If you don’t know what Napster is, A) you’re an idiot and B) I’m surprised you even made it to our site from the tube entrance. However if you do know what Napster is, then you probably joined the app’s creator, Shawn Fanning, and hate Metallica. Don’t feel too bad for poor Shawn, though…he recently cashed in his latest venture for 300,000 benji’s - that’s a sweet $30 million for the group A bunch.
Dumb.
When I first discovered Napster, I, along with everyone else on the planet acted like a bunch of kids in the candy store. Grabbing almost every file we could find whether we actually wanted the song or not. It was like this huge party, everyone was listening to music, carrying hundreds of songs in theirs pockets and not on shiny metallic discs. Things couldn’t be better. But then the aforementioned assholes showed up and took a leak in the party punch.
I’m not going to get into the hypocrisy behind a band that got it’s start because the fans were freely sharing their music through free demos distributed by the band. Anybody that’s ever even touched a musical instrument knows that you only want people to hear your music if they paid for it! Right?
Anyway, you know the story, they sobbed to the government, Napster became a second rate, subscription-based file sharing site, and Metallica continued to reward their ever so loyal fans with loads and loads of crap (the latter, Rock Band: Metallica, will probably bank them more than any album releases — just like it did for Aerosmith).
But all is not lost. There are still A LOT of ways to get Metallica music for free. Not because we like to listen to the music, but just to piss them off.
Side note: There was one shortfall to Napster. The closest thing to porn that anyone had was the sound of a woman having an orgasm (or was that Donald Duck?). Now, don’t get me wrong, that can do wonders when you’re in a pinch, but I much prefer the plethora of material offered by today’s file sharing services (and I’m not talking about that shitty application that only has songs that fax machines can understand known as Lime Wire).
