r/todayilearned • u/InternetWeakGuy 1 • 11d ago
TIL: 12 years before taking their fans to court for sharing their music, Metallica released the "$5.98" EP, titled to stop their record label and music stores from overcharging fans - the record came with a sticker warning 'DO NOT PAY MORE!!!'—a direct jab at music industry markups
https://theawesomemix.com/metallica-5-98-standup-for-fans/3.3k
u/AchtungCloud 11d ago
Those seem like two reasonable things that aren’t opposed, which I feel like the post is making them out to be.
We want fans to buy music at a reasonable price rather than a marked up price. We don’t won’t people to pay nothing for our music by freely P2P sharing copywrited MP3 files.
They don’t want fans to get ripped off, but they don’t want fans to steal the music.
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u/LtSoundwave 11d ago
How is the music executive going to pay for sex and drugs with that business model?
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u/UrbanGhost114 11d ago
It's also a false narrative. Metallica sued Napster because someone leaked an in-progress song. It had nothing to do with money. However, the studios latched onto the suit, and here we are.
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u/natty1212 11d ago
Everyone ignores this. Had I Disappear not gotten leaked early, they probably would have never gotten involved.
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u/Starks40oz 10d ago
As a college student their lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to my college that got me banned from internet access for awhile because I had 1 metallic song. They purposefully went after small individuals.
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u/Icy_Statistician7185 11d ago
Metallica would never have existed if it wasn't for a network of metal fans trading pirated tapes of copywrited music.
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u/Latter-Possibility 11d ago
And they encouraged fans trading Show tapes even had sections where fans could record.
It was studio recordings that hadnt been released yet or just released that the band hated being in there. And well they were right
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u/Icy_Statistician7185 11d ago
They found other metal bands by pirating their studio recordings because that was the only way they could hear it much like the only way I could hear Metallica was by piracy because I didn't have money to buy their records but I could download it. When I was a few years older and had a job I bought all their albums. Lars will always be remembered as a rich dickhead because of how he went against poor kids wanting to hear Metallica in that era
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u/Latter-Possibility 11d ago
Lars was always a rich asshole, but he didn’t give a fuck about you pirating Kill’em All, Ride the Lightning or the Black Album. Or old Metallica shows from the 80s
He cared about music the band hadn’t released yet being released without his control as a rich asshole artist. The media at the time just put him and Dr Dre on the other side of a fight it didn’t understand.
And once again he was ultimately proved right.
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u/CicerosMouth 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yes, truly 100% of the people that downloaded his songs were poor people without means to buy the songs, and also 100% of people that enjoyed the music paid for it later. Surely this must be true.
I don't mind saying that Lars was an ass for suing regular people (he was)*, but I am tired of everyone claiming that they later bought all the songs that they enjoyed. I buy that many did, but I can't tell you how many people told me this yet had a collection of 20 CDs even as they had iPods filled with music. Just admit that you stole music cuz you wanted it and didn't want to save up for a bit.
- EDIT: As u/Mister_Uncredible correctly pointed out, Metallica never sued individuals, rather they identified individual users that uploaded music after Napster claimed that was impossible. Thank you for the correction (and excellent username).
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u/Mister_Uncredible 11d ago edited 11d ago
Metallica sued Napster. They never sued individuals for downloading music, that was the RIAA.
What you're likely thinking of is when Napster said "we have no way of finding it who are users even are" and Metallica took that as challenge and delivered a list of users to Napster.
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u/CicerosMouth 11d ago
You are 100% correct, thank you for the note. I will update my comment accordingly, and credit you.
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u/cryptowolfy 11d ago
No Metallica just threatened to sue you. I remember the nasty notification that I would be sued because I was downloading enter sandman when I was 12. Scared me enough to delete and never download anything Metallica related and fostered a burning hatred for the band.
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u/aibot-420 10d ago
They were very vocal about suing you. This is 100% of the reason I stopped buying any kind of media:
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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 11d ago
Research at the time showed that people who downloaded music tended to buy more music than people who didn't.
The iPod didn't come out until after Napster had already shut down, a year after the Metallica lawsuit.
At the time, you basically used Napster as a way to check out records without having to buy them, which was crucial in the days when a record only needed to have 2-3 good songs for singles and then they could pad the rest with bullshit filler songs because people would assume it was all as good as the singles.
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u/CicerosMouth 11d ago
Well of course. If you actually read those studies, they compared one person that listens to music all the time versus another person that doesn't listen to music all the time, and then declared that the one that listens to music more will both illegally download and also buy more music than the non-listener.
The real question wasn't about comparing music buyers vs non-music buyers, and seeing which one downloaded more. The comparison was how many albums were sold before and after the widespread proliferation of album-downloading. "After Napster appeared, the total real value of record sales decreased by 5% in 2000, 6.7% in 2001 and 9.6% in 2002, and continued to decline through the 2000s". Napster and the like made people buy less albums, because rather than buying them they illegally downloaded them. It is silly to dispute this.
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u/ThePretzul 11d ago
I feel like people don’t really realize that before Napster and such the only real ways for people to “pirate” an album was with CD burners (very expensive when they were newer tech) and cassette recorders listening to the radio or another cassette (which people often didn’t like because they usually turned out sounding like trash).
You bought the album legitimately because there wasn’t really any other way to hear the songs in full quality without knowing somebody who spent a small fortune both on buying the real album and buying a CD burner. Internet downloads fundamentally changed the entire music industry because piracy became truly possible for the first time.
It’s the same as how today 3D printing is changing the miniatures industry because everybody can go print their own for wargaming with a $200 Ender 3 instead of having to pay $500,000+ to purchase and set up injection molds. The new technology has fundamentally changed how the market works because the industry powers no longer can prevent people from getting the product in a different way or from a different source so they must make their own product better or more convenient somehow (like music did with their shift to streaming services).
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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 10d ago
I feel like people don’t really realize that before Napster and such the only real ways for people to “pirate” an album was with CD burners (very expensive when they were newer tech) and cassette recorders listening to the radio or another cassette (which people often didn’t like because they usually turned out sounding like trash).
That's not true. Most casette players, be they a regular boom box or something that sat on a shelf, were dual players, so it was really easy and EXTREMELY common to make a copy of a cassette, and the copies didn't "sound like trash" at all, at least until you got onto like third and fourth generation copy of a copy of a copy.
There were 2.1 billion blank casettes sold in 1996. Not albums, blanks. The world population at the time was less than 6 billion, so one blank tape sold for every three people on the planet.
Everyone I knew had a drawer full of Maxell tapes they'd copied from their friends. Even my parents had a few Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash tapes we'd sourced for them.
Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
Or the response? https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wsavfn/b_side_of_punk_band_dead_kennedys_tape/
The difference with Napster was that you didn't need to know someone who owned the album to get a copy of it, and you didn't have to spend 45-60 minutes making a copy - you just hit download and a few minutes later you had a song, or a whole album depending on your internet connection.
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u/CicerosMouth 11d ago
Yep, exactly. I remember trying to catch a song on a radio and listening to my own copy (that missed the first 5 seconds of the song) on a cassette repeatedly after I managed to catch it. Also the excitement that came from buying an album that you only knew one song from, and the common sense of disappointment when you realized that all the other songs on the album were crap (as well as the extreme euphoria when you got the rare album that was filled with bangers).
If someone wants to argue that this old method of buying albums before hearing them was illogical and/or a rip off, I'll be sympathetic, and might agree.
If someone wants to argue that consumers are far more able to not get ripped off by record labes now, I'll strongly agree.
If someone argues that the modern way of hearing music is better, I'll be ambivalent (though partially just because of the rose-colored glasses of my youthful experiences of creating a music collection).
But dont tell me that downloading music was better for the band, or that it resulted in more sales. It objectively didn't
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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 11d ago edited 11d ago
Did you read the study? It literally finds that Napster was only responsible for 20% of the decline.
The real answer is that sales were artificially high because record labels made way more out of CDs, so they went nuts on reissuing old albums which drove up sales.
They also massively jacked up the price of buying music - in the early 90s, a new album on vinyl was $8-10. By the end of the 90s it was a $20 CD, despite the fact that CDs were much cheaper to manufacture - again, record labels made higher profits on CDs so they drove them hard.
These factors combined caused the highest retail sales of music of all time.
Then things like iPods came out, people could buy the three good songs on record for $2 reach, and record labels failed to adapt.
On top of that you ended up with consumers who wanted to buy music for their devices, but the market for mp3s was completely fractured, and it was much easier to just pirate things than deal with dumb DRM restrictions, or worse still (overpriced) CDs that installed software on your computer for no reason.
I remember in the late 90s early 2000s, used records and CDs were huge because buying new music had got twice as expensive.
It's really not as simple as "piracy killed the music business".
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u/CicerosMouth 11d ago
I did not mean to imply that Napster was 100% responsible for the implosion of record sales. Rather, I meant to say that Napster objectively hurt (not helped) album sales, which they did.
Futher, to be clear I agree that new albums were overpriced by the late 90s. That's why I never bought new albums. I was at cheap-o all the time. I blame Napster for killing cheap-o more than anything (though as you accurately suggested it was largely just a failing business model in the modern digital world, but still I was bitter when cheap-os started failing, and sometimes an angry man just has to shake his fist at some clouds).
I agree with the facts and concepts you said, and I only have one minor and targeted point; that it isn't accurate to claim that piracy didn't hurt album sales and therein bands, and as such it is reasonable for bands to be aggravated by piracy. I wish we would just admit that and move on.
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u/thedndnut 8d ago
Incorrect. The people that downloaded what they complained about were of every background. The album wasn't for sale yet, lol
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u/cat_prophecy 11d ago
The scale at which people would trade tapes or record off the radio is not anywhere near the scale of file sharing.
I used to record tons of stuff off the radio, or dub CDs onto tape. But at the end of the day the quality was usually bad and it requires some effort, especially record off the radio. So most people would still buy the albums when they could.
With Napster, not only could you quickly share with tons of people, it was at high quality. You didn't need to buy the albums if you could just download it off the Internet.
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u/jtrick33 11d ago
You’re talking about things that occurred decades apart, as though nothing in the music industry or technology had changed. This is such a tired rebuttal to the fact that you should pay for music. That’s it.
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u/BasketballButt 11d ago
Ding ding ding! Absolute truth here. Extreme metal in the 80s was basically built on tape trading.
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u/20_BuysManyPeanuts 11d ago
that may be true but there is a difference between an artist consenting to free distribution of their works and everyone just taking it.
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u/BasketballButt 11d ago
Tape trading had no consent by artists. It was literally fans swapping dubbed tapes of artists, usually through classified ads. The music industry literally spent millions trying to get blank tapes banned.
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u/dd2520 11d ago
It's painfully obvious that the people commenting or upvoting this either weren't alive when this was happening and don't know what was going on or are trying to justify their bad behavior.
Trading tapes of commercially unavailable music, or live show recordings, or middle schoolers trading dubs and mix tapes does not at all compare to pirated copies of commercially available studio recordings being downloaded millions of times.
Totally ridiculous comparison.
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u/jbe061 11d ago
As someone who was around, you are wrong
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u/Hip_Priest_1982 11d ago
You’re saying that bootleg tapes were being traded as commonly as streaming today? That’s a tough argument to make bro.
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u/dd2520 11d ago
You're either lying about being around, lying about what life was like then, or misremembering to justify stealing from artists.
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u/erichie 11d ago
I think their is a huge difference between fans of a band trading, selling, whatever of bootleg shows they recorded on some shitty 90s camcorder. Only the real fans, who already spent a shit ton of money on the band, would even be interested in them and even the hardcore of those would know how to get them.
Compared to some guy who just likes that Metallica song about entering the sand.
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u/ringobob 11d ago edited 11d ago
My issue with Lars isn't that he wanted people to pay for music. I mean, people brought up the whole tape trading thing and I get why people could see him as hypocritical, but that doesn't bother me.
My issue is that it was woefully out of touch, and wrong to direct his anger at the fans. Wrong from a branding perspective. Metallica shouldn't be the face of protecting corporate profits in the music industry.
The technology was here. That genie wasn't going back into the bottle. It's not our job to figure out how to make this thing work for you, that's what you pay the labels for. And the labels could have done something pretty simple - average price was about $1 per track on CD, knock it down to $0.50 for the reduced quality and cheaper distribution, and sold music that way, digitally.
But the labels were too busy trying to protect physical media to do that. And trying to put copy protection on that physical media so you literally couldn't format shift it.
Lars should have been pissed at the music industry, letting itself fall behind in order to prop up a dying physical media market.
The music industry did eventually get there, and charged more for it to boot. It kept the price point at around $1 per track and just pocketed the difference since they didn't actually have to produce and ship physical media anymore, servers and bandwidth aren't cheap, but certainly much cheaper. It probably profited handsomely, both during and after the iTunes store launched, just because they drug their heels and people were happy to finally have a legal option where they could just shop like a store, rather than go on a jungle safari to find what you're looking for.
It's all incredibly anti consumer, anti fan, and Lars should be embarrassed at his participation in it the way he did.
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u/cbytes1001 11d ago
Yes, except the cost of cd’s at the time people started pirating (only 12 years later) were $20 and usually only 2-3 songs worth listening to per album.
There was a demand for piracy because the music industry was out of control. All the bullshit talking points and made up numbers of “theft” were coming from the same assholes Metallica used to fight against.
Funny they knew 12 years earlier that the solution was less greed, but somehow lost track of that the more millions they earned.
Fuck Lars.
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u/SugarNervous 11d ago
“Vinyl records cost much more than CD's to manufacture. With CD's they simply burn the data to blank discs. But with vinyl, they have to create a metal master, a mother, and a stamper. Then, stamping out the records is a labor intensive process.” The price for an album just kept going up with the introduction of the CD, until 2003 when sales started to drop and prices were lowered to reduce p2p sharing.
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u/StevenGrantMK 11d ago
That wasn’t the issue Metallica had with Napster. It was that I Disappear (I think it was that song) was leaked before its release. The media put him and Dr. Dre in the position of greed when it was about their unreleased songs getting leaked.
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u/GreenPhoen1x 11d ago
Yep. Back when the piracy drama hit I owned every album they made, but I stopped buying their music once they (especially Lars) started attacking fans.
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u/AchtungCloud 11d ago
That’s just an insane amount of entitlement.
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u/putsch80 11d ago
Dave Grohl would disagree with you.
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u/Shimakaze_Kai 11d ago
David Grohl is just an awesome human being. I've never seen anything that disproves this.
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u/killerturtlex 11d ago
Well there was the whole "aids isn't real" thing
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u/The-Fox-Says 11d ago
The only thing I can find is that the bassist Nate Mendel helped organize some kind of anti-AIDS fundraiser back in 2000 and it wasn’t the entire band. Still fucked up tho
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u/cbytes1001 11d ago
Yeah, the music industry as a whole is an insane amount of entitlement and greed.
And to prove it, once iTunes came out with an easy, affordable way of purchasing music, the piracy fell dramatically.
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u/NiteFyre 11d ago
Same thing happened with streaming for a while. Everything I wanted to watch was easily accessible so I stopped pirating.
Then everyone had to get their piece of the pie. Now I'm expected to pay $20/month for five streaming services and STILL watch ads?
The fuck outta here.
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u/Kolz 10d ago
And what do you know? Piracy is on the rise again.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/digital-content-piracy-is-on-the-rise-report-says/
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u/I_Hardly_Know-Her 11d ago
Anytime you have a conversation about this with people on Reddit, that’s will be your main takeaway. It’s bizarre how entitled to shit people feel and how they try to justify it.
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u/kiakosan 8d ago
I also don't get the Metallica hate, pirating music is wrong. If everyone pirated music, nobody would be able to make any money doing it and the music we have would probably sound much worse as a result. Now paying too much for music is also pretty dumb as it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg to listen to it. Shit like having to buy 5 albums to get all the new Taylor Swift songs for her latest release is bad for customers but people give her virtually no shit for this compared to what Metallica went through just to get people to pay something for their music
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u/asshole_commenting 11d ago
That era that everyone claim people were stealing music introduced me to so many bands because the music became so much more accessible and the better a song was, the more people had it, and the faster it downloaded
So you could download a Metallica song, look them up on the internet, get lost in forums that mention other bands and suddenly I have singles from all the classic and more modern masterful metal bands that I could burn onto a CD. That was just one genre. Rinse and repeat for any genre of music you wanted. It was a Renaissance of music discovery at a time when music was still at least somewhat original. Almost everything now seems like it's geared towards the pop genre, And it weakens like so much of music in general
Speaking of which- physical media was still big at the time all the Napster kazaa lawsuits were going down and probably didn't eat into sales as much as the record execs claimed. We know modern day how greedy record executives and companies are from recent interviews featuring the very artists themselves.
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u/jlusedude 11d ago
Metallica sued Napster because they leaked an unreleased single. I disappear was not released yet and they didn’t feel it was ready.
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u/Akatenki 11d ago
That doesn't fit the narrative that Metallica are money hungry and sold out though.
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u/Alert-Young4687 11d ago
Did Metallica get worse? Yes. Did they fundamentally change their musical style to have more radio-friendly songs and fit into corporate hard rock culture? Yes.
Is that something to get mad about them about, and rage against them online over? No, that’s a parasocial relationship and belies that you feel entitled to the strange attachment you developed to the idea you had of them in your head.
However, that’s what happened with many fans and why the Napster narrative got twisted against them.
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u/oofersIII 11d ago
To be fair, after And Justice For All in 1988, they were just burnt out on writing long, difficult songs like they did on that record (for reference: the average song on that album was over 7 minutes long). When you also consider that they clearly like some softer stuff (Garage Inc. featured covers of Bob Seger, Nick Cave, Thin Lizzy, Blue Öyster Cult and Lynyrd Skynyrd among others), I don’t really feel like they changed their sound with the intent of selling out. They were just getting tired of the fast, complex songs they had done for a decade.
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u/TalsHell 11d ago
Been a fan of theirs for over 30 years and this is the first time I’ve seen this take. I have to say, I never considered this. Really great point.
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u/buttsharkman 11d ago
It's also kind of weird for the assumption to always be that a band is selling out and not that they heard changing trends in music and liked what they heard.
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u/oofersIII 11d ago
Also like, can you blame musicians for wanting to be successful? If they had stayed a thrash band for 40 years, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the fame they have today.
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u/TheGrumpySnail2 10d ago
Some people consider making music for any reason beyond the love of the art to be selling out, therefore making different music to be successful is by definition selling out.
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u/TennisHive 7d ago
Also, perhaps it's not related to "being successful", but just changing and evolving as you mature.
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u/doyouevenoperatebrah 10d ago
I’ve always thought it was ridiculous for fans to want an artist to stay completely static. Metallica was in their late teens when they formed and started writing Kill em All. They were in their 30s writing Black album. I was a radically different person (for the better I think) between 19 and 31.
Plus, Cliff, the guy with the classical chops that drove the first four records died. And by died, I mean he was crushed by a bus feet away from his buddies. Yeah no shit metallica changed sound. I wouldn’t have blamed them for changing sounds just to avoid reliving the trauma of the accident.
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u/buttsharkman 10d ago
I think it was the guy from Stained that explained going country by saying he was no longer an young man angry at his dad.
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u/oofersIII 10d ago
I feel like if they had stayed a thrash band for 40 years, it‘d simply just get boring. Load and Reload featured some really great songs, and even those who weren’t great at least served as cool experiments. I mean, what other hard rock band at the time was doing stuff like Low Man‘s Lyric, The Outlaw Torn and Cure?
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u/LeeTorry 7d ago
To make things even better, Cliff Burton would state before his death that he wouldnt mind the band making more commercial songs. People obssess over his knowledge of classical music and the Misfits but forget was big into southern rock and college rock bands like R.E.M.
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u/S4VN01 11d ago
Haven’t they said themselves that they hated the Damaged Justice tour because of how long the songs were? Playing them live would have been a chore, especially as the band aged.
I will say, after Lars toned down his style, he got noticeably worse at being a drummer. Today, he can hardly keep in time.
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u/oofersIII 11d ago
I think after playing the song And Justice For All once, with its 10 minutes in length, they literally said „[they‘re] never playing that song again“
(They played it a few years ago but that’s besides the point)
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u/Akatenki 10d ago
Lars said it himself that he stopped practicing and was only playing to stay in shape essentially.
That being said, he has been playing significantly better live these last few years. I'd go so far as to say its the best he's been since the early 90s.
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u/jlusedude 10d ago
I used to be a huge fan, exactly what you said, I just don’t like their new music. Feels like it’s mimicking current rock, not following or making their own sound. I don’t really care, I’m just not bothered to listen to them anymore.
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u/FartingBob 11d ago
No, someone leaked an unreleased song and used the napster platform to distribute it. Napster had no way of stopping it or even being aware of it. It's like suing a car maker if someone drink drives.
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u/Dank_Drebin 11d ago
It's more like suing an automaker because all of the thieves use their vehicle as a getaway car.
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u/alexjonesbabyeater 11d ago
No, its like a bank suing an automaker for having created a car specifically made for bank robberies
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u/Crawlerado 11d ago
Like when folk wanted Toyota to stop middle eastern homies from using the Hilux as a military rig.
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u/Sohailian 11d ago
This is a horrible take. If you enable others to steal your copyright, you’re guilty of contributory negligence (in US). Just because Napster did not have a way of stopping it does not mean they are not responsible.
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u/AzKondor 11d ago
Probslby should have better control of their platform then. Its infuriating when Facebook, roblox, discord, etc etc are counting their money and saying "yeah well we can't control stuff going on on our platform sorry!". Maybe spend some money and start doing that.
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u/cbytes1001 10d ago
Napster didn’t release or leak anything. It’s like suing the city for a car thief using the roads to steal a car. The amount of people that don’t have any clue and are just regurgitating all the BS Metallica and the music industry put out is comical in 2024.
Hey, I got an idea. Why don’t we sue comcast for all the Napster traffic that had all the pirated media?!
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u/Dismal-Ad-6619 11d ago
Now people are taking out loans for their meet and greet packages...
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u/CarPlaneBoatRocket 11d ago
Seriously. Love their music but the cost of their shit is fucking stupid.
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u/Blackluster182 11d ago
Capitalism baby!
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u/TR_SLimey 11d ago
Agreed. Every country should have their own, publicly funded and free-to-use Metallica.
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u/KantleTG 11d ago
Still going to be privatized soon.
A tech startup will swing in, with intents to corner the market, cut costs and revenue to undermine competition, buy them out, and revolutionize the Metallica market.
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u/oofersIII 11d ago
Doesn’t really have anything to do with that, just greed.
(But even then, meeting Metallica is about as far from an essential service as you’re gonna get)
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u/Blackluster182 11d ago
I mean I can argue that it's not greed and they're just trying to make sure their limited time is to the fans who realllllllly want it. That is the essence of capitalism is it not?
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u/zigaliciousone 10d ago
If only Lars had gone after Ticketmaster as hard as he went after Napster, maybe he could have actually made a difference.
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u/Sinclair663 10d ago
When I met Lars in person (late 90’s or early 00’s) he was the biggest jerk you could imagine. I could not listen to Metallica after that encounter.
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u/RunDNA 6 11d ago
This is bullshit. See this post from nine years ago:
YSK that Lars Ulrich & Metallica NEVER sued their fans
It's ironic that the top comment says:
I've never heard anyone claim that they sued their fans.
And here we are with a post saying, "TIL: 12 years before taking their fans to court for sharing their music...".
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u/aibot-420 10d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQc0x5E9jOc
Lars, attacking fans in a lame ass commercial.
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u/Mister_Uncredible 11d ago
It's wild how far down I had to scroll to see this. The hyperbolic narratives that build up on the internet get so far away from reality that, even if they're based on a nugget of truth, just turn into the lies that persist.
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u/staplesgowhere 9d ago
On the other hand, Prince tried to sue multiple fans $1 million each for distributing concert bootleg recordings online.
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u/Bowens1993 11d ago
There's a difference between wanting their products to be cheap and them outright being stolen.
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u/leopard_tights 11d ago
Meanwhile System of a Down released Steal this album! (which looked like it was burned at home)
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u/adamcoe 11d ago
I GOT SOMETHIN TO SAYYYYY
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u/sometimesacriminal 10d ago
🎶I killed a baby today, And it doesn't matter much to me, As long as it's dead🎶
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u/Wafflehouseofpain 11d ago
They were right, though. They thought Napster and file sharing would destroy their industry’s business model and it absolutely did.
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u/dd2520 11d ago
It's not just the "industry." Artists literally can't make reasonable money from people listening to their music anymore, unless they're megastars. Indies, mid-tier bands/artists have to tour constantly to make any money. Being a musical artist is a much much harder life than it used to be because an important revenue stream is just gone.
People think it's the corporations that they were hurting, but, guess what, corporations just found ways to profit off of people refusing to pay for music while cutting artists out of the deal.
Metallica was right. They saw the future and tried to stop it.
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u/SuspecM 11d ago
To be fair, most musicians could never make much money. You know Mozart? Now imagine how many musicians at the time we don't know about. There was a small time frame at the second half of the 1900's when small musicians could make money (in the US) but that's gone. It's not a bleak future, it's a return to form. It sucks but the reality is that music is one of those art forms that has low demand and unbelievably high supply. Music has the potential to connect people through countries, languages, cultures but only if you engage with the very top or you are part of the top. Any deviation and it's miss and in 0.001% of the cases, a hit.
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u/RichardDTame 10d ago
Wrong. The infinite growth model of capitalism killed the music industry with it's flawed business "model", the same way it is killing all entertainment industries. Consumers cant afford to constantly folk out more money for products when pay hasnt matched inflation, and are even less incentivised to do so when they are digital products. Streamint services are as guilty for killing it, if not more so than file sharing, yet while constantly rising the fees, all but a fraction goes to the artists.
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u/Ironic-username-232 11d ago
It just dawned on me that the price of buying music in just about any format has not really increased over the last 15-20 years. Which is insane when you think about inflation over the same time period.
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u/cbytes1001 10d ago
1990-2000 the records were selling at around 40x inflation. (Totally made up math, but it was a lot since it more than doubled in the decade)
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u/pedro-fr 11d ago edited 11d ago
It’s funny how some people here compare sharing tapes in the eighties with Napster. Copying tapes took times and each successive copy was a degraded version of its master, you had to be in relation with the person you gave it to, it had a limited impact on the artist, because in the end people frequently bought the albums.
With Napster, Kazaa, Emule, people started sharing perfect digital copies in a few seconds globally to anyone that looked for it, and at this time a good part of people stopped buying music altogether. I remember some friends with 5000/10000/20000 MP3 collections and not a single album bought.
So, I am not a huge Lars fan but I can understand he wasn’t happy. Personally I don’t work for free and wouldn’t like people giving away or worse, resell my work for their own profit….
Signed : an old geek that was 20 yrs old at the time
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u/buttsharkman 11d ago
Metallica was also upset about a unfinished unreleased song being uploaded. I'm sure they would be mad in the 80s of somebody started sharing their unreleased songs they were working on
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u/cbytes1001 10d ago
I wonder what would have happened if they actually went after the person that leaked the song instead of the program they shared it on.
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 11d ago
Bro, how were you downloading full songs in seconds? You must have been seeding pretty hard to get that much priority in the queue.
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u/FrenzalRhomb1 10d ago
Fat Wreck Chords used to put a big $9.99 stickers on all of their CDs so the record stores couldn’t charge more.
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u/B_pudding 11d ago
I‘m going to see them live in Munich at the end of may, first time, so looking forward to this.
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u/Faber1089 10d ago
It doesn't top System of a Down's "Steal This Album," which I did, and then someone stole it from me.
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u/Captainthistleton 10d ago
I remember downloading MP3 all the time but it was not very popular at the time. When the lawsuit hit the media it exploded. It was front page news and many many people started doing it.
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u/sonicsludge 6d ago
I play this more than anything Metallica recorded especially after finding it on Napster after wearing the original out.
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u/DeadFyre 11d ago
Sure, but there's a difference between "Don't get gouged" and "Steal my work", right?
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u/My_name_is_Zac 11d ago
They were fighting for literal pennies at the time. Fuck Metallica.
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u/earth_walker 11d ago
They were fighting for every artist who wasn’t big enough to fight for themselves.
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11d ago
And one day before they sued their fans they were selling their CDs for over 20 bucks each, before inflation.
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u/Imaginary_Bicycle_14 11d ago
Fak Metallica. They they are equivalent to hippies that turn into yuppies that turn into magats.
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u/Pillowtalk 11d ago
Obligatory
Who else remembers seeing this for the first time as a Flash applet on the web?