Gotta love the Metallica backlash.
Personally, I love Metallica, all of it. I own all the CDs, even the ones widely regarded as bad ones (Load and Reload), I listen to all of it and am excited for the new album. I've been listening to this band since I was 14 and the first CD I ever owned was the Black Album and it changed my life.
Napster sucked. All P2P file sharing sucks, IMHO, slow download, horrible sound quality -- if the whole file downloaded at all -- and generally not worth the time or effort. So, frankly, I don't have an issue with what Metallica (and other artists) did regarding Napster. Then again, I thought the whole concept blew chunks anyway, and I end up spending money on CDs no matter what.
Chris Cook has a valid point, though, about where artists make their money. It's all in touring. But ultimately I think the whole Napster thing was about control. It's no secret that Lars and James are both control freaks and that's one of the primary reasons Jason Newsted claims he left the band -- they had such an iron grip they wouldn't really let him contribute.
I just ignore any of the control-freak nonsense that happened during the early days of digital music sharing because it shouldn't change my taste in music. If I let people's business decisions affect what music I choose to listen to I wouldn't own any music at all.
In any case, I am stoked, I happen to really like The Day That Never Comes. I listened to it three times yesterday and thought Kirk Hammett was just showing off his metal god shredding abilities at one point. Heh. I still wanted to throw up the devil horns and bang my head. But, I was kind of driving the first couple times, so I figured best keep both hands on my steering wheel.
I purchased the digital download/CD package and downloaded a whole bunch of other digital content yesterday on missionmetallica.com.
Also, I hope to go see Metallica when they come to Seattle Dec. 1, plus I've been listening the hell out of Mandatory Metallica.
By the way, Sirius and XM have not yet merged as they only recently got FCC approval to do so, thus they are not one company but still two independent companies.
But, you can still listen to all the NASCAR you want on Sirius!
Back to rocking out to Metallica because I love all the music they make. It's a hell of a lot better than most of the other crap you're hearing on the radio these days.