Metallica: ‘Bands could buy our leftover riffs. We have spares…’

Lars Ulrich says Metallica have discussed making riffs left unused after each album recording session available for other bands to pick via an eBay-style website.

The drummer revealed the idea speaking to The National in Abu Dhabi where he also insists the legendary metallers are not avoiding making another record.

He says: “We have more riffs than we know what to do with. We talked about setting up a special riff thing, where maybe we could share some of these riffs with others, like an eBay kind of thing for leftover riffs. Some of them are actually quite decent, but we won’t be able to use all of them.”

(It’s not the first time a similar idea has been suggested: Classic Rock reported in February this year that Tony Iommi and Brian May had a similar project in the pipeline. May had visited Iommi’s studio and discovered a huge catalogue of unused material. “I thought it would be great to make a compilation out of them,” said the Queen guitarist. “The idea was to put all these riffs out in some form so people could build their own songs of them. You could make your own music with Tony Iommi on guitar.”)

Lars Ulrich, meanwhile, dismissed suggestions that Metallica were leaving too long between new albums.

“We’ll always make another record,” he said. “We’re certainly not avoiding making another record. We’ve been fiddling around a little bit when we have a week here, a week there, but we realized the other day that this (Through The Never) movie will take up realistically the next four or five months. But I hope we will get to another record when this movie is over.”

Ulrich also explains it is a love of the band which has helped fuel their longevity. He adds: “Somewhere along the line we learnt to get along and somewhere along the line we learnt we’d rather be in Metallica than not be in Metallica. I think we have tremendous respect for whatever it is Metallica means.

“I’ve never known anything else. This is the only band I’ve ever been in, since I was 17. So ultimately, you want it to survive, and you figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and what’s best for the band. Somewhere along, you just figure it out and you pray you have more good days than not.”

source: classicrockmagazine.com

Metallica launch movie trailer

Metallica have released a trailer for upcoming 3D movie Through The Never. View it below.

The film stars Dan DeHaan as young roadie Trip, who’s sent on an errand ahead of a Metallica show and finds himself in a strange parallel universe.

The thrash giants wanted to make a concert movie like no other before it – and drummer Lars Ulrich believes they’ve achieved that, with the help of director Nimrod Antal.

Ulrich tells I Am Rogue: “When Metallica does these things we have a tendency to jump forward and we don’t plan things through. We need people who are willing to take those jumps, don’t ask too many questions and are ready to go along for the ride. Nimrod went for it. I spoke to a lot of people in Hollywood about what kind of partner we needed and Nimrod was the first one who bought into it.

“We wanted to do a different take on a concert film. We figured one way of doing that, a movie we’d never seen before, was to have a concert and a narrative and to have those worlds interweave. You follow him closely and you follow the concert and it unwinds in real time. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and we’re very proud of that.”

Actor DeHaan – who lent his name to Metallica for a recent secret set – shares Ulrich’s views. He says: “I pretty much have to go through hell and back, and all of this is going on during the concert, so it all ties together really beautifully and uniquely. It’s unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before. It’s almost like a concert movie meets The Wall meets Metallica.”

Metallica Through The Never opens in cinemas in September.

source: classicrockmagazine.com

Spotify Rolls Out New Social Features With Frank Ocean, Metallica

When Spotify has something to say, they do it in style – so much so that the company's big news today was in danger of being overshadowed by Q&As with Glassnote Records CEO Daniel Glass, Napster founder (and Spotify investor) Sean Parker and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, as well as Frank Ocean performing his song "Pyramids."

But what CEO Daniel Ek had up his sleeve was just as flashy as what he brought out to the stage – namely, a redesign of the music-sharing platform complete with new features that highlight Ek's favorite buzzword: discovery.

The State of Streaming Music

The revamped platform, expected to launch early next year, will feature three new tabs on its main player that will put many of the different apps and aspects of Spotify directly on the user's front page. The "Discover" tab aims to recommend music the same way you would if you were telling a friend, with a few suggestions with a ton of context, rather than a long list of "related artists." The "Discover" tab will comecomplete with reviews culled from the music press, a full bio and photo, recommended upcoming performances and other songs.

Users can save an artist or track they've come across in "Collection," a second new tab that accounts for everything a person has listened to, and acts more as a folder for keeping track of music than the Spotify playlists do currently. A third new tab, "Follow," allows users to connect with friends or anyone else who can recommend music, and provides a platform for listeners and artists to share playlists with their followers.

During the Q&As, Glass talked about the reaction to Mumford & Sons' Babel, which just scored the band six Grammy nominations. With Babel debuting at Number One with 600,000 albums sold in its first week and breaking Spotify records for most streams in a week, the album became an example that streaming services don't cannibalize album sales. Glass also pointed out that streaming revenue is becoming significant.

"You have to play in the marathon game," he said. "It's about the long run of artist development."

Ulrich and Parker represented a reunion of the two most public figures in the Metallica-Napster copyright battle in the late 1990s. The two play nice these days – Metallica announced today they are putting their music on Spotify –  but it wasn't always that way.

"We just wanted to control what was going on with our music, because that's what we'd always done," said Ulrich, explaining his band's position at the time. "It became Metallica against its fans, which was never the fucking point."

The band is getting on the Spotify bandwagon now. "With the kind of global reach that [Spotify] had, we were ready to jump in as soon as we took control of our own masters," he said. Ek compared Metallica's early bootlegging days with what Spotify is doing now. "It's kind of like tape sharing, but on crack," he said.

source: rollingstone.com

Metallica Announce First-Ever Orion Music Fest

Arctic Monkeys, Modest Mouse, Gaslight Anthem among other acts on June festival lineup.

They've headlined stadiums around the world and made an incredibly polarizing album with punk grandfather Lou Reed. So what's left for Metallica to do to cap off a stellar year? How about launch their own summer festival with a lineup that includes some of their favorite bands?



On Tuesday (February 7), the group announced the debut of the Orion Music + More fest, described as an annual "music, arts and lifestyle" gathering that will feature multiple stages and take place June 23-24 at Bader Field in Atlantic City, New Jersey.


In addition to headlining sets from Metallica each day — during which they will play The Black Album one night and Ride the Lightning the other in their only North American performances of those classic releases in 2012 — the festival will also feature sets from: Arctic Monkeys, Avenged Sevenfold, Modest Mouse, the Gaslight Anthem, Cage the Elephant, F---ed Up, Best Coast, Hot Snakes, Titus Andronicus, Gary Clark Jr., Lucero, Roky Erickson, the Black Angels, the Sword and Liturgy. More bands will be announced in the coming weeks.

"We've had the idea of doing our own lifestyle festival with lots of diverse music and fun and games for years," drummer Lars Ulrich said in a press release announcing the event. "Finally this year all the practical ducks lined up in a row, and we are beyond psyched to bring Orion to our fans, friends and the curious. After the most incredible of weeks ever in December 2011 celebrating our 30th anniversary at the Fillmore in San Francisco, CA, bringing the spirit of that week, the looseness of that week, the possibilities of that week, the fan interactive elements of that week, and the (fill in your own blank here) of that week to a festival setting is so exciting we can hardly contain ourselves."

Pre-sale tickets for the Metallica fan club start Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET, with the public on-sale slated to begin Saturday. Tickets are $150 for two-day passes for the public and $125 for fan-club members. Head to OrionMusicAndMore.com for details.

source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1678721/metallica-orion-festival.jhtml