RICHMOND, Va. — In the music business, they still talk about the “Lars curse.”

It has been 13 years since Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, identified the screen names of more than 300,000 Napster users in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The tarring he received in response — being derided as greedy and insensitive to fans — still makes musicians think twice before complaining about the problems with digital music.

But it hasn’t stopped David Lowery.

As the leader of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, Mr. Lowery had a modicum of fame in the 1980s and ’90s. But over the last year, he has become a celebrity among musicians for speaking out about artists’ shrinking paychecks and the influence of Silicon Valley over copyright, economics and public discourse.

In public appearances and no-holds-barred blog posts, Mr. Lowery, 53, has come to represent the anger of musicians in the digital age. When an NPR Music intern confessed in a blog post last year that she paid very little for her music, he scolded her in a 3,800-word open letter that framed the issue in moral terms. Since then, he has attacked Pandora for trying to lower royalty rates, accused Google of masterminding a broad anti-copyright campaign and compared people who doubt the effect of piracy on musicians to those who think President Obama is a Muslim.

“Once the cobra bit me, I might as well just eat the cobra,” Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview at his home here. “Nothing worse can happen to me.”