7. Drummer Crushes Fans Underheel
Metallica were another hard rock band whose powers were arguably on the wane come the turn of the millennium. Seminal releases such as Master Of Puppets and The Black Album were fond but distant memories, as the turgid Reload album torpedoed the group's momentum. Surely this was the best time for the band to take stock of what made them so special in the first place and reward their fans with a stunning return to form? Lars Ulrich thought differently. A million years ago, Napster was at the cutting edge of music. Created by student Shawn Fanning, the site operated a file-sharing service where digitally encoded music was shared peer-to-peer as MP3 files. Users could experience a whole new world of music, with the premise that they would be honest enough to buy records by a band that they had gotten into on the site. Naïve maybe, but well-intentioned. Ulrich disagreed. The art and private jet loving sticksman went into meltdown upon hearing an unreleased track hit the airwaves through Napster, and launched a lawsuit in which he sought damages of a minimum of $10 million. The Dane may have had a point in seeking to protect his royalties, but turning up in court with a list of every user who had downloaded his music was essentially smacking the wrists of everybody who had listened to his music in this way-his own fans, in essence. Way to stick it to 'The Man', Lars. He won an incredibly grubby victory, ensuring that Napster had to become pay-to-use whilst keeping the trough in which the band were sticking their snouts brimming full. Were he not aware of the negative perception of himself as a heavy-handed bully that he had presented gleefully to the world, he surely was after he was booed onto the stage at the 2000 MTV VMAs.