DAMAGEPLAN Singer Talks About Illegal Music Downloading

DAMAGEPLAN frontman Patrick Lachman recently gave an interview to the DAMAGEPLAN fan site DamageplanFan.com about the group's touring activities, the band's debut album and the possibility of him playing guitar on the group's next CD. Asked for his opinion on music downloading and the Internet's role in rock music today, he said, "I think it's a two-edged sword. As far as new bands, it gives them an opportunity to reach so many more people than they would normally would sitting around in their hometown or whatever, and that's the same thing with file-sharing and downloading, you know, you can print up a demo tape or a demo CD and pass mouth to everybody in your neighborhood, and you know, kinda reach somebody in Australia or whatever, so it gives a fledgling band a lot of exposure in a very convenient way. Now big bands like METALLICA, OK, yeah, maybe it does pull some money out of their pocket because, you know, people would rather download it, but I think they can afford to take the loss at this point. To something like DAMAGEPLAN, I'm still undecided on it, it gives a lot of people an opportunity to hear it, before it comes out, when people bootleg and stuff like that, and then maybe takes a little bit of the impact away, takes some of the surprise or the excitement in a way. I think when it comes down to it, it's really the same thing as when cassettes first came out and when CDs came out, everybody thought, 'Oh no, you're gonna be able to buy it and make infinite copies.' Oh well, you can still do that anyway, it hasn't changed anything. And the hardcore fans will always be the first ones to buy the album, be the first ones to buy the tickets, be the first ones to buy the t-shirts... When you download, you don't get the pictures and the lyrics, sure you can eventually track all that stuff down and then sit there with your laser printer and make your fake insert but, you know, what's the point? . . . I think probably the biggest debate is, it's a way... it's a forum for just about anybody to state their opinion, and too many people interpret that the wrong way. There's a small group of people that sit there and bash on it, and it'd be easy for an outsider to just, not even be posting or anything, just reading any member of a particular site and think, 'Oh no, it sucks, because there's 20 people in here that hate it.' meanwhile there's 20,000 out there that love it ..(laughs)... but don't bother to get on the net, you know what I mean? So as an artist, I have to sort of ignore that shit a lot of times. I like to read the positive messages for sure."

Read Patrick Lachman's entire interview with DamageplanFan.com at this location. Audio of the interview can be downloaded here (1 MB).