While it’s a foregone conclusion that labels are bleeding money as bands and artists struggle to make a dollar, the great edifices of rock and roll — your U2s, your Chili Peppers, and your Metallicas — are assuredly still rolling in the bucks.
While each band’s output has certainly slowed down in recent years, they have a lucrative back catalog, huge concert attendance numbers, and an endless list of investments and side-businesses to ensure they’re not going broke anytime soon.
At least, that’s what we all think, right? But according to Paul Brannigan and Ian Westwood, authors of the comprehensive Metallica biography Into the Black, “Since 2010 it’s likely that Metallica have lost more money than they’ve made.”
Speaking recently to The Weeklings, Brannigan and Westwood explain how one of the world’s biggest bands and metal’s biggest superstars came to be in a situation where they’re effectively forced to tour Europe every summer, and it has nothing to do with the economy.
“Well, over the past five years Metallica have embarked upon a variety of vanity projects that haven’t exactly brought home the bacon,” say the authors. “By their own admission, the two stagings of the Orion festival were disastrous financially.”
“And the shambles that was the Through The Never movie cost $32 million and will only recoup a fraction of that amount,” they continue. One also has to account for the logistical costs of “maintaining an entertainment corporation” the way Metallica do.
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“No one is going to shed any tears upon hearing Metallica pleading poverty,” the authors state, to the rebuttals of absolutely no one, “but over the past decade their margins will undoubtedly have taken a hammering.”
When asked to name Metallica’s “single biggest blunder”, the authors were quick to name Through The Never, the band’s extravagant 2013 concert film, as one of the band’s most significant missteps, highlighting what they call the band’s “bloody-mindedness”.
“There’s a line from ‘Damage Inc.’ on Master of Puppets which runs “Honesty is my only excuse…“, and many of what outsiders might regard as Metallica’s missteps, if not outright mistakes… have stemmed from their own bloody-mindedness.”
It’s this stubbornly disposition that not only spearheaded Lars Ulrich’s “bullish” pursuit of Napster in the late ’90s, but vanity projects like Lulu, their much-maligned collaboration with Lou Reed, and Through The Never.
“It’s hard to fault a band that (largely) operates on such principles however, so I’d be loathe to label these decisions as ‘blunders,’” say the authors. “When Metallica mistrust their own instincts however, they falter, and increasingly in recent years that’s made them look at best infallible and at worst dishonest.”
“The whole Through The Never film project was a horrible misjudgement, a misguided attempt to breathe new life into a decade-old idea. As the film spiraled horribly over-budget it’s hard not to imagine that at least one band member… thinking, ‘What the fuck have we got ourselves into?’”
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However, it’s important to note, as Brannigan and Westwood do, that if it wasn’t for the band’s cockiness and brash nature, encapsulated most potently in drummer Lars Ulrich, Metallica would not be the colossus that they are today.
“Had they kicked Lars out in 1986, they’d have imploded long before now,” the two authors acknowledge. “It’s unquestionably his drive, his vision, his utter inability to know his ‘rightful’ place that pushed Metallica into the big league.”
“It’s Lars that keeps pushing Metallica on, even now: he’s been the engine from day one. James, Cliff and Kirk would still be making music, but not together, and not with the eyes of three generations of metal fans upon them.”
