Gene Simmons On Piracy: 'Fans Killed Music', KISS Bassist Likens Pirates To Nazis And Calls Everyone A 'Capitalist Pig'!

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Gene Simmons is back again with some new anti-piracy comments!

Gene Simmons is well-known for being against piracy and he has some memorable quotes about it, such as blaming the fans for "killing music", wishing that everyone at Napster had been thrown in jail and then forced into work as the "Allies did with the Nazis" and suggesting that a "Great Wall of China" should have been built around music with everyone daring to pass being sued.

Last 2008 he said that children should be harshly punished for obtaining songs for free, noting that "Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth."

Later that year he was talking openly about the so-called death of the music industry.

"It's six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this."

It's now 2014 and when asked about piracy and the "death of the music industry" he still says the same thing, blaming the fans for "killing music".

"I still think it's a crime," he says in his interview Metal Hammer magazine.

"The sad part is that the fans are the ones who are killing the thing that they love: great music. For fuck's sake, you're not giving the next band a chance."

"Record labels should have stood together and made the Great Wall of China [around music] and sued anybody who transgressed," he explains.

Talking about Napster's creators, Gene Simmons says they shouldn't have been allowed to walk away. He believes they should have been "bitch slapped", sent to jail and put to work for the government, likening pirates to Nazis.

"They should have bitch-slapped them," he says. "Gone down with the FBI, seized everything and put everyone in jail. But then they should have done what the Allies did with the Nazis: made them work for us."

While Simmons regularly talks about the death of music at the hands of piracy, it seems to come down to how much the band has lost to illegal downloading.

"It's certainly millions. I don't think it's tens of millions, but certainly millions," he says, adding with a smile that the band does very well indeed from licensing and merchandising.

To have lost millions to piracy suggests that many more millions have been made and there can be little doubt that KISS have done extremely well financially after selling 100 million albums. But for Simmons there's something that we all have to accept - every one of us is "a capitalist pig."

After admitting that he himself was a "capitalist pig" he said that everyone is the same as him.

"And this is the essence of what unites us all. We all want more. There's no such thing as never enough. It's a harsh truth," he says. "I want to make as much money as possible and then make some more. My conviction is that everyone is just like me.".

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