this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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I was around at the time, and there were half a dozen other platforms that took centre stage once Napster closed its doors. Morpheus, KaZaA and eMule were my main ones. Free music was as available as it ever was, so in that sense all Metallica did was lose fans and annoy everyone.
The basic concept is still around today in the form of Soulseek, which is where I get 99% of my pirated music from (such as Metallica's). BitTorrent mostly supplanted these kinds of programs, though.
They even went after private servers like Hotline and public FTP.
My parents internet got turned off after someone uploaded a Metallica album to my little brother’s drop box on a Hotline server.
He didn’t even know the files were in there at the time, and had been using the Hotline server to share 3D softwarez and models.
Made a lifelong ememy of Metallica that day.
also itunes popped up and people started paying again