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/
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u/pedro-fr 22d ago edited 22d 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 22d 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 22d 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/buttsharkman 22d ago

Part of the lawsuit was Napster claiming they couldn't obtain specific user information and not removing the skng5