Even before the RIAA got into the business of policing and suing people for sharing music files, the heavy metal band Metallica had a successful run at it. Remember Napster, the file sharing service back in the year 2000? Metallica was instrumental in getting the courts to shut them down permanently. I remember that mumbling clown Lars Ulrich (the drummer for the band) whining like a little kid on TV back then about how people were stealing his music. Looks like the whole thing backfired on Lars and his mates because here we are almost a decade later and guess what? BitTorrent! There are more file sharing services out there right now and people have figured out clever and discrete ways to share files. Illegal sharing of music is now rampant as ever and apparently even Lars is into it now. According to TorrentFreak he admitted to downloading his own music using a file sharing client …
“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”
Ulrich went on to say that he and half a dozen friends were enjoying a bottle of wine at his house and used a file-sharing client (the name of which eluded him) to download the album.
“We found it - this was like two or three days after it leaked. I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta try this.’ So we sat there and thirty minutes later I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”
Yeah definitely bizarre Lars. Maybe if you had realized the potential back in 2000, file sharing would perhaps be mainstream and legal right now instead of being forced underground. Instead of working with Napster and trying to figure out and understand the technology you and the fat record execs decided to squish a tiny start up right out of business. Welcome to the 21st century!
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LOL at metallica, I want to ask if the downloaded something else.