Corey Taylor: “Lars Ulrich was right about Napster”

Back in 2000, Metallica copped an awful lot of shit for more or less grassing up their own fans over illegally downloading and distributing their music on file-sharing service Napster. Drummer Lars Ulrich has admitted that it made him “the most hated man in rock'n'roll”, but has also stuck by it, saying that this new world of digital music was something artists and labels needed to get on top of.

Now Corey Taylor has agreed that, despite the look of the thing, Metallica actually made a very good point. Speaking with Jackass star Steve-O on his Wild Ride! With Steve-O podcast, the Slipknot vocalist recalled (via Blabbermouth), "I remember everyone giving him so much shit ’cause of that, and he was so right on so many fucking levels, dude."

Read this: Metallica vs. Napster: The lawsuit that redefined how we listen to music

Looking at it in the context of current streaming operations and how they compensate artists, he continued, "It's scary. And I wonder how many people look back and eat a little crow because of that. ’Cause [Lars] knew – he knew that this was the direction we were going."

When asked for his thoughts on the current business models for streaming, Corey, naturally, had some opinions.

"It's kind of weird, it's kind of hard, because in this day and age, it's really hard to know which ones of the fucking streaming services actually compensate the artists that they're ripping off," he pondered. "It's more important for me that people listen to the music. At this point, I've kind of made peace with the fact that there are various services who are just kind of screwing us, and until the legislation is actually enforced, which they passed under Trump – which I couldn't fucking believe – they'll keep charging us at that rate. But they've appealed that legislation. I don't think the appeals will actually go through. They will raise the rates, and musicians will be able to make a living off their recordings again."

Check out the full interview below:

Talking of recordings, Slipknot have been getting creative working on the follow-up to We Are Not Your Kind during the pandemic, according to Shawn 'Clown' Crahan.

“Right now, the pandemic hit, and it made me creative,” he revealed recently. "And if anybody’s mad at me for being creative, I don’t know what to say about it. But I know that we can use all of it, or none of it – I don’t care either way. So I will let you know, maybe we will use all of it or none of it – either way, we don’t need to make it confusing. But I will play it until [DJ] Sid Wilson has said what he wants to say, listened to every ounce, been able to take his time. I point him out, because he has not been one of the people yet to be here; that’s gonna happen very soon, as I go into his location, and doing the same thing.”

Though he wouldn’t give too much detail for fear of everyone "bugging” him about it, Clown nevertheless insisted that he was hard at work, "Everybody just needs to know I’m in my basement, with my stuff, doing my thing, with my friends, the way we want to,” he said. "There’s no-one telling us anything… And Corey Taylor has gotten almost all of it and partaken on almost on all of it, which has made it a completely other sort of weird thing. But I’m going on record right now that we could be talking about one song.”

Read this: 10 lesser known Slipknot songs that everyone needs to hear