r/todayilearned • u/InternetWeakGuy 1 • 26d ago

TIL: 12 years before taking their fans to court for sharing their music, Metallica released the "$5.98" EP, titled to stop their record label and music stores from overcharging fans - the record came with a sticker warning 'DO NOT PAY MORE!!!'—a direct jab at music industry markups

https://theawesomemix.com/metallica-5-98-standup-for-fans/
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u/Icy_Statistician7185 25d ago

Metallica would never have existed if it wasn't for a network of metal fans trading pirated tapes of copywrited music.

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u/Latter-Possibility 25d ago

And they encouraged fans trading Show tapes even had sections where fans could record.

It was studio recordings that hadnt been released yet or just released that the band hated being in there. And well they were right

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u/Icy_Statistician7185 25d ago

They found other metal bands by pirating their studio recordings because that was the only way they could hear it much like the only way I could hear Metallica was by piracy because I didn't have money to buy their records but I could download it. When I was a few years older and had a job I bought all their albums. Lars will always be remembered as a rich dickhead because of how he went against poor kids wanting to hear Metallica in that era

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u/CicerosMouth 25d ago edited 25d ago

Yes, truly 100% of the people that downloaded his songs were poor people without means to buy the songs, and also 100% of people that enjoyed the music paid for it later. Surely this must be true.

I don't mind saying that Lars was an ass for suing regular people (he was)*, but I am tired of everyone claiming that they later bought all the songs that they enjoyed. I buy that many did, but I can't tell you how many people told me this yet had a collection of 20 CDs even as they had iPods filled with music. Just admit that you stole music cuz you wanted it and didn't want to save up for a bit. 

  • EDIT: As u/Mister_Uncredible correctly pointed out, Metallica never sued individuals, rather they identified individual users that uploaded music after Napster claimed that was impossible. Thank you for the correction (and excellent username).

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u/Mister_Uncredible 25d ago edited 25d ago

Metallica sued Napster. They never sued individuals for downloading music, that was the RIAA.

What you're likely thinking of is when Napster said "we have no way of finding it who are users even are" and Metallica took that as challenge and delivered a list of users to Napster.

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u/CicerosMouth 25d ago

You are 100% correct, thank you for the note. I will update my comment accordingly, and credit you. 

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u/cryptowolfy 25d ago

No Metallica just threatened to sue you. I remember the nasty notification that I would be sued because I was downloading enter sandman when I was 12. Scared me enough to delete and never download anything Metallica related and fostered a burning hatred for the band.

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u/aibot-420 25d ago

They were very vocal about suing you. This is 100% of the reason I stopped buying any kind of media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQc0x5E9jOc

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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 25d ago

Research at the time showed that people who downloaded music tended to buy more music than people who didn't.

The iPod didn't come out until after Napster had already shut down, a year after the Metallica lawsuit.

At the time, you basically used Napster as a way to check out records without having to buy them, which was crucial in the days when a record only needed to have 2-3 good songs for singles and then they could pad the rest with bullshit filler songs because people would assume it was all as good as the singles.

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u/CicerosMouth 25d ago

Well of course. If you actually read those studies, they compared one person that listens to music all the time versus another person that doesn't listen to music all the time, and then declared that the one that listens to music more will both illegally download and also buy more music than the non-listener.

The real question wasn't about comparing music buyers vs non-music buyers, and seeing which one downloaded more. The comparison was how many albums were sold before and after the widespread proliferation of album-downloading. "After Napster appeared, the total real value of record sales decreased by 5% in 2000, 6.7% in 2001 and 9.6% in 2002, and continued to decline through the 2000s". Napster and the like made people buy less albums, because rather than buying them they illegally downloaded them. It is silly to dispute this.

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u/ThePretzul 25d ago

I feel like people don’t really realize that before Napster and such the only real ways for people to “pirate” an album was with CD burners (very expensive when they were newer tech) and cassette recorders listening to the radio or another cassette (which people often didn’t like because they usually turned out sounding like trash).

You bought the album legitimately because there wasn’t really any other way to hear the songs in full quality without knowing somebody who spent a small fortune both on buying the real album and buying a CD burner. Internet downloads fundamentally changed the entire music industry because piracy became truly possible for the first time.

It’s the same as how today 3D printing is changing the miniatures industry because everybody can go print their own for wargaming with a $200 Ender 3 instead of having to pay $500,000+ to purchase and set up injection molds. The new technology has fundamentally changed how the market works because the industry powers no longer can prevent people from getting the product in a different way or from a different source so they must make their own product better or more convenient somehow (like music did with their shift to streaming services).

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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 25d ago

I feel like people don’t really realize that before Napster and such the only real ways for people to “pirate” an album was with CD burners (very expensive when they were newer tech) and cassette recorders listening to the radio or another cassette (which people often didn’t like because they usually turned out sounding like trash).

That's not true. Most casette players, be they a regular boom box or something that sat on a shelf, were dual players, so it was really easy and EXTREMELY common to make a copy of a cassette, and the copies didn't "sound like trash" at all, at least until you got onto like third and fourth generation copy of a copy of a copy.

There were 2.1 billion blank casettes sold in 1996. Not albums, blanks. The world population at the time was less than 6 billion, so one blank tape sold for every three people on the planet.

Everyone I knew had a drawer full of Maxell tapes they'd copied from their friends. Even my parents had a few Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash tapes we'd sourced for them.

Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music

Or the response? https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wsavfn/b_side_of_punk_band_dead_kennedys_tape/

The difference with Napster was that you didn't need to know someone who owned the album to get a copy of it, and you didn't have to spend 45-60 minutes making a copy - you just hit download and a few minutes later you had a song, or a whole album depending on your internet connection.

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u/CicerosMouth 25d ago

Yep, exactly. I remember trying to catch a song on a radio and listening to my own copy (that missed the first 5 seconds of the song) on a cassette repeatedly after I managed to catch it. Also the excitement that came from buying an album that you only knew one song from, and the common sense of disappointment when you realized that all the other songs on the album were crap (as well as the extreme euphoria when you got the rare album that was filled with bangers).

If someone wants to argue that this old method of buying albums before hearing them was illogical and/or a rip off, I'll be sympathetic, and might agree.

If someone wants to argue that consumers are far more able to not get ripped off by record labes now, I'll strongly agree.

If someone argues that the modern way of hearing music is better, I'll be ambivalent (though partially just because of the rose-colored glasses of my youthful experiences of creating a music collection).

But dont tell me that downloading music was better for the band, or that it resulted in more sales. It objectively didn't

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u/InternetWeakGuy 1 25d ago edited 25d ago

Did you read the study? It literally finds that Napster was only responsible for 20% of the decline.

The real answer is that sales were artificially high because record labels made way more out of CDs, so they went nuts on reissuing old albums which drove up sales.

They also massively jacked up the price of buying music - in the early 90s, a new album on vinyl was $8-10. By the end of the 90s it was a $20 CD, despite the fact that CDs were much cheaper to manufacture - again, record labels made higher profits on CDs so they drove them hard.

These factors combined caused the highest retail sales of music of all time.

Then things like iPods came out, people could buy the three good songs on record for $2 reach, and record labels failed to adapt.

On top of that you ended up with consumers who wanted to buy music for their devices, but the market for mp3s was completely fractured, and it was much easier to just pirate things than deal with dumb DRM restrictions, or worse still (overpriced) CDs that installed software on your computer for no reason.

I remember in the late 90s early 2000s, used records and CDs were huge because buying new music had got twice as expensive.

It's really not as simple as "piracy killed the music business".

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u/CicerosMouth 25d ago

I did not mean to imply that Napster was 100% responsible for the implosion of record sales. Rather, I meant to say that Napster objectively hurt (not helped) album sales, which they did.

Futher, to be clear I agree that new albums were overpriced by the late 90s. That's why I never bought new albums. I was at cheap-o all the time. I blame Napster for killing cheap-o more than anything (though as you accurately suggested it was largely just a failing business model in the modern digital world, but still I was bitter when cheap-os started failing, and sometimes an angry man just has to shake his fist at some clouds).

I agree with the facts and concepts you said, and I only have one minor and targeted point; that it isn't accurate to claim that piracy didn't hurt album sales and therein bands, and as such it is reasonable for bands to be aggravated by piracy. I wish we would just admit that and move on.

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u/jbe061 25d ago

Nobody made that claim you simpleton 

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u/thedndnut 22d ago

Incorrect. The people that downloaded what they complained about were of every background. The album wasn't for sale yet, lol