In my last blog entry Music Business and The Starfish I shared my highlights of chapter 2 of The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. Today, I’d like to continue that topic and discuss Metallica’s fight against Napster.

In 1999, eighteen-year-old Shawn Fanning, aka Napster, started sharing music files with his friends through a P2P (peer-to-peer) platform he managed out of his dorm room. That very event and the way (some) artists and record companies acted upon, changed the way music is consumed today. Lars Ulrich from Metallica battled Napster in a very aggressive way and became the ‘face of evil’ of the music industry for Generation Y. Lars Ulrich claimed that he only stood up for his intellectual property rights. On February 12, 2000, the courts rules against Napster marking the death of the music business as it was known for past decades. Even though Napster had to stop their ‘illegal’ activities, new players such as Kazaa, eMule, and Bittorrent came up to make life even more miserable for record companies. The new platforms became even more decentralized and almost impossible to stop. Brafman and Beckstrom write in The Starfish and The Spider,

“Who started eMule? No one knows. They simply can’t be found. Sam Yagan, head of eDonkey, explains that “eMule is a rogue network, it’s open source, there’s no way for [major record companies] to pursue the entity eMule.”… Companies like eMule are so decentralized that they are beyond the reach of any label’s lawyer. Who would you sue—the software? There is not even a trace of a leader.”

What upset most people wasn’t just the tone Lars Ulrich used when talking about intellectual property rights, but that he seemed simply greedy. Metallica made piles of money by selling millions of CDs, concert tickets, over-priced T-shirts, and other gadgets to their fans. And, all of a sudden these millionaires are getting upset with their fans for sharing their passion among each other? Years back, Lars Ulrich sort of predicted the future of music talking about concert bootlegs. He stated,

“What are you going to do about [bootlegging]? It’s there. So, if you confront it and deal with it on some sort of level instead of pretend that this doesn’t go on …” (watch the interview)

There was nothing artists could do about it. Most of those bootlegs were dodgy anyway. I claim it is the same with today’s file sharing. Most illegal MP3s don’t have the quality you would receive when buying a CD or a legal download. I would have understood Lars’ behavior if he would have been poor and really relied on each and every sold CD or LP, but that wasn’t the case. Funny enough, bands like Dispatch, an unsigned and simply unknown band, became famous in the US by spreading their music for free in the high-days of Napster. The band couldn’t understand how hundreds of fans could sing along at their concerts, when only twenty CDs got sold up until then. Only a few years later, with higher Internet penetration, people found the answer.

Independent labels realized what was cooking in the music industry and embraced the new technology and got friends with it. A friend of mine, who runs a very renowned rock studio in Hollywood, is about Lars Ulrich’s age and understood the change early enough to go from analog to digital. Maybe my friend saw it coming because he wasn’t dealing with majors, but mostly with independent labels, who have to be up-to-date and, especially, down-to-earth with their customers.

Almost ten years later, Metallica seems to have learned from the Napster incident. Metallica’s new album “Death Magnetic” leaked from a music store in Paris ten days before the actual release set for September 12, 2008, and eventually found its way onto Bittorrent and the likes. Lars told San Francisco’s Live 105,

“Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.” (Source: blog.wired.com)

I’m glad he became more Zen about it. Maybe, if he wouldn’t have been that aggressive when Napster got big, none of the above would have happened in such a dramatic way.