This person wrote to me and said, It s great your work s online, because it promotes it all the more. Elizabeth Brooks, vice president of Napster, sees no reason for artists like Rimbaud to be worried. Regarding Napster downloads alleged cutting into record sales, Brooks says, I haven t seen any evidence that speaks to that. I ve seen the promotional benefits of the Internet, notes Brooks, but I ve never seen documentation of any damage to record sales. The industry s very healthy right now.
Online sales are up.
Offline sales are up. While the band filed a lawsuit against the company in May, they also released a statement that their concern is the unauthorized trading of commercially sold master recordings, not the swapping of otherwise-unavailable live bootlegs that they ve allowed fans to trade freely for years. In the past, Metallica have also lent implicit support to re-contextualizing uses of their work. Canadian collagist John Oswald has been rearranging Metallica music in various Plunderphonics projects since 1989, first without the band s knowledge, but eventually with their approval. Although his first Metallica reconstruction, a piece called Net from 1989 s Plunderphonic, was done without the band s involvement or consent, Oswald was soon working in cahoots with their label, Elektra Records.