Coming Soon To Cereal Boxes: Metallica?

With no record contract and all the freedom they could want, one-time Napster-slayers Metallica are kicking around album distribution concepts they've never considered.

Sure, 2008's St. Anger probably made Warner Bros. millions distributed the good old-fashioned way. Nevertheless, drummer Lars Ulrich tells Spin "The world is our oyster."

"We're writing music and we're going to be recording very soon," Ulrich said, some 13 years removed from the outspoken drummer winning some fans' bile for spearheading the movement to shut down Shawn Fanning's premiere P2P file-sharing service Napster and stop piracy of Metallica and other artists' works. "At some point we're going to want to share that with people that are interested in listening to it. So we gotta figure out ways we want to do that, from giving it away in cereal boxes to getting people to do handstands for it. We could come up with something wacky."

Don't get it twisted: Ulrich isn't yet making marketing a second career, exactly. Himself, singer James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo are still making the music itself, not gimmicks, Priority One. Still, here they are, about 30 years into Metallica's existence and ready to get adventurous. They're just not forgetting the people who still buy music in a more traditional fashion in the process, either.

"This whole thing about who can come up with the coolest [release strategy] so it can be written about on 12 different blogs for six hours - I mean sure, that's all pretty cool and hip," Ulrich conceded. "But at the same time you have to remember we have a very global audience. We have fans in Indian and the U.A.E. and Russia. In a lot of these places there are still more conventional ways of getting music to people. We're not just seeling Metallica music to people in Los Angeles, New York and London. We have to think of the whole globe to try to find the right balance."

Nor have priorities yet gotten out of order. They first need something to market, Ulrich explained. Even now, though, they're ignoring what some might consider a beaten path and charging down one they can follow, whether anybody else could do the same or not.

"We're still throwing ideas around," he said. "We work in stages. Some people will write a song from beginning to end in one go. We don't do that. We'll develope, like, 10 ideas and do a couple cycles. We'll do a verse, chorus and maybe an intro, and then we'll leave them and go develope 10 other ideas. So it's a little early yet because we haven't gone back yet and started tweaking anything. Right now we're throwing ideas at the canvas and picking out great riffs."

Actually, right now, the item taking up the most real estate on the band's plate is the upcoming Atlantic City Orion Festival June 23-24.

"Right now we're putting the final touches on a stage that's going to host mostly thrash and punk - kind of extreme stuff," Ulrich reveals. "The whol point is to give people a chance to explore. It's not so much about, 'Okay, I'm going to park msyelf in front of Stage A for the next nine hours.' It becomes continuous movement: 'I'll go into Lars' film tent. I'll go over to Kirk Hammett's surf tent. I'll check out the comedy and the thrash stage.' It's pretty ambitious. We want to make sure it's the best it can be."