I get their music from Soulseek now, rather than Napster.

Not a historian, just a concerned bystander at the time.

As I recall, it was one more nail in Napster's coffin.
It had absolutely no effect on filesharing or the industry.
It did cost them some fans for a time. Probably not many and not forever.
In short, nothing much. It was kind of a waste of time for everyone involved who wasn't a lawyer.

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.

Definitely don’t respect Metallica anymore.

It’s kinda funny that Napster promoted sales where things like Spotify hinder them.

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.

It did cost them some fans for a time.

I have not purchased a Metallica album since.

It did give us a pretty awesome flash animation.

The fans they lost over ths never came back, for the most part

metallica became karen, and started suing everybody to stay relevant, and to be lucrative.

Yup. I’ll never respect or care about Metallica ever again. Fuck them.

also itunes popped up and people started paying again

The fallout? Metallica became the butt of a lot of jokes for a few decades.