How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

by Stephen Witt

  On a busy day, the plant could produce a quarter million compact discs. Six hundred people were employed there, and the plant ran shifts around the clock every day of the year. Most were permanent workers, but to handle high-volume runs the plant relied on temps like Dockery and Glover. The two were at the very bottom of the plant’s organizational hierarchy. They were unskilled temporary laborers who worked the opposite ends of a shrink-wrapper. Glover was a “dropper”: wearing surgical gloves, he fed the married, stickered discs into the gaping maw of the machine. Dockery was a “boxer”: he took the shrink-wrapped discs off the other end of the belt and stacked them into a cardboard box. The jobs paid ten dollars an hour.

  Amidst this drudgery, Glover and Dockery soon became friends. Dockery, clownish and extroverted, provided Glover with amusement. Glover, taciturn and diligent, provided Dockery with a ride. Despite appearances, the men had much in common. They liked the same music. They made the same money. They knew many of the same people. Most of all, they were fascinated by computers.

  This was an unusual proclivity for two working-class Carolinians in the early 1990s—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC. But Glover and Dockery were ahead of the curve. Their computers both had modems, and they had begun to experiment with bulletin board systems and the nascent culture of the Internet. In 1995, the online world was still largely a fragmented archipelago of homegrown servers, most of which couldn’t talk to one another. Like the Galápagos, the bulletin boards were isolated islands that developed distinct vocabularies and cultures, and you connected to them by dialing a phone number you got from the back of the newspaper.

  Glover’s interest in technology was inherited. His father had been a mechanic. His grandfather, a farmer, had moonlit as a television repairman. Glover, born in 1974, was their namesake, and they called him Dell to avoid confusion with the two other Bennie Glovers around the house. Things had been hard for his forebears: their lives were defined by the era of “colored” discrimination that Dell had only narrowly missed. In a time of entrenched, endemic racism, the elder Glovers had carved out niches as “tinkerers,” capable men who could fix anything from a blown vacuum tube to a busted gasket.

  As a child, Dell had expressed an indefatigable interest in cars, motorbikes, radios, televisions, and anything else with engines or circuitry. He relentlessly sought to understand how machinery worked, taking it apart and reassembling it over and over again. His father, himself a quiet, practical man, had encouraged these interests. Dell remembered fondly his first ride on a tractor, followed by a terse discussion of how the machine worked and what each part did.

  At the age of 15, Dell purchased his first computer. His mother was there with him in the electronics department at Sears. The year was 1989, a time when the PC was still the domain of hobbyists. The Sears catalog from that year outlined the specs of a typical machine: 2 megabytes of RAM, a 28-megabyte internal hard drive, a one-color monitor, and two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. The total cost ran to $2,300, a purchase perhaps better understood in contemporary, inflation-adjusted terms: Glover had paid the equivalent of $4,000 for a 20-pound box with less computing power than a low-end cell phone.

  He didn’t have the cash up front, so Sears offered him an installment plan, with his mother as cosignatory. To make the payments, he took a summer job as a dishwasher at Shoney’s. When school started that year, he continued to work, commuting directly from campus to the restaurant and working until eleven at night, every weekday, even Friday. His grades suffered and his overall interest in school declined, but Shoney’s management was impressed by this capable and tireless worker. By the time he graduated, he was running the kitchen.

  Around this time, too, Glover’s nights became difficult. While sleeping, his breathing became constricted, and he would choke or snort, and then awake with a start. On a bad night this could happen several times in an hour. Glover’s sleep apnea was a chronic, undiagnosed condition that made his days groggy and his nights unbearable. It was a contributing factor to the grueling routine that he stuck with into his 40s: 12 hours of work, followed by some free time on the computer, followed by four or five hours of troubled, restless sleep. On weekends he went bowling.

  After graduation, and following an indifferent stint at community college, Glover began to look for full-time employment. Food service was out. Shoney’s was a grease trap, and Glover was tired of smelling like fryer oil. But he walked away from the job having learned a valuable lesson: if you worked hard, you got a promotion. For the next two years Glover moved furniture, and supplemented his income with a succession of low-wage rotations from a temp agency. In 1994, he was placed in a long-term engagement working weekends at the PolyGram plant.

  PolyGram. The name and the job had piqued Glover’s interest. He knew the company as a music label, but wasn’t familiar with its roster. In time, he would come to learn that PolyGram was just a division of a much larger corporate entity: Philips, the consumer electronics giant headquartered in Holland, the co-inventors of the compact disc. In addition to being a digital enthusiast, Glover was an avid music consumer, and he was fascinated by compact disc technology. He’d recently made the transition from tapes to CDs, and a few months earlier he had even purchased a used player with the express intention of taking it apart. He had taken inventory of the component parts: a mechanical drive, a headphone jack, the standard array of circuitry, and a small consumer-grade laser. The discs themselves contained a series of microscopic grooves, representing a series of ones and zeros. The laser fired its beam at the grooves and bounced back the information to a sensor. Then the circuitry translated that information into an electrical impulse, which was sent to a speaker, completing the transformation from digital signals on plastic to analog vibrations in the air.

  On his first day at the plant, Glover was presented with the standard battery of workplace paperwork. Among these documents was PolyGram’s “No Theft Tolerated” standard, which barred the unauthorized removal of unreleased compact discs, under threat of termination. The terms of this standard were broad, and extended to unauthorized duplication and “conspiring with others.” Glover signed, dated, and initialed this document, and it was placed in his employee file. Then he was led to the factory floor.

  It soon became clear that PolyGram wasn’t employing him for his technical skills. Anyone could be a dropper. Feeding jewel cases into a shrink-wrapper required neither skill nor work ethic, only a heroic resistance to boredom. Occasionally, Glover was tasked with applying the “Parental Advisory” warning stickers by hand, and that was the closest the job ever came to fun. Still, he saw the potential for advancement. Several of the plant’s permanent employees had started out as temps, and some now even worked in management. There was some kind of future here, maybe as a technician, maybe as an overseer. Reaching those heights required only dedication, and the lessons of Shoney’s applied.

  In fact, opportunities for advancement were everywhere. The Baptist backwoods of the Carolina foothills were transforming into America’s fastest-growing industrial corridor. In most of the country manufacturing jobs were vanishing, as work was automated or outsourced to Latin America and Asia. But in the Southeast United States the reverse was happening, as favorable tax rates, cheap land, and an antipathy toward organized labor attracted the attention of multinational corporations. In 1993, BMW had opened its first ever automobile factory outside of Germany: not in China, nor Mexico, but Spartanburg, South Carolina, just across the state line from Glover’s hometown. Dozens of other multinationals had followed, including the Dutch conglomerate Philips that had hired Glover. The Carolinas were changing.

  Glover’s hometown of Shelby was changing too. The seat of Cleveland County had for decades been a sleepy holdover from the bad old days of the rural South. The town square abutted the train depot, and south of it the main road led past a tony array of colonnaded mansions. Across the highway, property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of
racial segregation. Divided by race and geography, the town’s population remained united by religious denomination. More than two dozen Baptist churches ministered to Shelby, and in summer outdoor faith healings and tent revivals were a common sight.

  All of this was now being paved over. Shelby’s new “downtown” was a long string of cookie-cutter corporate franchises along either side of Highway 74. There was a Wal-Mart, a movie theater, a strip mall, a Chick-fil-A, another strip mall, a Bojangles’, and a megamall. The stores were arranged in a single-file line, which even in a town as small as Shelby tended to create traffic problems. They were all surrounded by high-capacity parking lots.

  Car culture, the great equalizer of American life, was on the rise again. Rank, status, and style were displayed via the vehicle one drove and the accoutrements one added to it. The price of gasoline was the topic of endless discussion, comparison, and speculation among Shelbyites—they talked about it the way New Yorkers talked about their rent. This clogged, anonymous strip of highway was now the center of Shelby’s social and cultural life.

  Such as it was. Glover liked his hometown, but he was the first to admit that life there could be terribly boring. On weekends, he headed to Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, located about an hour’s drive east of Shelby. There he found excitement at Club Baha, or Club 2000, or any of Charlotte’s other half dozen dance floors, where promoters and DJs spun hip-hop records to raucous, racially mixed crowds. There was energy to the nightlife there, spurred on by a recent reinvention of the popular sound. Radio-friendly bubblegum was out; hard-edged gangster rap was in. Glover fast became a Charlotte fixture, sometimes accompanied by Dockery. Young and handsome, with a deep voice and an affected nonchalance, Glover was generally successful with women. Dockery was not.

  The clubs weren’t too far from Shelby, but they were far enough. Two hours’ drive for a few hours of fun wasn’t the best trade-off, and if, by some ill-starred arrangement of fortune, you found yourself driving home alone at the end of the night, there was the ever present hazard of the DUI. So it was often easier to bring the club to you, which you did by blasting the music out of the trunk of your car. The new trend in rap seemed specifically designed to encourage this activity. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and the other pioneers of the West Coast sound were pushing a resurgence in car culture that popular music hadn’t seen since the Beach Boys. In the parking lots of Shelby and Charlotte, Glover was exposed to this strange new world of hydraulic suspensions and window tints, powered subwoofers and chrome rims. A well-equipped car could turn a barren expanse of asphalt into a spontaneous party zone where dozens of people laughed, danced, flirted, and drank. It could even lead to the promised land: a joyride with your girl, up and down the town’s main drag.

  Despite his good looks and demeanor, Glover was at a disadvantage in this respect. His Cherokee was serviceable as a commuter vehicle, but unsatisfactory as either a mobile stereo system or a chick magnet. The advantages of a better vehicle and the standard suite of aftermarket upgrades were apparent, and the need for them was urgent. From early on he was driven by a sort of narrow-minded cupidity: he wanted a better car.

  Soon. For now, though, the Cherokee would have to do. On that Saturday in 1995, after a long shift of dropping and boxing, Glover and Dockery were ready to relax. Something different was on the agenda for that night. One of the machine technicians had invited the two to a house party. Both Glover and Dockery were angling for better-paying permanent positions, and, although their coworkers sometimes seemed a little stiff, attendance at the party was a chance to network.

  The night turned out to be full of surprises. The party was more enjoyable than Glover had expected, with plenty of alcohol, and girls, and other things as well. Several representatives from plant management were there, and Glover was startled by how friendly they were outside of work. As things progressed, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, the club fixture, was keyed into the popular sound, but he’d never heard any of this music before, even though much of it was from artists whose work he enjoyed. A few drinks in, he had a hazy epiphany. Of course he’d never heard this music before. It hadn’t been released yet. The host was DJing the party with music that had been smuggled out of the plant.

  CHAPTER 3

  In June 1995—just after Karlheinz Brandenburg’s meeting in Erlangen, just before the party Dell Glover attended with his coworkers—Doug Morris, the North American head of Warner Music Group, walked down the corridors of Time Warner’s Manhattan offices for a meeting with his boss. On the walls around him hung hundreds of gold records commemorating a series of successful releases that went back to Sinatra. Warner Music was itself part of the larger Time Warner entertainment conglomerate, whose legacy went back further still, all the way to the original Warner brothers, and a significant portion of twentieth-century American entertainment history belonged to it.

  Morris, who had come to power just eight months earlier, felt confident this streak would continue. Since his appointment as CEO, Warner had dominated the record business, and Morris had been rewarded with a company car, a personal chauffeur, a corner office with a piano, and access to the company jet. Managing the most profitable music company in America, at the most profitable time in its history, he was earning ten million dollars a year, plus stock options. And on the strength of recent signings, the future looked even better.

  At 56, Morris was approaching late middle age, but he retained the body language of a teenager. Broad faced and clean shaven, he eschewed late nights and went to the gym every morning. Years ago he had gone bald on top, and when he smiled, he raised his eyebrows and the lines on his forehead arranged themselves around a smooth notch of scalp where there once had been a widow’s peak. He affected an air of perpetual bemusement, but his eyes conveyed an expressive, penetrating intelligence, and his personality was magnetic.

  A nice Jewish boy from Long Island, Morris had been raised in the tranquil middle-class hamlet of Woodmere, one of America’s first suburbs. There, he developed a pronounced regional accent, and for the rest of his life coffee was “cawfee,” water was “wahduh,” and Long Island was “Lawng.” Morris’ father had been an attorney, but illness had hampered his professional life, and so his mother, a dance instructor, was the family breadwinner. Doug’s ambition had been apparent from childhood, as had that of his brother, who went on to become an oncologist. But although more respectable careers beckoned, Morris, from an early age, knew he was destined for show business.

  At Columbia University he was a straight-C student, neglecting his studies to focus on the piano and a potential career as a musician. This wasn’t just a pipe dream—Morris played concerts throughout high school and college, and was even briefly signed to Epic Records, who released his only vinyl single. (It didn’t chart.) After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1960, he was drafted into America’s peacetime army and stationed on a military base in France for the next two years. In 1962, he returned to permanently settle in New York City, then in the middle of the Greenwich Village folk music revival. But Morris was out of step with this scene, more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan, and he failed to make it as a performer.

  He decided to try it as a songwriter. He learned the craft at Laurie Records, as an assistant to Bert Berns, the hitmaker responsible for “Hang On Sloopy” and “Twist and Shout.” Despite appearances, successful songwriting was a challenge, even though most hit pop songs consisted of little more than a few saccharine lyrics and a rearrangement of the chords C, F, and G. (Late into his career, Morris would contend that every chart-topping song from the last half century was just a reworking of “La Bamba.”) In 1966, after several years of striving, he finally scored a minor radio hit with the song “Sweet Talkin’ Guy,” performed by the Bronx-based girl group the Chiffons.

  The experience of hearing his own work on the radio delighted him, but Morris struggled to replicate this success. Songwriting was a competitive discipline, and Morris wasn�
�t seeing a lot of interest in his work. In 1967, he was further discouraged by Berns’ untimely death from a heart attack, at the age of just 38. Seeking a change in direction, he began transitioning to his first role in management. Though he continued to offer in-studio guidance, and still occasionally received producer credits, from this point forward he was a businessman.

  In 1970 he set off on his own, founding his boutique independent label, Big Tree Records, with a $50,000 investment. Over the next few years, the label scored a few minor hits, most notably Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” which Morris also produced. Like many of Big Tree’s songs, the tune was commercially viable but artistically insipid. Still, sales were sales, and in time he earned the attention of major players, particularly Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, who agreed to a distribution deal with Big Tree in 1974, and bought the label outright in 1978.

  Ertegun was a legend. The high-living son of Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, he had made his career by wandering into the juke joints of black America and capitalizing on the rhythm and blues sound, signing Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. As hard rock replaced R&B, Ertegun followed, assembling the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young supergroup and signing Led Zeppelin off the strength of their demo tape. Ertegun then sold Atlantic to Warner Music Group, netting himself an enormous fortune while retaining creative control. In the early 1970s he completed the classic rock trifecta, awarding the Rolling Stones their own custom label and one of the largest distribution contracts in history. They paid him back with Exile on Main Street. Still looking for fresh talent, Ertegun thought he saw it in Morris, in spite of Big Tree’s humble roster.

  Morris was put in charge of ATCO, Atlantic’s custom records division, where he oversaw both Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song imprint and Rolling Stones Records. While the talent on the roster was exceptional, both bands had already peaked creatively, and here again Morris oversaw a series of bland commercial hits. Still, he was charming and he earned the label money, and in time Ertegun came to love him like a son. In 1980, Morris was promoted to president of Atlantic Records, and his office was placed next to Ertegun’s own. After a year of successful service, Ertegun gave him a bonus of a million dollars.