Metallica Kills Early Reviews of Upcoming Album

Found on Wired on Sunday, 08 June 2008
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The band seemed to have learned somewhat from the dark days of the Napster debacle by offering fans online access to pre-release material and in-studio video footage, but now it has apparently unleashed another potentially damaging fiasco upon itself by forcing bloggers to take down reviews of their upcoming album.

Metallica representatives played the album for The Quietus contributor "Bob Mulhouse" in London last Wednesday, after he did what one would expect: he posted a review on his blog.

Metallica held a listening party for music reviewers and was surprised when some of them wrote reviews? That has to be a public relations first.

It's still unclear why Metallica's management didn't require the reviewers to sign non-disclosure agreements if they didn't want them to write about it.

Ok, it might be understandable if a band wants negative reviews removed (good luck). Removing postive reviews is just dumb. But then, that could be an attempt of being sneaky and cunning by trying to use the Streisand Effect for PR purposes. However, I won't get anything from them; not only isn't it my genre, and since Napster I couldn't care less about them. Even though I never used Napster, it kicked off all the current lawsuit problems against P2P.