Metallica has a new record coming out. To promote the album, they invited some bloggers to London to listen to tracks from said album. Doing what bloggers do, they immediately wrote about it. And then Metallica did what it does and asked them to all take down their reviews.

There’s no need to get into the history behind this story, as every blogger and their brother has long discussed the band’s role in the takedown of Napster in 2000. But I have to say, Ars Technica has summed it up better than I could ever hope to:

Given all that Metallica has done, said, and been through in the last 20 years, what could they still do that would lead bloggers to ask, “What the hell is wrong with Metallica?”

As someone working in online music marketing, there is only one way to describe my feelings on this.

UPDATE – Looks like we should give Metallica a little more slack than we thought. After getting off their tour in Europe, the band found out their management had quashed early reviews and weren’t too happy.

“Our response was ‘WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record… that makes no sense to us!’”