Metallica vs Napster, Pt. 1 - 2000

Audio source: https://anchor.fm/spotify-rd/episodes/00-The-most-epic-battle-in-music-history-es7j2l (10 minutes in)

- I Disappear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Disappear#Release
- Metallica v Napster Inc. lawsuit

Highly recommend subscribing to this Spotify miniseries, it is excellently produced and Episode 2 has nice technical detail on the founding of Spotify from Daniel Ek.

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:00] In fact, Sean estimates that about 70 million people were using Napster at the height of its popularity, but not everyone was a fan. 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:07] We were all completely in over our heads. 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:10] That's Lars Ulrich. You may know him as the drummer in Metallica, or you may know him as a plaintiff in the now historic Metallica versus Napster lawsuit.

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:18] It's easy to sit 20 years later and see the chain of events and how one domino would cause another domino and cause another domino to fall and so on and so forth. And then we ended up. Basically in this shitstorm  and ended up, suing each other and ended up being on Capitol Hill and blah, blah, blah.

And it was such a circus. You know,

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:50] the circus started when Lars got a call about an unreleased Metallica track. called "I disappear" from  long time manager, cliff going, "There's 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:56] a radio station in St. Louis, Missouri, that's playing "I disappear"".  That was if he had called up and started speaking Russian to me. So a day or two later, I get a call back going well, there's a company called Napster who offer the service over the internet, where you can go and download songs and then people can play him. Basically long story short, we tracked down the fact that this I disappear song. That was a work in progress.

We hadn't even decided which version of the song we were going to share with the world at leaked through this Napster. And then now I think subsequently 20 or 30 radio stations in America were playing the song. We felt so,  I guess violated, is the right word because the song wasn't even done and then all of a sudden it's being played on all these radio stations.

So these people took our song. So we're like, well, let's get our song back.

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:02:03] What followed was were both Lars and Sean referred to as a back alley, brawl. A back alley brawl that was about to get much, much bigger than just one song. In April, 2000 Metallica, officially filed charges. They accused Napster of "copyright infringements, unlawful use of digital audio interface, device, and violations of the racketeering influenced and corrupt organizations act".

And they sought a hundred thousand dollars per illegally downloaded song in damages. Two weeks later, Lars showed up unannounced at Napster's office. A rundown old bank building in San Mateo, California, with a special delivery for Sean and his co-founder a complete list of the 335,435 Napster users who had illegally downloaded Metallica songs, all neatly printed out on 60,000 sheets of paper.

Lars Ulrich: [00:02:56] This cavalcade of black SUV shows up and Lars, or it gets out of them with the sunglasses on. And ceremonially marches in with the first box followed by an army of people carrying the other boxes of names  and  made a point to do this in person, the 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:03:13] camera. So they clearly knew how media worked.

The 

Lars Ulrich: [00:03:15] San Mateo police had had come because there were crowds of protesters who were angry at Metallica. And then there were crowds of Metallica supporters who were cheering them on, and then they weren't just like casual kind of looky-loos who were, who were. You know, interested in the spectacle. And, and so I, I was there when, when Laura's walked those names into our office and sort of like glanced at me and glanced at Sean, the other Sean, and it was sort of the extent of it.

Then we snuck out. So the two of us went outside and just put like hoodies on and walked across the street and just watch this bizarre spectacle, 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:03:50] but Lars wasn't the only one adept at working the media. Sean struck back hard Napster did ban the Metallica fans on largest list, but when they open up the app, every single band user, all 335,000 of them.

So a popup window that simply said band by Metallica. This was like a punch in the stomach to Lars for decades, Metallica private itself on being fan friendly. And now overnight, they were being presented as the symbol of corporate greed. The effect was immediate and devastating. We 

Lars Ulrich: [00:04:21] made it about Metallica, Napster, Napster made it about Metallica and our fans.

And that was the smartest move that they could do because they, they took themselves out of the equation. But it was this thing of you're either for Napster or you're against Napster. If you're against Napster, you're greedy. And if you're against Napster, you're a Luddite and you don't understand technology.

And if you're for Metallica, then it's about money. We had always been, so fan-friendly we had always been into tape trading and we had been into sharing music through cassettes, and we had encouraged people to come and record our shows for free. And we were really pro bootlegging and all this type of stuff.

And we were sitting there going, what Metallica they talking about? We've spent 20 years being the most fan friendly band on this planet, I mean, it was so surreal because we couldn't correlate who they were talking about in the press to who, how we viewed ourselves at the time.

we may not be against giving our music for free. But you should ask us that question before you make our music available. 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:05:31] The back alley brawl had become nothing less than a national conversation about the future of music.

By July, 2000, Laura's even found himself testifying in front of the us Senate judiciary committee. 

Lars Ulrich: [00:05:41] We should decide what happens to our music, not a company with no rights in all recordings, which has never invested a penny and on music or anything to do with its creation.

The choice has been taken away from 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:05:54] us. And then in 2001, just two short years after Napster had first launched a circuit court in California, ruled in favor of Metallica and issued an injunction against Napster to delete every single Metallica track from its users libraries, a task that was by definition, impossible on a peer-to-peer network.

Instead Napster voluntarily ended service and eventually filed for bankruptcy. But Sean knew instinctively what every good product person strives to understand what the consumers actually want. And once the consumers had tried it, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle.