I hate Metallica. I loathe almost everything about Metallica, and it has nothing to do with their music at all. In fact, I enjoy a great deal of their pre-1990 catalogue and a few songs that have come out since then. They are one of the bands that generated my real interest in metal during my youth and this interest has stayed with me ever since then…but I still hate Metallica.
It’s not because they sold out, nor is it because they cut their hair when I was six-years-old. The reason why I hate Metallica is they made music piracy a hot button topic back in 2000. What makes me hate Metallica even more is that I can’t, no matter how I try, justify music piracy even though I actively participate in it.
I was in seventh-grade, and Napster just came out. Since I was only twelve, I pretty much only downloaded “The Bad Touch” by The Bloodhound Gang and “The Thong Song” by Sisqo. This was a wonderful time for me and my fellow seventh-graders due to the fact that the average age of our teachers was around two-hundred-fourteen and they just recently traded in their abacuses for internet machines. Explaining Napster to them would be like teaching Latin to your dog, so it goes without saying that the little Gateway hard drives that the school board shelled out big bucks for were chock-full of DMX songs. Metallica ruined it for all of us when their lawsuit against Napster hit the mainstream news.
The job market is very limited for pre-teens, so going out and buying music like a responsible adult just wasn’t in the cards. With my love of music ever growing and my main means of going about getting it for free being taken away, I cried foul. Very often, the people who were on the receiving end of my uneducated and un-researched claims asked me to explain how downloading music could possibly be okay. I never had a good answer, except for the old standby: “those bands are rich enough all ready.”
Now that I am older and theoretically smarter, I probably should have some sort of logical argument pertaining to the legality of downloading music for free. The sad reality is that I don’t, and it’s not due to a lack of trying.
The only real argument that I could come up with stems from the idea that Napster and programs like it are file sharing services, meaning that the people we download the music from are not the artists, but regular Joes and Jills who have bought the albums and decided to upload them onto the internet, and they are not doing it for any sort of profit. Since bands typically make most of their money from touring and merchandise and not from record sales, the sharing of their music wouldn’t hurt their wallets too much and it actually may increase the chances of someone going to see them live and buy a wristband with their name stitched into it. The counter argument is that if purchasing albums were truly so meaningless, then why do artists bother to put them in stores? The answer is to appease their labels, mostly, since they are the ones who see most of the money. Say what you want to about labels and how they built an industry built upon parity and marketing to ethically questionable demographics, and not through finding talented, unique bands, but a lot of work goes into the recording, production, packaging, and distributing of an album just like anything else we would be expected to buy without a single audible sigh. Why should buying albums be any different than buying a sandwich from Subway, a book, or a Sea-Doo? I wish I could download a Sea-Doo.
Other file-sharing programs and torrents have come out by the dozens since the ending of Napster (although, they have a paid subscription music service now, but it doesn’t work with iPods which is totally not epicsauce. Can we convince Steve Jobs to give the go ahead to a subscription service for the iPod? Somebody already convinced him that making a giant iPhone would be a good idea, so it can’t be that hard, right?). Using the examples of Napster, DC++, Kazaa, Limewire, and The Pirate Bay it has become apparent that music, movies, and game piracy will be around in at least one form or another as long as the internet remains in its current modus operandi. Even without the internet, we also get music for free from our friends through flash drives or ripping someone else’s CD onto our computers. I don’t feel like a hypocrite for saying these sorts of things since, despite the questionable legality of the situation (no, not The Situation), downloading music has become a part of our generation’s identity. A few pure souls may exist, but the probability of finding someone our age that has never downloaded a song through some sort of questionable method is about as likely as Lars Ulrich learning how to correctly play drums.
An article about Metallica on this blog? I'm suprised, and impressed with your writing and your take on their involvment in shutting down Napster over 9 years ago.
ReplyDeleteA positive twist on something you were getting at in your 6th paragraph is that some record labels and artists have actually embraced the idea of the "leak" to generate album sales and increase interest in their artists/work. Since it's safe to say that downloading isn't going away anytime soon and that suing the people who most likely support and buy your music isn't good business, it makes sense (and is pretty neat for someone who is really into a certain band that has a new release on the horizon) for the music industry to unofficially embrace torrenting and downloading. You see this in "official album streams" and especially on band MySpace pages. Like you said, if you look at the big picture, it's a good move for everyone when the music industry embraces something they once so publicly frowned upon, because it can only help your band(s) if more people hear the music and go out and purchase merch and/or tickets.
As for Metallica, for anyone reading this, go buy/download/torrent/whatever their album "...And Justice For All" or, really, any of the ones that came before it. 80's Metallica is hands down some of the best music EVER, even if Lars (and Kirk; James and Rob can still play) can't play to save his life nowadays. Also, if you were to ask the band their opinion of what happened with Napster nowadays, you'd probably hear a bit of regret for what happened mixed with the fact that they didn't really understand what they were dealing with at the time. It's a generational gap; people who heard/found out about Metallica in the 80's and 90's heard them on a radio, a turntable, or a bootleg. This is what Metallica knows. Today's generation hears Metallica music over their computers, through streams or downloads. It's two different ways of hearing the same thing, one is legitimate and legal, while the other is somewhere in between accepted and illegal.