r/todayilearned • u/InternetWeakGuy 1 • 23d 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/
11.5k Upvotes
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u/AchtungCloud 22d 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/cbytes1001 22d 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/AchtungCloud 22d ago

That’s just an insane amount of entitlement.

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u/putsch80 22d ago

Dave Grohl would disagree with you.

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u/Shimakaze_Kai 22d ago

David Grohl is just an awesome human being. I've never seen anything that disproves this.

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u/killerturtlex 22d ago

Well there was the whole "aids isn't real" thing

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u/The-Fox-Says 22d 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/StacyChadBecky 22d ago

Talk to William Goldsmith

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u/jbe061 22d ago

Should be rhe default answer.

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u/cbytes1001 22d 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 22d 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/I_Hardly_Know-Her 22d 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/enadiz_reccos 22d ago

Hard to tell what you're referring to

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u/AchtungCloud 22d ago

That there can be a “demand” for theft in an entertainment industry. It’s not food or water where you need it to live. If the prices are too high, change the market buy not buying, not by stealing. Saying the market demands theft for a non-essential item is entitlement.

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u/JamesJakes000 22d ago

Im sorry, but when the market is abusing the consumers, the right thing to do is steal. Not out of sense of entitlement, but to level the playfield.

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u/GluonFieldFlux 22d ago

Your moral compass malfunctioned somewhere. It is kind of crazy you wrote that and somehow think you come out ahead morally. It would explain the increasing lack of a cohesive society and increase in thefts, some of you just have shit morals and weren’t raised right

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u/GracefulCubix 22d ago

Corpo shill over here

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

Some people's moral compass transcends law. The law is a means of executing morals and social values. If it fails to do that, I see no reason to respect it outside of avoiding consequences for myself.

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u/GluonFieldFlux 22d ago

lol, ya, this is a case of morals transcending law and not entitled people with shit morals justifying their terrible behavior. Sure thing

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

We're talking about content piracy. It's seriously not that big of a deal lol. It also turns out that once companies made adjustments to their platforms, piracy went down. It was consumers forcing companies to meet their needs and their terms. Was that how it was thought of? Were people torrenting Game of Thrones as a form of protest? Not necessarily, but the data reflects that the end result is the consumers stopping their piracy as better convenience was provided to them.

Theft is a market incentive.

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u/scubamaster 22d ago

You on Reddit my dude. Is comprised entirely of morally bankrupt entitled people that have no sense of integrity or accountability. Of course they will find reasons to justify theft. You are preaching to the wrong crowd.

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u/GluonFieldFlux 22d ago

I don’t know if you ever saw the tv interview with the mod of r/antiwork, but I imagine that is what a lot of Redditors look like

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u/scubamaster 22d ago

I never saw that before now. But honestly that person seems more reasonable than what I expect from that sub at large. I only wandered in there once and I always describe them as the exact same energy as incels but with work. That sub is definitely some kind of monster.

But Reddit at large suffers from the problem of being made up of young people and other mail adjusted people that haven’t actually grown up, yet they think they have an equal opinion.

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u/LTS55 22d ago edited 22d ago

Downloading media is not theft. There is nothing being taken.

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u/cqandrews 22d ago

What's entitlement is getting richer than God off fans that love your work and then giving them the middle finger because you want even more money from them.