Four short years ago, rock band Metallica angered part of its fan base by going after downloaders who used the online file-trading service Napster. At that time, the band provided Napster with the screen names of 335,000 users reputed to be pirating Metallica's music, and demanded they be removed from the service. The group was also the first to sue the fledgling company.Metallica fans called for a boycott of the band's music and it was the beginning of the end for Napster, which was eventually squashed and has been reborn as a pay-for-music service. Metallica will now try to clear its anti-Internet karma by putting a wealth of new music files online via an authorized service.Last week, the band revealed that it has entered into agreements with digital media distributors nugs.net and CinemaNow to make concert recordings from its new tour available for download. As part of the agreement, Metallica claims, its fans will be able to download audio of entire shows from each stop on the first leg of its North American tour "within days of the band's performance."
Here's the part that audiophiles will find interesting: the unedited soundboard recordings of all shows will be released not only as standard low-rez MP3 files, but also as higher resolution "Free Lossless Audio Codec" (FLAC) files via a high-bandwidth delivery system using CinemaNow's "PatchBay" technology.The announcement also offers a glimpse of possible future pricing models for offering high-quality audio online as an alternative to the typical low-rez one-size-fits-all audio files currently selling via iTunes and Rhapsody. The cost for each two-plus hour show is $9.95 for MP3s and $12.95 for higher-quality FLAC files. These are the same prices currently offered on similar live music services such as Phish's LivePhish.com and LiveDownloads.com, which features The String
Cheese Incident and other bands.Metallica has also attempted to bypass the online format war brewing between iTunes' AAC coded files and Microsoft's WMA files by choosing MP3 and FLAC. Both formats are compatible with Windows, Mac, and Unix operating systems and once downloaded, can be burned to disc, transferred to portable players, or played through a computer. The band adds that each show also comes with printable booklets, tray inlays, and labels for fans who elect to burn the files to CD.
Metallica's Lars Ulrich notes, "This is the next logical step in a process that began back in 1991 when we first implemented the 'Taper Section' at our shows, where the fans were encouraged to bring in their own gear to record the show, and then take home their very own 'bootleg' of the concert they had just seen. This technology will enable our fans to get the best possible recording of the show, without having to hold a microphone in the air for the entire night!"And, as an added bonus, the band now gets paid for what was once free.
