In seems so long ago that people who bought music on physical formats awoke to Napster presenting the possibility of a future where songs where accessed purely digitally almost instantly and for little money (well, back then free if you waited half an hour). Metallica famously stood their ground against Napster and went to court… and now we know what Metallica think of that now.

 

Kirk Hammett was interviewed by Dean Delray on Let There Be Talk, and he conceded total defeat: “The amazing thing now is back then, people were saying, ’20 years from now, we’re gonna look back and say, ‘Goddamn it! We did the right thing… But when people were saying back then we were actually gonna make a difference? We didn’t make a difference — we did not make a difference. It happened. And we couldn’t stop it, because it was just bigger than any of us — this trend that happened that fucking sunk the fucking music industry. There was no way that we could stop it. It was a perfectly human thing that just happened. And what had happened was all of a sudden, it was just more convenient to get music and it was less convenient to pay for it. And there you have it.”

 

He went on to say the only way to make money from music now is to play it live, and has a dig at bands who don’t even really perform but press play on their recordings. “That’s cool, because it really separates who wants to do this and who is just here for the fucking pose.”