Metallica famously sued file sharing service Napster in 2000, and drummer Lars Ulrich delivered a truckload of paper to Napster, Inc. listing hundreds of thousands of people who allegedly used the company’s software to share unauthorized MP3s of Metallica songs. Metallica representatives compiled a more than 60,000-page list of over 335,000 Napster user IDs in response to Napster’s promise to terminate the accounts of users who traded material without permission.
In a new interview with Classic Rock Magazine, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett said the band “warned everyone” about the changes that were coming to the music industry. “We warned everyone that this was gonna happen,” he said. “We warned everyone that the music industry was gonna lose eighty percent of its net worth, power and influence. When these monumental shifts come, you just either f*cking rattle the cage and get nothing done or you move forward. There’s definitely a new way for getting music out there, but it isn’t as effective as the music industry pre-Napster. But we’re stuck with it. There needs to be some sort of midway point where the two come together, or another completely new model comes in.”
A few years ago, Hammett said that Metallica didn’t make a difference by trying to fight Napster. “The amazing thing now is back then, people were saying, ’20 years from now, we’re gonna look back and say, ‘Godd*mn it! We did the right thing,'” he said. “But when people were saying back then we were actually gonna make a difference? We didn’t make a difference — we did not make a difference. It happened. And we couldn’t stop it, because it was just bigger than any of us — this trend that happened that f*cking sunk the f*cking music industry. There was no way that we could stop it. It was a perfectly human thing that just happened. And what had happened was all of a sudden, it was just more convenient to get music and it was less convenient to pay for it. And there you have it.”
“For me, it was kind of a leveling factor,” he continued. “All of a sudden, all of us were brought back to the minstrel age now where musicians’ only source of income is actually playing. And it’s like that nowadays — except that a lot of these bands [chuckles] aren’t really playing; they’re pressing ‘play’ or something. But there are a lot of bands who actually fucking play their instruments and have to play to still be a band and still fucking survive. And that’s cool, because it really separates who wants to do this and who is just here for the fucking pose. … You’ll see who’s passionate about it and who’s really into it for the art of it, and then you’ll see who’s not so passionate about it and into the commerce of it.”
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