouTube as “the devil”, saying the video streaming site is killing the music industry.
In 2000, Ulrich famously took on file-sharing website Napster by hand-delivering a list of more than 300,000 users who, it was claimed, traded Metallica MP3s illegally to the firm’s San Mateo headquarters.
Metallica released a video of their live performance of classic track _For Whom The Bell Tolls_ earlier this week.
(Continue to Next Page for Metallica’s tour dates and “Hardwire… to Self-Destruct” Track list)
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