Episode 148 - Metallica vs. Napster

METAL UP YOUR PODCAST - All Things Metallica

Clint Wells

Clint Wells, Ethan Luck, Heavy Metal, Arts, Nashville, Metal Up Your Podcast, Metal, Music, Society & Culture, Thrash Metal, Metallica

4.9 • 775 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2019

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June of 1999, two college programmers launched a program that would go on to change the face of the entire music industry. Napster was the first mainstream program that allowed users to share and download mp3's on a centralized, user-friendly peer to peer network. Within months of launching, Napster had millions of users sharing and downloading tens of millions of songs all over the world. In March of 2000, Metallica learned that an unreleased and unmixed version of their forthcoming single, "I Disappear" had been leaked to radio stations all over America. The leak was traced to Napster where Metallica also learned their entire catalogue was available for free. This prompted an April lawsuit and a year of bad press for Metallica as they sought not only to shut Napster down, but also to start a public dialogue about the relationship between commerce, art, intellectual property and the delicate future of artistic control in a digital age. In 2002 Napster filed for bankruptcy and liquidated it's assets. But in it's wake, countless other file sharing programs surfaced. Torrenting sites soon became ubiquitous. It seems that everything Metallica fought to protect was taken from them regardless of how the Napster controversy ended. What was left besides a tarnished reputation for Metallica? In this episode Clint, Ethan and their long time friend, Grammy nominated producer Paul Moak, break down the entire Napster saga in detail. They talk through the origin of Napster, the relevant details of the lawsuit, the demise and unlikely future of Napster and discuss the reaching implications into modern day streaming from the point of view of seasoned music industry professionals. If you think Metal Up Your Podcast has value, please consider taking a brief moment to leave a positive review and subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/metal-up-your-podcast-all-things-metallica/id1187775077 You can further support the show by becoming a patron. All patrons of Metal Up Your Podcast receive every volume of our Cover Our World Blackened EP's for free. Additionally, patrons are invited to come on the show to talk about any past Metallica show they've been to and are given access to ask our guests like Ray Burton, Halestorm, Michael Wagener, Jay Weinberg of Slipknot and members of Metallica's crew their very own questions. Be a part of what makes Metal Up Your Podcast special by becoming a patron here: http://www.patreon.com/metalupyourpodcast Official Website here: http://metalupyourpodcast.com Purchase Cover Our World Blackened, Volume 1 here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/cover-our-world-blackened-vol-1/1442721389 Purchase Cover Our World Blackened, Volume 2 here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/cover-our-world-blackened-vol-2/1464606181 Follow us on all social media platforms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Metallica, here they come, the kings of metal.
0:04.0	So fucking what?
0:23.6	A wildly popular website called Napster has changed the landscape for pop music fans who download music on the internet. Welcome to the Metal Up Your podcast. I'm Ethan Luck.
0:51.4	And I'm Clint Wells.
0:52.2	We got Paul Moog.
0:53.5	Paul Moog is back in the house. Or should we say we're in Paul Moog's house?
0:57.2	We're at HQ3 right now, which we decided was officially HQ3 on the last episode. Paul was on it.
1:02.3	My four runner, unfortunately, has been demoted to HQ4. I don. That's true. It does work. That works better. Yeah, you're right.
1:11.3	So if you heard our episode last week, we burnt down the year 2000 in our year in the life of Metallica series.
1:16.6	I can't even do it.
1:19.1	It was a race to the finish to see who would start.
1:22.0	We only said that, I think, maybe 25 times on the episode. But one of the major things that happened that year is, of course, Napster came on the scene.
1:29.1	Metallica and others sued them. It was a huge shitstorm. There was a huge backlash against
1:34.2	Metallica. Lars Ulrich, as he said, in some kind of monster documentary, became the most
1:38.2	hated man in rock and roll, which I'm not sure was an exaggeration. No. The backlash to this was extremely serious.
1:46.4	Very serious.
1:47.2	And ever since we started the show, we always knew we were going to do sort of a big deep dive episode into this issue.
1:53.2	Right.
1:53.6	And here we are to do that today.
1:55.0	We've done all of our research.
1:56.5	We're going to be talking about exactly what happened, what Napster is, how all of this came to be.
2:02.0	We're going to parse out all the details, dispel some myths.
	...

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