My irony meter breaks into the red zone over this story.  It seems Metallica, who notoriously paid back their loyal fans by suing them in 2000 for using Napster, are having a difficult time adjusting to the internet age.  According to BLABBERMOUTH.NET, the Rumpelstiltksin of metal, Lars Ulrich, and his cronies intended to post exclusive recorded material to paying fans (as if they haven't paid enough) on their website, as a promotion to their upcoming LP.

MissionMetallica.com, is scheduled to launch tomorrow and according to Ulrich:

"We thought, instead of doing the usual DVDs and all that, why don't we just do it on the Internet and people can kind of tune in every day, watch clips, contests, get updates for what's going on with the record and kind of watch the last couple of months of song titles, album titles, final mixes...So it's kind of a little bit of a countdown type of thing. It should be fun."

It seems, though, that Metallica failed to purchase the necessary bandwidth and the site, as of this post, is down.  Also, the trailer intended to announce the site has been mysteriously pulled from YouTube.  The lesson being: if you are going to base your business model on Radiohead, you might want to know about the technology that you once tried to stifle.

Although the official Mission Metallica trailer is down, there still this gem from the unintentional humorous documentary, "Some Kind of Monster."