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

by Stephen Witt

We met for the first time in 2012. Returning from prison, he, too, had developed an interest in weight lifting, and hit the gym with characteristic discipline, adding twenty pounds of solid muscle to his frame. But as his body grew intimidating and bulky, I could see from photographs that his face had actually relaxed, and when he reflected on his life the familiar grimace would fade into an expression of fatherly tenderness. I don’t think he’d ever really considered the risks he was running as a bootlegger. He’d just wanted something and had impulsively gone after it. Nevertheless, his encounter with America’s criminal justice system had marked him, and sometimes, when he was telling me the juicier bits of his story, he would go to the window and pull aside the curtain to scan the block, as if the Feds might still be out there, waiting for him to slip up again.

  By the end of the year he’d begun to wonder if there wasn’t an easier way to make money than working 16-hour shifts on a production line. Capital had gone global, and bounced from New York to Montreal to Paris to Japan. Labor stayed local, stuck in Shelby, North Carolina. That geographic disconnect was a key driver of inequality, and Glover was beginning to see it. He enrolled in night school and began pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He worked fewer hours, and his life became more stable. He regularly attended services at Friday Memorial Baptist. He sold the Navigator—rims and all—to a buyer he found on Craigslist.

  Inevitably, though, the sidelines remained. Glover, now 40 years old, continued his work as a self-described “tinkerer.” For small cash payments, he did low-level computer maintenance and repair. He installed software on friends’ computers. He set up wireless routers for the elderly, careful always to protect their networks with passwords. He formatted hard drives and reinstalled frozen operating systems. For twenty bucks, he would jailbreak your iPhone.

  The sideline extended to optical disc technology. Xboxes, PlayStations, Wiis, Blu-ray—if your device wasn’t working, you took it to Glover, who would fix it for a small cash fee. Most of the time, somebody had inserted a second disc on top of a first, or maybe the laser had burnt out. The fixes were simple and required no more than a screwdriver and a single replacement part. Meaning, if you had a busted CD player, Dell Glover could fix that for you too.

  As technology evolved, such physical relics were left behind. I could relate to Glover’s fondness for obsolete tech—looking to hold on to my music collection, I’d saved every hard drive from every computer I’d ever had. There were nine of them, dating back to 1997, each one double the capacity of the last. The earliest, with just two gigabytes of storage, contained the first few songs I’d ever pirated. Now, across all the drives, I had more than 100,000 mp3s.

  It had taken me 17 years to amass all these files, but the rise of cloud computing made the whole thing pointless. My hoarding instincts were fading, curating the library was growing more tiresome by the year, and the older drives didn’t even work with modern systems. Finally I caved, bought a Spotify subscription, and accepted the reality: what I’d thought of as my personal archive was just an agglomeration of slowly demagnetizing junk.

  How to dispose of it? I googled “data destruction services” and soon found myself in a warehouse in Queens, carrying the drives in a plastic bag. I was prepared to pay for the service, but the technician told me that, for such a small job, he’d be willing to do it for free. He led me around back, through a massive warehouse shared by a variety of industrial firms, to a small chain-link partition that belonged to his company. Once we arrived, I watched as he donned a pair of safety goggles, then picked up a large pneumatic nail gun. He took a drive from the bag, placed it on a workbench, and systematically blasted a half dozen nails through its metal housing. Then he picked it up and shook it next to his ear, to listen for the telltale rattle of its shattered magnetic core. One by one he repeated this process, until the bag was empty. When he had finished, he gathered the ruined drives in his arms, then threw them in a nearby dumpster, on top of thousands of others.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It took me nearly five years to write this book, and the list of people who assisted me is long. Several professors at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism provided invaluable guidance and support, particularly Sam Freedman, Kelly McMasters, Kristen Lombardi, John Bennet, and the trustees of the Lynton Fellowship. I’d especially like to thank Jim Mintz and Sheila Coronel, who taught the best class I have ever taken.

  Reporting is an intrusive process, but my sources have been exceptionally cooperative and kind. In Ilmenau, Karlheinz Brandenburg was an almost embarrassingly gracious host. So too was Bernhard Grill in Erlangen. Matthias Rose and Susanne Rottenberger at Fraunhofer arranged a half-dozen interviews for me, and also helped me rescue my rental car after I backed it into a ditch. At Sony, Doug Morris was generous with his insight and time, as were Julie Swidler and Liz Young. In New York, Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai provided invaluable information and context. Above all, though, I have to thank Dell Glover for sharing his incredible story with the world.

  I will never forget the day (my birthday, coincidentally) that my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, pulled my manuscript out of the slush pile and told me I had something worth publishing. As a writer I was unheralded and unknown, attempting to effect a lateral career transition at the age of 34, with no platform, no name recognition, and no published work. But Chris—possibly suffering from some sort of head trauma—decided that I was going to be his next client, and his decision changed my life. Without his business sense and editorial guidance, this project would have foundered. The reader will, I hope, forgive this treacly Rod Tidwell moment, but he really is that good. So are Will Roberts, Andy Kifer, Rebecca Gardner, and the rest of the team at the Gernert Company.

  I got lucky with my publisher, too. At Viking Press, Allison Lorentzen took a huge chance on me, and later graciously entertained my desire to read the entire manuscript to her out loud, sacrificing her weekend in service of my neurosis. She’s a great editor. The rest of team at Viking are great, too: Diego Nunez, Min Lee, Jason Ramirez, Nicholas LoVecchio, Lydia Hirt, Sarah Janet, Lindsay Prevette, Whitney Peeling, Andrea Schulz, Brian Tart, Clare Ferraro, and Catherine Boyd. Across the pond at Bodley Head, Stuart Williams, Vanessa Milton, Kirsty Howarth, Joe Pickering, David Bond, and James Paul Jones were all terrific. (I especially enjoyed the UK libel read. Let’s do it again sometime.) And I can’t forget my fact-checkers, Jill Malter and Dacus Thompson, who were forced to wade through thousands of pages of notes and to remind me on repeated occasions that no, Charlotte is not the capital of North Carolina. Additional fact-checking work was done by Lev Mendes at The New Yorker, where editors Willing Davidson and David Remnick were kind enough to publish an excerpt of this book.

  It’s not always easy having a writer as a friend. Actually it sucks, so I’d like to publicly acknowledge those people close to me who listened (or at least pretended to listen) to me complain about this project over the years: Robin Respaut, Dustin Kimmel, Josh Morgenstern, David Graffunder, Elliot Ross, Brian and Kimberly Barber, Laura Griffin, Daryl Stein, Dan D’Addario, Pete Beatty, Bryan Joiner, Lisa Kingery, Dan Duray, Brian and Kristy Burlingame, Bernardo de Sousa e Silva, Lauren and Rui Mesquita, Jamie Roberts, Beverly Liang, Atossa Abrahamian, and Jihae Hong. Extra-special thanks go to my spirit brother Daniel Kingery, for nearly two decades of love and friendship. And extra-extra-special thanks go to Amanda Wirth, without whose patience, kindness, and support this book would never have been written.

  Lastly, there is my family. Here I am luckiest of all. My father, Leonard Witt, was himself a journalist for many years, and has always encouraged me to write. My mother, Diana Witt, is a librarian by training, and she even compiled the index for this book. But it was my sister, Emily Witt, who really showed me the whole thing was possible. She’s a great reporter, an original thinker, and one of my favorite living writers. She will forever be an inspiration to me.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  A private detective once explained
to me the essence of the investigative method: “You start with a document. Then you take that document to a person, and ask them about it. Then that person tells you about another document. You repeat this process until you run out of people, or documents.” Starting with the Affinity e-zine interview quoted in this book, and following this iterative process for the next four years, I ended up with dozens of people and tens of thousands of documents. A comprehensive catalog would take pages—below is a selection.

  The key interview subjects for this book were Karlheinz Brandenburg, Robert Buchanan, Brad Buckles, Leonardo Chiariglione, Ernst Eberlein, Keith P. Ellison, Frank Foti, Harvey Geller, Bennie Lydell Glover, Bennie Glover, Jr., Loretta Glover, Iain Grant, Tom Grasso, Bernhard Grill, Bruce Hack, Jürgen Herre, Bruce Huckfeldt, James Johnston, Larry Kenswil, Carlos Linares, Henri Linde, Doug Morris, George Murphy, Tyler Newby, Harald Popp, Eileen Richardson, Domingo Rivera, Hilary Rosen, Johnny Ryan, Patrick Saunders, Dieter Seitzer, Jacob Stahler, Alex Stein, Simon Tai, Steve Van Buren, Terry Yates, and Elizabeth Young.

  The list of documents is longer. The annual reports of Fraunhofer IIS were supplemented by the Institute’s own record keeping, particularly their documentary website on the history of the mp3, and their short video interviews with early mp3 team participants. Additional historical perspective on the mp3 story was provided by Telos Systems, and the “official” mp3 story was supplemented by reports and press releases from MPEG, ISO, AES, and various patent offices, with Leonardo Chiariglione’s MPEG archive at Chiariglione.net being a critical resource. Early demonstration versions of L3Enc, Winplay3, and other historical software from the mid-’90s were sourced from various underground sites. (Many times, the pirates ended up being the best archivists.)

  The reporting on the structure and nature of the Scene relied heavily on court documents, testimony transcripts, and evidence submitted by the Department of Justice during the prosecutions of various warez groups, particularly RNS, APC, and RiSC-ISO. Supplementing this was the FBI’s heavily redacted case file on the Patrick Saunders investigation, obtained by Saunders himself under the Freedom of Information Act. The documentary record of the official court system was matched—and sometimes exceeded—by the shadow bureaucracy of the Scene itself. Various dupecheck sites and leaked databases provided millions of NFO files, but it wasn’t until Tony Söderberg’s creation of Srrdb.com that these found a centralized home. The tireless work of other Internet historians proved invaluable as well, particularly that of Jason Scott and the rest of the team at the Internet Archive.

  Reporting on the life and history of Dell Glover comes from a series of ten interviews I conducted with him, on the phone and in person, over the course of nearly three years. I corroborated the details of his story with historical photographs, court testimony, DOJ evidence, clemency letters written by his friends, family, and neighbors, Facebook posts, corporate records from Vivendi Universal and Glenayre, arrest records from the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, and on-site visits to the Kings Mountain plant. Details of the leaked CDs were cross-referenced against RNS NFOs, and checked, when possible, with the physical evidence of the discs themselves—he still has them.

  Reporting on the rise and fall of Oink’s Pink Palace relied heavily on my own experiences as a user of the site, as well as my participation in the broader private tracker underground (undertaken for research purposes only, of course). My personal background was supplemented by evidence, testimony, and court documents from the European torrent trials, particularly the UK’s prosecution of Alan Ellis and Sweden’s prosecutions of the founders of the Pirate Bay. Historical information about the sites was also provided by the terrific reporting at torrentfreak.com, and several documentary films, particularly TPB:AFK, helped shape my understanding of this world.

  Details of the ups and downs of the music industry came from sales figures provided by Billboard, the RIAA, and the IFPI, supplemented by several decades of corporate filings from Warner Music Group (in various incarnations), MCA, Seagram, Apple, Sony, and Vivendi Universal. Additional perspective came from industry analyses produced by Bain & Company, the Nielsen Company, the Institute for Policy Innovation, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., and the now-deceased U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. Evidence of wrongdoing in the music industry, specifically compact disc price-fixing and industry payola, comes from both the Federal Trade Commission and the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Information about the RIAA’s structure, funding, and decision-making process comes from public tax documents, interviews, trial testimony, and evidence submitted in numerous civil court cases. For the lives of the musicians themselves, I relied on a wide variety of trade publications and video sources, but I would like to single out Adam Bhala Lough’s 2009 Lil Wayne documentary, The Carter, for praise.

  The reporting on Doug Morris’ career, earnings, and assets relied on corporate filings and public records, supplemented by various public appearances he has given over the years, particularly his 2007 appearance on PBS’ CEO Exchange and his 2013 keynote lecture at Oxford Business School. Getty Images’ archive of 2,203 candid party shots of Morris also provided context, as did his 2007 congressional testimony defending the content of rap lyrics. Naturally, Morris’ incredible career had already attracted a fair amount of media coverage, and here I am indebted to the work of other journalists, especially regarding the frenzied reorganization of the music industry in 1995. While I tried wherever possible to supplement their efforts with my own research, there is no substitute for timely, original reporting. In particular, I relied on prior work from James Bates, Connie Bruck, Dan Charnas, Fredric Dannen, Fred Goodman, Robert Greenfield, Walter Isaacson, Steve Knopper, Mark Landler, Joseph Menn, Seth Mnookin, and Chuck Philips. The more I researched Morris’ life, the more impressed I was by the skill and investigative tenacity of the “old guard” of newspaper and magazine reporters. Let’s keep this tradition alive.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth As I moved toward higher-quality files from private torrent sites, the albums took up more space than typical downloads.

  a secret database that tracked thirty years of leaks Specifically, a database of Scene NFOs stretching back to 1982.

  using forensic data analysis Different Scene releasing groups and torrent sites used different specifications for preferred bit rates and encoders over the years. By comparing these specifications with embedded ID3 metadata in the file, it is possible to get a general sense of an mp3’s time and place of origin.

  CHAPTER 1

  “He’s very good at math …” All quotes from Fraunhofer colleagues. The last is from Seitzer.

  liminal contours of human perception For details, see Eberhard Zwicker and Richard Feldtkeller, The Ear as a Communication Receiver (Acoustical Society of America, 1999).

  “Perfect Sound Forever” Philips’ tagline for its demonstration 1982 compact disc was “Pure, Perfect Sound Forever.” The disc contained tracks by Elton John, Dire Straits, and the Dutch Swing College Band.

  one-twelfth their original size Digital information is stored in binary units of zero or one, and each individual value is referred to as a “bit.” The bit rate of CD audio is 1,411.2 kilobits per second (kbps)—in other words, it requires 1,411,200 of these bits to store one second of stereo sound. Germany’s first digital phone lines transmitted data at 128 kbps—in other words, they could transmit 128,000 of these bits per second. Thus the CD audio specification was 11.025 times larger than the capacity of the data pipe. With the conservative touch of the engineer, Seitzer rounded this number up.

  the compression algorithm could target different output sizes Technically, Brandenburg’s algorithm made multiple passes on the source audio until the desired bit rate was achieved. With each pass the information was simplified, and fewer bits were used. A 128-kbps mp3 took more passes to create than a 256-kbps mp3, and thus its audio quality was lower.

  Johnston was the Newton
to Brandenburg’s Leibniz Like Newton, Johnston claimed he had got there first and, with a somewhat churlish touch, would tell of a public presentation he’d given in Toronto in 1984 in which he’d outlined concepts in perceptual coding that predated Brandenburg’s work by nearly two years. But AT&T hadn’t understood the value of Johnston’s research, and Brandenburg had filed his patent first.

  MPEG … decides which technology makes it to the consumer marketplace MPEG is perhaps the world’s strangest standardization committee. Its continued existence depends almost entirely on the work of a single person: an eccentric Italian engineer by the name of Leonardo Chiariglione. Despite volunteering more than 10,000 hours of his life managing the organization for the last 25 years, Chiariglione lays claim to none of its patents and has never earned any money for his work. He describes his motivation in almost metaphysical terms: “MPEG is the bridge between the human and the rest of the world.”

  The Stockholm contest was to be graded A technical description of the format and results of the Stockholm contest can be found in “MPEG/Audio Subjective Assessments Test Report,” International Organization for Standardization, 1990.

  MPEG approached Fraunhofer with a compromise In addition to the MPEG deal, Fraunhofer made engineering concessions to please Thomson and AT&T. The final piece of technology took a variety of sound-sampling and compression methods and bound them together with the computing equivalent of masking tape. James Johnston, who despite his grumpy, plainspoken manner, was careful never to swear, thus described the mp3 as “A hybrid. Or maybe an impolite word for an illegitimate child.”

  better known today as the mp3 The name “mp3” was not widely used until the introduction of Windows 95. During the period after the MPEG announcement, the mp3 was referred to as “Layer 3.” Although anachronistic, from here on I refer to it as the mp3 for clarity.