METALLICA's Record Label To Be Bought By NAPSTER Founder?

The Pulse Of Radio reports that METALLICA's record label is for sale — and one person interested in buying it is the man who founded Napster, against which METALLICA fought a legal battle more than a decade ago. According to All Things Digital, Napster founder Sean Parker is in talks to team up with two other private investors to purchase the Warner Music Group, where METALLICA has been making records since 1984.

Back in 2000, METALLICA launched legal action against Napster, claiming that the pioneering music file-sharing service was illegally allowing users to download METALLICA tracks without paying royalties to the band. Although the case was settled out of court, 300,000 users were banned from Napster as a result and METALLICA's image took a tremendous beating in the eyes of music fans.

Napster's legal battles continued with Warner Music Group and other labels until the service finally went under in 2002.

Parker, who later became a billionaire by helping to launch Facebook, may now make a bid for his old enemies' label, which is suffering from the same woes as the rest of the traditional music industry.

Parker was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the recent, Oscar-winning movie about the start of Facebook, "The Social Network".

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich, who was the main spokesperson for METALLICA in the Napster battle, later admitted that he wished he had dealt with the situation differently.

Even if Parker succeeds in buying WMG — and four other parties are said to be in the race as well — he might not get to be METALLICA's boss after all. The band's last effort, 2008's "Death Magnetic", was its last under its current contract, and it is not known whether the group has re-signed with the label.

METALLICA frontman James Hetfield told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that the band has yet to decide what its future plans are for distribution of its music. "It's kind of a good feeling to feel that you're free from any piece of paper that binds you to something," he said. "But over our career, we've learned a lot about record companies, the goods and evils of the business and this and that, and we're not very focused on that right now. It is what it is, and when it becomes time for us to either renegotiate or shop around or do things ourselves or something like that, we don't know. There's nothing but options, which is great."

In a 2003 interview with Launch, Lars about the band's battle with Napster, "Most of the time, it's like a bad dream, like what the fuck was that? [Several] years later, it's like did that really happen? We went from being somewhat well-respected, well-liked, and then I woke up one day and all of a sudden I was the most hated man in rock 'n' roll. It was like, huh? Me? What did I do wrong? I'm one of the good guys. That was all kind of weird. If you look at our history, we've always been pretty protective of our own shit. When anybody got too close or fucked with our shit, we always took action. In retrospect, I'm proud of what we did, I really felt sideswiped on that one. In my own little ignorant world, I didn't see it coming. I was completely ignorant and unaware of the magnitude of this issue for people. I was just sitting there in my own little selfish world going, 'I'm going to protect METALLICA. Don't fuck with METALLICA.' Then (explosion sound),'You're pro-record company, you're greedy!' I'm not pro-record company. We invented being anti-record company. We told our record company to go fuck themselves before anyone else. Stop. It was a very surreal thing, because it was so hard to connect what I read about myself and METALLICA, it was so abstract to what was on my radar about my own reality. People going, 'You're a really greedy little man.' It was like, what are you talking about? We've been giving shit away for years. We want to be the ones giving it away, not someone else. I'm proud of the stance we took. It was a very tough time. It was a much tougher time, because in the middle of that you have to put your best game face on. It was difficult. A lot of that shit hurt and it was very bewildering because it was difficult to connect it to your own reality. For better or worse, it got a good debate started. In retrospect, I'm not claiming any sort of victory — who gives a shit about that? — I think more people are starting to realize, not that we were right, but this is an issue that is changing the face of everything that is going on. Not only the music world, but the film world is next. What better way to deal with it than at least educate people about it. If nothing else, I look back at the six months in 2000 as the first step in the education."