THE STRANGLERS - CORNWELL FUMES AT DOWNLOAD LAWSUITS

CORNWELL FUMES AT DOWNLOAD LAWSUITS

Former THE STRANGLERS frontman HUGH CORNWELL is still an angry punk at heart - he is waging war on mega-rich record bosses who target illegal downloading.
The Golden Brown singer has stood up for music fans who "steal" records on the internet, and branded rock giants Metallica "silly" for their notorious lawsuit against file-sharing website Napster.
Cornwell, whose new solo album Hoover Dam is available to download free via his website, insists record-buyers are "ripped off" by the price of CDs and urges them to grab albums for free on the web.
He tells WENN, "The internet is the perfect delivery system for music, so why not use it? I don't see it as being exploited at all - I think we are exploiting the internet.
"I think you have just got to find more ingenious ways of generating a living than by ripping people off, charging them GBP15 for an album that they can get for free. It just means people aren't being ripped off any more.
"To physically print up a CD it costs about 50p. It you're charging GBP15 for it, that's a huge profit margin. It just means that all these years, people have been ripped off."
Referring to Metallica's 2000 legal action against Napster, Cornwell fumed: "It's silly. Come on! It's hysteria. You have got to grow up and move forward. They can't exactly need the money, can they?"