Metal giants Metallica have partnered with interactive music tuition company Yousician to offer an online course where fans will be taught how to play 10 of the band’s most famous songs by the band members themselves.
It’s a major undertaking and, of course, is not being offered for free. The band, as their entanglements with the original Napster proved, like to get paid, so the lessons are part of a wider Yousician subscription that costs £119.99 a year (currently discounted to £83.99) for a single user.
“The best way to play like us,” says guitarist and lead singer James Hetfield in the promo video, “is to play with us.”
Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammet will break down the riffs and solos in 10 Metallica songs, including ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Nothing Else Matters’, ‘One’ and ‘Master Of Puppets’.
There are two major selling points here to elevate this above the many licensed tuition platforms (including ones from Gibson and Fender) and unlicensed YouTube tutorials out there: firstly, it features the musicians who actually wrote and performed the music so that what students are shown will be correct; and secondly, Yousician is built on AI technology so it can give real-time feedback (no, not that kind) on how well, or how badly, someone is playing along.
Those who are long enough in the tooth will perhaps recall Now Play It, which attempted to do something similar back in 2007. It was backed by EMI and had EMI-affiliated artists, like KT Tunstall and Graham Coxon of Blur, run through some of their best-known songs. It was perhaps a bit too early for the market – and was selling individual lessons rather than rolling them into a subscription – so it never really took off and was quietly mothballed.
Two decades ago, Metallica were castigated as Luddites when they became the public face of the industry war on online piracy. They were also slow to license to streaming services (taking until 2012 to get on Spotify). While the Yousician deal is aimed at a particular subset of their audience (those wanting to learn guitar), it does show they are moving with the times.
