ANTHRAX Singer Says He Is Against Illegal Music Downloading

ANTHRAX vocalist John Bush recently spoke to Sweden's Metalshrine about his stance on the illegal music-downloading issue. "I think of it as a negative thing," he said. "The reality is that record sales are down, so how is that positive? Anybody who says it positive...why are record sales down? Somebody said record sales are down 40% in Germany. So how is that positive? Bottom line is, stealing is stealing! That's the reality of it and if people are not buying records, then bands are not gonna sell as many records, hence there's gonna be a lot of bands not making records. Because this is people's livelihood. Look, if people see things and hear things and that inspires them to go buy records, that's great. And I'm sure there are some people that do that, but I think there's a lot of people that don't do that. They just say it's free, I'll take it. I'm not gonna buy it! Why am I gonna buy it? It's fifteen bucks! And that's wrong and that's why record sales are down. So anybody who argues it, how could they? The record sales are down! But you know, the companies should have seen this coming. The movie industry is seeing it coming now but they have the fucking break of seeing the record industry take a hit. I don't know! I always praise METALLICA on the whole Napster thing because they didn't have to do that. They've already sold millions of records and made millions of dollars. They didn't have to champion that cause. Who cares if it were them. They did that and it was the right thing to do. They took a lot of shit for it."

When told that it still seems like a lot of artists are totally for being able to share music over the Internet, Bush said, "Well, are those artists selling a lot more records? That's the only question! Are they selling more records than they were, are they? Because nobody is. Nobody is selling the kind of records that they were and anybody who puts out one record and says it, fuck them because they don't know. They have nothing to compare it to. So, somebody that's got a couple of records out can say something. Somebody that put their first record out and says, 'I'm for it!', fuck them — that's what I say, because you need to figure out again...record sales are down. That's all I need to say and if they're down, how is it helping? Sure, it's exposing certain people that maybe you wanna hear about. Baby bands might be affected the best by it. But anybody who puts a real record out, even on an independent [label]...someone distributed it, they're gonna be affected by it. They're going to! Someone who doesn't have a record deal, probably will benefit because they can put their shit up on one of the sites and nobody knows them, so somebody might take a chance on their name and...sounds like a cool name. That could help them, but anybody who has somewhat of a history in the music business and I'm talking about one record, I can't see how they can argue that cause, personally." Read more.