5 Times Metallica Were The Best Band In The World (& 5 Times They Were The Worst)

Long before Spotify, when CDs reigned supreme and MP3s were kind of hard to come by (least of all because of the existentially painful late-'90s/early-'00s download speeds) there was Napster.

The brainchild of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster was a P2P service set up so that users could easily share (often copyrighted or bootlegged) music content. So, when Metallica's mainstream rock banger I Disappear, which was set to be released as part of the M:i:2 soundtrack, ended up on the radio unfinished, the band knew something was wrong. After discovering their entire catalogue available for free, they decided to uphold their all-American values and sue the living hell out of Napster.

But the fans and general public weren't happy. Lars spearheaded the campaign and garnered most of the backbite, in what became an ugly, us vs them, big money vs the little man kind of fight. This went so far as Metallica delivering a long list of names of users who had downloaded their music, who were subsequently banned from the site.

But there was no stopping the flow - illegal music sharing services continued to grow and, eventually, helped legitimise the new mode of consuming music: legal streaming. While there is a strong case to be made on the band's part, all that Metallica actually succeeded in doing was royally pissing off many of their fans.