James Hetfield: ‘Lars Ulrich is still taking bullets for Metallica's Napster lawsuit’

The heavy metal giants sued Napster in March 2000 when a demo of their song ‘I Disappear’ circulated on the peer-to-peer file sharing service before it was released.

Despite rapper Dr Dre filing a similar lawsuit, Metallica faced a huge backlash and, as mouthpiece of the band, Lars has bore the brunt of the criticism.

"That poor guy's still… he's taking bullets, he's taking hits for it still,” James told The Joe Rogan Experience via Blabbermouth. “That poor guy, he got beat up by that, and we all stood behind him. Obviously, he was the spokesman for it. He chose to do that.

“Management said, 'Hey, this is coming. This is coming. Let's be the ones that stand up for artists.' And he grabbed the flag and said, 'I'm going.' And there were lots of other musicians and people that were on board as well, but they weren't as vocal or taking the hits like he did.

“Even like Dr. Dre, he was on board with it, but for some reason, in the rap world, it's, like, well, it's all about money anyway. So what?"

James continued: "For heavy metal, there was some kind of stigma around you're an asshole if you're rich, or if you've been successful or something. It's, like, 'We've gotta pull you down into hell with us. Don't be getting good now.' So there was that stigma.”

Explaining that Metallica were fortunate to weather the storm, James added:  "We were at that point where we had such a following, we had such a strength in Metallica that we survived all of that stuff. But there was a lot of bands that didn't — they couldn't sustain themselves, couldn't feed their families because of what happened.

"I think the frustrating part was no one really understood that music is our life. If you take that, if you take our… Like, the way we wanna present our music is part of the art. Like releasing an album. Here's how we we'd like to release it. We don't want it leaked over here. We don't want this happening. The presentation is part of the art. Like when you walk into an art studio, the artist has been in there putting it together, like, 'Okay, I want you to see this first, and then that, and then you go here, and you get bam!'

“There's a passion behind that, and when someone just throws it out there, it kind of loses an impact. But we have survived and we feel good about it and we've adapted, but the record companies certainly did not."

Lars is now good friends with Napster’s billionaire co-founder Sean Parker, who invested $15million in Spotify in 2010. He even attended Parker’s Lord of the Rings-esque wedding in 2013.