When Metallica took on Napster: 25 years of the trial that changed the music industry forever

On April 13, 2000, the metal band Metallica stopped appearing in the music sections of the newspapers and instead moved to the business, economics, technology, and law sections. The reason: a lawsuit filed against the website Napster for copyright infringement. It all began when, on the file-sharing platform, someone posted a demo of I Disappear, a song that the band, led by drummer Lars Ulrich and vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield, had composed for the soundtrack of the film Mission: Impossible 2. The single wasn’t scheduled to be released in its final version until May of that year and, furthermore, it was the band’s first new recording since 1997. The leak was supported by several radio stations in the U.S., which began airing the song as a scoop. This alerted the band’s representatives, who then discovered that their entire catalog (at the time, seven albums released since 1983, plus all sorts of pirated live recordings and rarities) could be downloaded for free from Napster.

At the turn of the millennium, Metallica was one of the best-selling bands in the world, but it realized not only that its financial status could be jeopardized by the exponential growth of online file sharing, but also its artistic integrity: did the public have the right to hear an unfinished song, without the band having any control over when and how it was distributed? Perhaps this second aspect would have convinced its fans, but outrage arose when the band’s lawyers sent Napster the names of 300,000 users who had pirated its songs — most of them low-income college students — demanded that their files be deleted, and their access to Napster banned. Weeks later, representatives for rap producer Dr. Dre followed suit.

When the internet began to become widespread in the second half of the 1990s, it didn’t seem like a threat to the music industry, but rather a promotional tool yet to be explored. Nor was the invention of the recordable CD (or CD-R) initially seen as a danger, but the emergence of platforms dedicated to free file sharing among their users, fueled by the increasing download speeds enabled by the internet, did demonstrate that it could challenge record companies: suddenly, users had all the albums they wanted at their disposal. And for free.

When Metallica filed the lawsuit, Napster was just a few months old. The platform was launched on June 1, 1999, by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, two computer geek students, with the intention of connecting users globally and enabling them to share compressed MP3 audio files. Napster grew to have up to 80 million registered users and also raised alarms at American universities, some of which had to block its use. This wasn’t so much due to copyright infringement issues as because its extreme use by students was blocking the system: up to 61% of the university network traffic was taken up by MP3 file transfers.

Metallica’s lawsuit further increased Napster’s popularity, as many people learned of its existence after the news broke. This also created a rift between musicians and fans and began to disrupt the normal functioning of record promotion. When Madonna’s song Music was leaked on the platform in June 2000, three months before its official release date, her lawyers not only threatened legal action, but the artist also decided to move up the album’s release date and tightened control over the advance copies provided to journalists who would write about it. Despite this, the entire CD was also available on Napster a month before its release. What at the time seemed like an anomaly eventually became standard practice.

But Madonna didn’t sue the company. She left the dirty work to her record label. In fact, all the major multinationals, en masse, supported the lawsuit against the platform. This contrasted sharply with the image of Lars Ulrich appearing in person in court with a box containing the names of all the fans who had pirated his songs. This automatically sent Metallica’s image plummeting. Those who had previously been seen as gurus of a certain alternative rock ideal became, in the public’s eyes, greedy millionaires demanding an obscene amount of money ($10 million at the time) and posing as defenders of an anachronistic music industry, trying to keep things in check.

What was wrong, many thought, with kids freely exchanging the music they liked over the internet? Thus, Metallica and the less-publicized Dr. Dre were left alone in a corner. Ulrich and company’s defenders pointed to the hypocrisy of their fellow artists, who, while letting those defending the rights — perhaps the future — of the entire industry sink in the mud, remained silent or, outright, explicitly positioned themselves in favor of Napster. This was the case, among others, with Limp Bizkit, Smashing Pumpkins, Chuck D (Public Enemy), Courtney Love, Mötley Crüe, and The Offspring. The latter even announced that their next album would be available for free download on their website... until their label, Columbia Records, stopped them. Furthermore, in a paradoxical turn of events, the California punk band decided to market T-shirts with the slogan “Save Napster,” prompting the platform’s lawyers (yes, Napster’s!) to threaten them with a copyright infringement lawsuit.

But public opinion already had a winner, something aided by Metallica’s lack of guile in the media game. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Ulrich tried to poke fun at himself when he appeared with host Marlon Wayans in a sketch where the latter played a college student listening to I Disappear. Ulrich entered and demanded an explanation. Wayans told him that using Napster was simply sharing, to which the drummer retorted that his idea of sharing was “borrowing things that aren’t yours without asking.” He then called the band’s road crew, who proceeded to confiscate all of Wayans’ belongings, leaving him practically naked in an empty room.

But his gambit backfired. Shawn Fanning, also present at the ceremony, came out wearing a Metallica T-shirt that read: “I borrowed this shirt from a friend. Maybe if I like it, I’ll get one.” When Ulrich later came out to introduce Blink-182, he was booed by the audience. Numerous taunts followed in the form of songs and comedy sketches, in which Metallica were always ridiculed.

One of the most widespread arguments in favor of Napster was the platform’s promotional power, especially for artists whose songs weren’t widely played on radio and television. The example of Radiohead is often used as proof of this. Their album Kid A was leaked on the platform in September 2000, three weeks before its release date. It was a difficult album, with no traditional singles or music videos, but it was downloaded by millions of users. When the CD hit stores, it reached number one in sales in the U.S., something the British band had never achieved before. Lead singer Thom Yorke also expressed support for Napster’s role, saying it “fosters enthusiasm for music in a way the music industry has long forgotten to do.” Even their record label, Capitol, supported them in their advocacy of file sharing and considered it crucial in stimulating album sales.

The subsequent decision to release their album In Rainbows (2007) directly online, under the “pay what you want” formula, with a notable financial profit, was the culminating moment for them and for the most optimistic defenders of free downloads. Another curious case that is often mentioned is that of Dispatch, an independent rock band from Boston. They didn’t have a record label, but they became known through Napster and ended up filling Madison Square Garden for three consecutive nights. It was the beginning of a new myth: that of the completely anonymous artist who goes viral through the internet, outside of traditional promotional methods, and who would become one of the most exploited marketing lures in the following years, this time through platforms like MySpace (which is how, without going any further, the legend of Arctic Monkeys began) and YouTube.

Who was the winner?

As Guillermo Vega reported in EL PAÍS, while the litigation with Metallica was ongoing, “the German record company Bertelsmann teamed up with Napster to create a legal subscription store that ultimately failed. Meanwhile, the startup found a possible solution: blocking songs that artists or their record labels wanted to block. After several last-minute fixes and appeals, Federal Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered the service’s definitive closure in July 2001. To continue operating, Napster had to pay millions in compensation. Lacking the funds, Bertelsmann attempted to buy the company, but nothing prevented it from declaring bankruptcy in 2002.” Since then, Napster’s history has been an erratic journey through corporate hell, with the brand being bought and sold by various companies for various uses. The latest move came on March 25, when its sale was announced for $207 million to Infinite Reality, a technology and entertainment company specializing in digital media and artificial intelligence.

Metallica won the lawsuit. A settlement beneficial to the band was reached, Napster stopped sharing music for free, shut down, and became something else. The band emerged victorious from that battle, yes, but 25 years later, it can be considered that the internet won the war against the record industry. For starters, Metallica’s public image never fully recovered. Ulrich himself acknowledged years later in an interview with Rolling Stone that his strategy hadn’t been the most timely: “I underestimated what Napster meant to people in terms of the freedom it represented.”

When the band released their next album, St. Anger, in 2003, they also had to push forward its release date for fear of it being leaked online. Only two years had passed since their victory in the Napster lawsuit, but the landscape had already changed dramatically, and they had begun a path of no return. Paraphrasing the slogan “one eviction, one squat,” typical of the squatter movement, for every download site that was shut down, another one emerged: BitTorrent, Emule, Soulseek... The emergence of the iTunes digital store in 2001 also began to pave the way for legal streaming services. In 2005, YouTube emerged, the enormous popularity of which (it’s the second most-visited website after Google) forced bands and record labels to upload their content there before fans could do so. In fact, it could be said that musicians ceased to be considered artists and became, virtually, content creators for platforms.

The definitive paradigm shift was consolidated in 2008 with the emergence of Spotify, which has since maintained its hegemony in determining how music is consumed and how creators are compensated. As Guillermo de Haro explained to EL PAÍS: “The industry brought down a company, but it couldn’t bring down the technology that enabled free file sharing. It was the business model that did.”

What happened, by the way, to the founders of Napster? Shawn Fanning appeared on the cover of Time magazine in October 2000 (something Metallica have never achieved in their more than 40-year career), and since then, he has founded and advised several technology companies. As for Sean Parker, many will remember him being portrayed by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s film The Social Network. He helped Mark Zuckerberg found Facebook and, later, was one of the first shareholders in Spotify and the person responsible for the alliance that allowed its users to share their playlists on the social network. Those entrepreneurial nerds have much more power today than rock stars.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition