TIL In 2000, Metallica hired a consulting firm to monitor Napster for people illegally sharing their music. The firm produced a 60,000-page list of 335,435 users, which Metallica delivered to Napster's office and demanded the users be banned.

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militant-hippie@reddit

The day I vowed never to purchase their shit again. Still pirated some. Anything after the 90s was shit anyway.

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-threefeetoffun@reddit

I won tickets to see them in Toronto back 2003ish. Refused them. Why I was asked? SARS and Lars.

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NachoNachoDan@reddit

Lars straight up crying in front of a congressional panel about lost album sales revenue was the least metal thing ever

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Mail_Order_Lutefisk@reddit

Second least metal thing ever. Least metal thing ever was Rage Against the Machine requiring everyone to attend their show at Bank of America Center to take a hastily tested Pfizer jabberino.

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Synensys@reddit

Its funny because of course ultimately he was right. In a world where pirating is easy, there will always be a pretty low ceiling on sales.

But then again also he couldnt do anything about (I had come to the same conclusion halfway through a freshmen year research paper on the issue a couple of years earlier when most people handt heard of mp3s yet and people were still downloading individual files off of websites).

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ailish@reddit

Oh no, the multimillionaires were making slightly less money, and most people were still buying CDs because they had no idea how to pirate music, and the vast majority of the money they made was from touring anyway. 🙄

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militant-hippie@reddit

Many bought stuff to support the bands they liked. Early years of internet people might have a bootleg version on their computer but then buy the cd for their cars cd changer. ...or they couldn't afford the albums but would buy other merchandise.

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ailish@reddit

I only pirated stuff if I couldn't afford it, or if there was one good song in an album of 25 songs (if it was a band I was only so-so about). Even today I do my absolute best to pay for as much of the content that I consume as possible, but it's getting really hard because I refuse to have 20 different streaming services. They're getting greedy af, again.

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militant-hippie@reddit

Duckduckgo skips YouTube ads.

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ailish@reddit

I watch YouTube on my TV app not on a computer.

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BasvanS@reddit

If illegal content is way easier and more convenient than legal content, why do they expect to get paid?

And it’s happening again. All streaming apps are going to shit, and they expect me to pay a constantly increasing amount of money for it? I’d expect them to make it easy if they’re asking that much. That’s a form of control they have.

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ailish@reddit

Oh no, the multimillionaires were making slightly less money, and most people were still buying CDs because they had no idea how to pirate music, and the vast majority of the money they made was from touring anyway. 🙄

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

gif

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smuckola@reddit

you mean after the black album

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BasvanS@reddit

My mate got the Black Album as a birthday gift and we laughingly put it in a vice and shot it.

I’d say the Black Album was a bit of an issue in the metal scene.

Perhaps we mellowed out after the even worse stuff, but it’s wasn’t Metallica. Not really

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facesnorth@reddit

Agreed, Justice was the last good album... Black album was the beginning of the end.

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militant-hippie@reddit

Sounds about right

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cheffartsonurfood@reddit

Death Magnetic (2008) was a badass album.

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facesnorth@reddit

poster child for the Loudness wars....

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HotTubSexVirgin22@reddit

I like Hardwired too, pretty much.

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

It was!!

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militant-hippie@reddit

I'll never know. Nor will I take your word for it.

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facesnorth@reddit

* anything after the 80s

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Sodamyte@reddit

That's why they fought so hard against Napster.. they needed the royalties on the old stuff

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militant-hippie@reddit

Well it backfired. Hard.

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GeetarEnthusiast85@reddit

Did it though? They're still an immensely popular stadium act. I remember when they went on their crusade against piracy, they embarked on a very successful stadium tour with Limp Bizkit.

People grumbled but still went to the shows and bought the tunes.

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militant-hippie@reddit

Most did not. And they had to work with Fred. They went from headliner to struggling opening act in under a year. Most people also only recognize the earlier stuff. Yes... yes it did.

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GeetarEnthusiast85@reddit

Metallica became a struggling opening act?

Do you have anything to back that up?

During the Napster years, they had very successful arena/stadium tours whithey headlined

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Sanitarium_Tour

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madly_in_Anger_with_the_World_Tour

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militant-hippie@reddit

You could read the comments in the thread or check anything that isn't Wikipedia. Also, I don't care.

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BasvanS@reddit

You really, really sound exactly like you don’t care.

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GeetarEnthusiast85@reddit

LoL! Of course, of course.

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cheffartsonurfood@reddit

That's the biggest LOAD of shit I ever read. "Struggling opening act".....LMAO!

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builtinamplifier@reddit

They just headlined the Sofi Stadium two nights in a row sold out a year ago...they are doing just fine.

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builtinamplifier@reddit

This not at all true. What really happened is that its almost impossible for the artist to make money while the labels all made deals with spotify and are making record profits.

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laziestmarxist@reddit

That's on the labels and Spotify, not consumers

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builtinamplifier@reddit

Nor did I say it was on the consumers; like not anywhere did I say that where did you even get that from? Never the less, Napster and file sharing is the technology by which the music industry was destroy'd and specifically the artist who weren't already big stars and future artist. So while Metallica did a very horrible job in the way they handled this, they were right that this technology was going to destroy the things we loved about the music industry.

Laziest maxist indeed. Fully read next time.

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cheffartsonurfood@reddit

Yeah it did. Look at them now, in the poor house. Lol.

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Sodamyte@reddit

it sure did

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TiEmEnTi@reddit

They were largely irrelevant in popular culture by the time I reached high school besides as an avatar for "old school metal". I probably knew as many people who only knew them from Beavis's t-shirt and the South Park episode as actually knew their music.

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ElectricPenguin6712@reddit

Same. Got banned and said fuck them forever

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ShotWin8124@reddit

Won't anyone think of the poor rich people!

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pettyvillainy@reddit

You'll never convince me this wasn't 150% Lars.

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AlienDelarge@reddit

I still disluke metallica because of this.

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grantnaps@reddit

Them boys be greedy.

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ElfDestruct@reddit

Resulting in the classic flash animation:

https://archive.org/details/napsterbad_se

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ello_bassard@reddit

I laughed so fucking hard when this first showed up. Can't remember which site, think it was Newgrounds where I originally saw it.

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Bradical_Dutch@reddit

Fuck you Lars!!

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Accurate-Temporary73@reddit

I was banned from Napster for having Metallica MP3s shared

I made a new account and shared everything again and it was fine.

They did a one time ban and never touched it again.

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Apprehensive_Hat8986@reddit

Metallica also sued grandmothers.

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wanderingwoodcarver@reddit

Iron maiden did something similar, except they just used a firm to find out where in the world their music was downloaded the most and then organized tours to go to those places because people clearly wanted to hear them play.

Smart.

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dtisme53@reddit

I knew lots of people on that list and as I recall they did indeed get banned.

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raisedbydogsnhippies@reddit

What a bunch of bitches.

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Solintari@reddit

Especially Lars. He was my idle in middle school and let me down. Imagine being at the peak of your fame, more money than you can dream of spending and being such a whiney bitch about kids downloading music.

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raisedbydogsnhippies@reddit

At that age, I didn't care about metallica enough to steal their music. I thought they were overplayed and overhyped. Why steal music from a band you can hear on the radio three times in an hour? Now that I'm old, I have a better appreciation for the complexity of their music. But they are still so overplayed its really easy to overlook the details in their music.

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Solintari@reddit

All they seemed to play around me were "nothing else matters" and "enter sandman" which were ok, but not their best. I just wanted to listen to master of puppets on my 32 mb rio mp3 player.

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raisedbydogsnhippies@reddit

Here its master of puppets and for whom the bell tolls.

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elphaba00@reddit

"Not a big deal?"

https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/psta8e/south-park-not-a-big-deal

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riomp300@reddit

I want to see if Im on there.

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VampireOnHoyt@reddit

I was

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musical_shares@reddit

Same. I was well past Metallica by 2000 but my idiot friend downloaded Nothing Else Matters on my parents’ computer, getting me banned and sending me into the waiting arms of KaZaA and LimeWire.

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basiden@reddit

Kazaa

gif

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elkniodaphs@reddit

The Cliff Burnstein list.

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Sodamyte@reddit

I'm sure I had several names on there..

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Double-Tradition413@reddit

I knew a limo driver in Boise, who drove them in the 90s and they were absolutely awful human beings. Disgusting and entitled.

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ZeusBruce@reddit

They also tried to flood it with garbage versions of their songs where the first ten seconds were normal and then it had a bunch of clicks and pops and stuff overdubbed on the rest.

Also, nowadays everyone listens to virtually any kind of music for $13/month, where the artists receive almost nothing in compensation, so yay the system works I guess.

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Rendakor@reddit

garbage versions of their songs

So just, regular Metallica songs then?

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ZeusBruce@reddit

Ha! I stand by the first 4 albums to this day

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Sinistas@reddit

I was banned by both Metallica and Dr. Dre. Fun times!

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blove135@reddit

That's right all people remember is Metallica being so against downloading but Dr. Dre also spoke out against downloading music. I guess people forgot about Dre.

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Primary-Performer853@reddit

I mean, the guy stood next to a burnt down house... with a can full of gas and a handful of matches, still no one found out. I think motherfuckers just act like they forgot about Dre.

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Sinistas@reddit

Oh, you!

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AnswerGuy301@reddit

He wasn't wrong, legally or ethically speaking. But technology changes things, often in ways that the legal system only has so much power to deal with.

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DontYuckMyYum@reddit

I was one of those users. was a big Metallica fan before that, bought all their records and some shirts, but haven't bought any of their stuff since they pulled this shit.

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SeekingNoTruth@reddit

I'm definitely on that list. I was in college at the time and downloaded their entire available discography via Napster.

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have1dog@reddit

For years I was like “those bastards!.”

Then after being a professional musician for a while, I totally get it.

People were upset because they got banned for stealing someone else’s hard work.

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mtron32@reddit

That was my thought back when it went down, I never got all the hate they were getting.

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Fluid_Change_9647@reddit

I owned all of their CDs and still downloaded their music just to have it on my computer. I never bought anything else of theirs after the Napster bs

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Sunsfever83@reddit

I remember that time. It was the time metallica went from heavy metal to sell outs. They showed everyone what they thought of their fans.

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Mysterious_Ayytee@reddit

Metallica sucks and I say this as a metalhead for 30 years who owns all of their CDs until '99

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R005TER_85@reddit

Napster was the beginning of the insane concert ticketing prices…artists now have to rely more on touring for revenue than album sales.

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youreusingyourwrong@reddit

Yeah, fuck those guys.

Corporate rock sucks.

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taleofbenji@reddit

Big time boomer move

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zombielunch@reddit

Yeah, they instantly lost me as a fan. A big part of Metallica's success was them doing metal cover songs from other bands. But God help their fans wanted to burn a song onto a mix cd for a car ride.

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Freudianslip1987@reddit

They got popular by fans recording there concerts and passing them around. One of my neighbors had a pirated vhs I saw as kid

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crackedtooth163@reddit

I will never forgive them. Ever.

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Freudianslip1987@reddit

Don't you remember even south park made fun of them in the episode moop. Lars had to wait for a gold poolside shark tank

https://i.redd.it/hzwjro1mdevg1.gif

because of Napster

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TheN1ck@reddit

I was actually banned from Napster because of this.

I found out a few months later the ban was actually just a registry entry on my PC and unbanned myself.

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builtinamplifier@reddit

Given the shambles that the music industry and musicians are in post Napster/Death of CDs, turns out they were right. Went about it in a terrible way but the legacy of Napster is that it gave studios a way to get around paying artist, kill music video budgets, all while still making tremendous amounts of money.

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LoudAd1396@reddit

I definitely shared Metallica on Napster in 2000, and I was never banned. I remember them being huge dicks about it though!

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ADMotti@reddit

And then, worst of all, they released St. Anger.

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-threefeetoffun@reddit

Fire bad! Fire bad!

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Bob-Dolemite@reddit

NAPSTER BAD

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Rich-Truth5329@reddit

James blew up for you! He exploded into a fiery inferno for you people!

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Bob-Dolemite@reddit

fuck metallica

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Rurumo666@reddit

Metallica was always studio music for posers.

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I_Lick_Your_Butt@reddit

My roommate downloaded Metallica using my computer and got me banned. I was furious since I owned all their albums.

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

Metallica's stance in this was right and wrong at the same time. Right, as in stealing the music ultimately cheapened (litetally) the artform. Wrong, as it was the record companies pushing hack "artists" to the stop so song after the artistic revival of the early to mid 90s.

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Moxie_Stardust@reddit

It's also interesting given that part of how they got their start back in the day was through the tape trading scene.

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

When the poor and struggling become rich, they act like the rich!

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the_kid1234@reddit

You’re not wrong Lars, you’re just an asshole!

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HotTubSexVirgin22@reddit

In reading “Where Are Your Boys Tonight,” music sharing was the way most emo bands were getting discovered. Someone told you about them, you found their MySpace, then downloaded music that they “leaked” on purpose. They (Taking Back Sunday, FOB, My Chem, Dashboard Confessional, etc) said they kept being blown away when they showed up in new towns and somehow everyone already knew the words.

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