Popular Music Online

(Photo Source:TheAge)

Metallica, one of the crusaders against online music file sharing, have announced that they might follow Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead in releasing tracks for free over the internet. Metallica were one of the first bands to sue people for copyright infringement and attracted scorn from internet users for helping shut down the peer-to-peer downloading tool Napster. Before Napster’s demise the band was among the most vocal critics of file sharing. Its drummer, Lars Ulrich, famously showed up at Napster’s headquarters in 2000 brandishing the screen names of 335,000 people the band said had been illegally downloading its songs, demanding the company block those users. But the industry has changed in the past eight years. Bands and record labels long ignored the threat of the internet and for a time refused to experiment with online distribution. But with physical CD sales in persistent decline and legal music downloads only partly making up for the lost revenue, the music industry is frantically searching for a new business model.