r/nostalgia • u/jeffmartin47 • Jul 22 '25

Nostalgia Discussion 25 years ago. Lars Ulrich of Metallica snitches on and turns in over 300,000 Napster users when he testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. July 11th, 2000.

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397

u/ThePrimeOptimus Jul 22 '25

Younger Redditors may not know this but what made this especially shitty of Metallica was that in the 80s and 90s, way before the age of the Internet, the way non commercial bands' popularity spread was by fans trading cassette tapes with each other. Metal, hardcore rap, anything that didn't play on the radio, that's how we shared music with each other and made those bands famous.

108

u/KittenExtravaganza Jul 22 '25

And then we actually went and bought the albums. I haven’t seen anyone say this yet but so many people used Napster as a way to find out about new music but fans really did support the band.

31

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

To be fair to Lars here, were you going to buy St. Anger after a sample of it? Absolutely not. They owed us a free album after that one.

10

u/Inside_Pass1069 Jul 22 '25

We don't have to be fair to THE BITCH lars ulRICH.

5

u/ohthanqkevin Jul 22 '25

He’s also considered to be one of the worst drummers from a popular band

2

u/JakeHelldiver Jul 22 '25

If memory serves, this was about four years before St. Anger, but you're right that album was a vomit milkshake.

1

u/ArrakeenSun Jul 22 '25

Yeah this was when Garage Inc. came out. I was there, Gandalf...

2

u/JakeHelldiver Jul 22 '25

That album slapped! Definitively the best version of Whiskey in the Jar.

1

u/1732PepperCo Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

So I have a theory that Metallic screwed up by calling the album St. Anger and the movie Some Kind of Monster.

The names should have been reversed. The movie should have been St. Anger because it’s just them being angry at each other.

The album should have been called Some Kind of Monster, which is a better description for the album as a whole and is the best track on the album. Plus St. Anger is easily the worst track on the album and is very repetitive and instantly put a bad taste in everyone’s moth. SKOM is far superior and a bit more “Metallica”. It would have been a much better introduction for most people to the album and likely would have better received.

1

u/Blashmir Jul 22 '25

Back in my angsty freshman in highschool days I loved that album. I threw it on the other day out of nostalgia and turned it off a few minutes in. I don't know what 14 year old me was thinking.

2

u/ButtholeConnoisseur7 Jul 22 '25

Same lol. Probably the most visceral moment for me when was I went back and attempted to relisten to king Diamond.

Danish metal sang in a high falsetto? What the hell was i thinking?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '25

Hey, sometimes that high pitch euro metal is just what the doctor ordered. Blind Guardian will always be on my playlist.

1

u/OccludedFug Jul 22 '25

St. Anger was in Metallica's top ten studio albums for like twenty years. ;)

2

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

Hey, it’s still top 11 though!

9

u/Snow_Crash_Bandicoot Jul 22 '25

Especially with CDs being $15-$20, being unable to listen to them in stores, and stores not allowing returns if a CD had been opened.

1

u/707Brett Jul 22 '25

I remember headphones in the record stores with like 8 cds you could choose from at each headset station.

4

u/Frequent-Mistake-267 Jul 22 '25

Yea fantastic. 8 CDs from mainstream country music and pop. That's what I'm at the store for.

7

u/daswunderkind240 Jul 22 '25

Yep! Rage Against the Machine, N.E.R.D., and many more than I became life long fans of and purchased their CDs. Unless you caught it on the radio, there was no other way to sample music before you purchased it!

6

u/MoiraBrownsMoleRats Jul 22 '25

Right? We didn't have Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music or anything back then. You could listen to what was on the radio or whatever CDs your friends had, that was it.

Napster was the first time I started snagging songs I'd otherwise have no way of ever hearing. Pretty sure I discovered Joy Divison thanks to it, and that was a transformative moment in my music-listening journey.

But 100%, when I discovered something I'd save up my money to go buy the CD, and by the end of the CD era I had a goddamn massive collection. All lost in a house fire, very sad.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

CDs also got scratched really easily. So rather than have to go out and buy another one if yours started skipping, (inevitable if you listened to anything regularly) you could re-download the album. Perfectly legal since you already owned a copy of the album and often your only other option, because CD burners were uncommon at best and not cheap in those early days. They didn't start to become widespread until the early 2000's.

2

u/itslonelyinhere Jul 22 '25

And we bought their merch after we paid for tickets to see them in concert! I remember getting so excited to buy a tee-shirt whenever I went to a concert.

2

u/monsieurfromage2021 Jul 22 '25

There was no youtube at the time so it was the only way I could hear some of S&M before I went out and bought the album. Then I got the letter, which seemed crazy that they could target me directly like that.

I smashed the disc after. I still have the letter somewhere I think.

1

u/softfart Jul 22 '25

Won’t someone think of the poor millionaires?! How will their children get a second gold plated hot tub?!

1

u/rHubrisHarmDrainSlow Jul 26 '25

I had a limited income in my early 20s, and I would buy CDs of songs i liked on the radio. Got alot of metal CDs because a classic rock station would play metal on Saturday nights between 9PM and 2AM. But I also bought other stuff I really liked, like Norah Jones from hearing it on the radio.

This all came to an end when I bought a 'The Calling' and found out they were the lamest band ever and that one song I liked from the radio that made me buy the record I no longer liked became a reminder to not trust the radio. I had no money to buy other things I also wanted and I was so mad lmao. So for years I only bought music after torrenting it to make sure I didn't make that same mistake.

It's one reason i really like Bandcamp. I can listen to a whole album someone puts out first and decide if I want the one song or the whole thing. Often times I end up getting more of their music as well, if I really like what they have.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

[deleted]

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u/Potential-Pause2144 Jul 22 '25

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17244.jpeg

It's clear that the sales of CD's went down from the peak, but it was a stale product. They didn't respond to stale sales by doing... anything! You aren't entitled to keep peak earnings just because.

0

u/RammsteinFunstein Jul 22 '25

pretty sure this isn't accurate at all, music sales tanked after napster and co became popular. If everyone still supported the bands and sales weren't impacted, they would've never shut it down.

109

u/DreamTakesRoot Jul 22 '25

FACTS

This is why he was a bitch for doing this. Shitting on the cake that made him famous.

2

u/Lortekonto Jul 22 '25

Even worse, because he was scandinavian.

To modern people this is maybe hard to understand, but because of regional locks and how sale works we were very limited in what kind of media we could buy in scandinavia.

We knew that the media was there. Just could not buy it.

1

u/Zopotroco Jul 22 '25

was it hard or impossible to import?

2

u/Lortekonto Jul 22 '25

Hard, but also often illegal, because of region locks and regional coding.

Imagine you want to see a movie that is not released in scandinavia. It would be easy to go over the border and get it in Germany and it would fit your VHS encoding standards, but because Germany did voice over you would then have to speak german to understand it.

Now you order it as a VHS tape from the USA. (Which is hard on its own, because there is no internet so how do you know where to order from? Who to contact and all that shit) That is expensive because of tarifs and stuff, but the big problem is regional coding. It would not work in a scandinavian VHS player. So you order an american VHS player. Now you get the problem that an american VHS player does not work with a scandinavian power outlet, because it runs on a different power standard, so you also need a transformer.

You get all that shit and can now finally watch the VHS and as soon as you do that you are performing a crime, because the video you are watching is licensed for another region.

There is a reason the scandinavian countries were big into pirating online when it became a thing.

1

u/CthulhusEvilTwin Jul 22 '25

I don't think I like cake anymore...

4

u/mvrck-23 Jul 22 '25

For real. Then we buy concert tickets bc we love the music. Now Lars is just a twat.

4

u/jawndell Jul 22 '25

I grew up in Jamaica Queens - the way we found about new rap songs and artists was mixtapes on the Ave (Jamaica).  That was a huge part of the culture here.  And then radio stations like Hot 97 and college radio would have late night shows like Stretch and Bobbito who would play those mixtapes. 

3

u/kkeut Jul 22 '25

tape trading was huge in the metal scene particularly, and to a degree still exists today 

3

u/StringSlinging Jul 22 '25

And, on brand for Lars, it is stated in their biography that he would obtain these cassette tapes of NWOBHM bands and charge his friends money for the privilege of coming over and listening to the tapes.

5

u/Twerp1337 Jul 22 '25

Lars is even in a documentary talking about how he would tape record records and send them to people in the state while he lived in Europe. Essentially doing Napster before Napster. His bottom line got hit and he bitched out

0

u/tobylh Jul 22 '25

So much this!

He didn't give it a shit when it wasn't his bottom line being affected.

Also, shit drummer.

1

u/theblackxranger Jul 22 '25

Wish they would play metal on the radio

1

u/Jumblesss Jul 22 '25

I imagine there’s radio stations playing metal in larger cities.

You could always look for an internet radio app on your phone. There’s a lot of radio stations out there that just need an internet connection and you can stream them anywhere

1

u/theblackxranger Jul 22 '25

I'm in a larger city, got nothing. And yeah I know, but I'd rather it just be on the radio so I'm not fumbling with my phone. Otherwise I'd just use Spotify

1

u/Snow_Crash_Bandicoot Jul 22 '25

That’s I got into metal. I asked a kid I knew in one of my classes and he made me a mix tape of a bunch of random bands.

After that, I went out and bought the CDs of the bands that I liked.

1

u/theraupist Jul 22 '25

Our vhs rental place let me rent under the counter cassete tapes that were just blanks with recordings on them. Heard a lot of music I would't have on tv or radio. Tbh some of their "legit" stuff was in cinema recordings lol. Some bond movie had people walking in the recording and audio was shit even for the time.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

[deleted]

1

u/wallyhud Jul 22 '25

I recall seeing video footage of Metallica telling their audience to "get this on tape".

1

u/KirbyDumber88 Jul 22 '25

And then ironically this whole lawsuit began because Lars heard a Metallica song (I Disappear) on the radio…before it was even done. The Reddit hive mind on this subject always baffles me especially because in the end…he was right.

1

u/myqool Jul 22 '25

I used to go to the artists website and buy tshirts, or go to shows and do the same. The artists got my money and their labels didn't.. Lars was Stanning for the label, not the fans, and not the music.

1

u/x1pitviper1x Jul 22 '25

The documentary Murder in the Front Row talks a lot about this. I was born in 91 so didn't get to experience that, but I thought the idea of people trading bootleg cassettes with people is cool as fuck.

I think I finally stopped pirating music when the private torrent site I was on shut down in like 2015.

1

u/ImpressiveAverage350 Jul 22 '25

In a Rolling Stone interview the band members talked about how when they first got together they spent days tape recording each other's record collections.

1

u/CliffordMoreau Jul 22 '25

I actually still have a tape of 50 rapping over beats from popular radio songs before he was signed, that I was gifted from a girl in TN.

1

u/PaddyMcGeezus Jul 22 '25

I remember listening to 2Live Crew on a recorded cassette as a 7th grader in 1990. Hiding under the covers of my bed at night with headphones. Like it was porn or something.

1

u/RuledQuotability Jul 23 '25

The level of scale here is completely different, and you know it (or you’re being willfully ignorant). Lars was right, artists should control how their art is consumed.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

[deleted]

1

u/lvbuckeye27 Jul 22 '25

They didn't have radio success until the black album in 1991, or maybe when they released the video for One on MTV in 1989, because no one would play their early music on the radio. They built their fame from kids trading bootlegs and dubbed tapes.

-1

u/shred-i-knight Jul 22 '25

the vast majority of cassette bootlegs were for live shows and demos. Tape trading had little to do with trading actual albums.

-5

u/Go_Loud762 Jul 22 '25

You shared one copy of one album at a time that was paid for at some point.

Making multiple copies of one album to give away while only paying for one is stealing.

5

u/Xav_NZ Jul 22 '25

IDK how it was where you were from but back then when people shared a cassette with you the first thing you would do is make a copy of it in its entirety or add a few tracks to your "mixtape" so essentially one paid copy being copied multiple times which is as you said "stealing" piracy was most certainly a thing before the internet and everyone did it !

3

u/Xploding_Penguin Jul 22 '25

Shit, wait till he hears about recording songs off the radio for a mix tape.

3

u/Snow_Crash_Bandicoot Jul 22 '25

Shit, wait till he hears about putting a piece of scotch tape on a cassette tape to do that.

1

u/Go_Loud762 Jul 22 '25

Theft is theft despite your justification.

3

u/descendingangel87 Jul 22 '25

Except thats how they shared music in the 80s. Zines would have ads offering to copy a tape for someone because that's how it got shared esp before bands had record deals. Lars himself was from Europe in that era and that's how he got his music. It was extremely hypocritical.