MUDVAYNE Singer On Illegal Music Downloading: 'Stealing Is Stealing'

October 16, 2007

MUDVAYNE and HELLYEAH singer Chad Gray recently accepted an offer to contribute a guest entry for the Headbanger's Blog in order to vent about the bane of every recording artist's existence — illegal downloading. An excerpt from the blog follows:

"If I take a bunch of wood and build a chair, and somebody walks up and steals it, no one in their right mind will say that's not theft. There's a lot of work that goes into making a good chair and if that happened to me, people would feel sorry for me and be pissed off at the guy who took it. Yet that exact situation is happening all the time to hard working musicians, and no one seems to care.

"Let's look at it another way: If you want a Diet Coke, you will go into a store and pay money to get it, and then you'll walk out of the store with it in your hand. But if you didn't pay for that Diet Coke, you better know if you walked out that door and that buzzer goes off, you're going to jail. It don't matter if it costs $300 or 30 cents. If you steal something that you're holding in your hand and you get caught, you're going to jail. They don't jack with that crap anymore. Shoplifting is pretty hardcore. They will bust your ass for nothing.

"Yet, I can literally work for months and months and months and put all my creative energy into something, and, I guess, at the end of the day it's just a bunch of 'zeros' and 'ones' to a lot of people. I mean, who are we kidding? Stealing is stealing."

Read the entire blog at this location.

Watch fan-filmed video footage of HELLYEAH performing a cover of QUEEN's "Stone Cold Crazy" on October 6, 2007 at BayFest in Mobile, AL:

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