I made a point to never buy anything Metallica after this. As a teen I switched to listening to other bands such as Black Label Society and bought their CDs. Napster was fun, the old days of downloading songs and putting them on cassette, later onto cds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.
I had Napster and wouldn't even bother to download their crap music for free.
shareEvery artist has an obligation to protect their copyrights. If you don't fight to protect your IP/copyrights, you forfeit them.
Mixed tapes and cds were becoming very popular. They were bulky items, it made no sense to have a CD with 2 good songs on it.
shareWe're not going to rehash the pros of Napster. All I'm saying is any artist, or business or inventor actually has a legal obligation to take steps to protect their IP's.
Napster was viewed as some sort of Robin Hood type hero in pop culture, but they were always going to lose their fight to be pirates. And the people who fought them had to fight them, they really had no choice, and that didn't make Metallica bad people.
The end of Napster didn't kill downloading MP3's. Afterwards came Kazaa to take its place (that program infected your computer with Trojan horses and malware), then Direct Connect and then finally BitTorrent.
Although Napster was fun. I had a classmate who had a cable modem with "high-speed" internet in 2000 and we were on it. My very first encounter with broadband.
cheap streaming has pretty much killed off illegal mp3 downloading though these days
Well, that's the case with everything. Piracy isn't as rampant as it once was. With the rising cost of streaming services it might make a comeback, however.
Streaming is Becoming Cable TV
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zetm-urf-JI
I wonder if kids today with the convenience of Spotify even bother to check out stuff that is too politically incorrect to be allowed there. Probably not. I remember when I had my CD Walkman and burned mix tapes (well, technically mix CDs) from MP3 files I downloaded with music that my parents would kill me for if they knew I was listening to it. I would be up late at night in bed when everyone was sleeping and listen to it. Spotify has rap music and all that so maybe I'm just overtly sentimental but I still feel that's gospel music compared to what I was listening to. 🤗