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How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Science & Technology (2015)What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?
How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store.
Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.
Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online — when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.
An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published June 4, 2015
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September 29, 2016
Remember the bad old days of buying CDs? When an album cost a fortune and buying one was a big deal? How Music got free will take you back to that era, explain why it ended, and make you glad that it's gone. This is an informative, fascinating window into the dark arts of the recording industry and the collapse in record company sales that online piracy precipitated. I raced through it, eating up Witt's story of research, money, theft and technological disruption.
How Music got free centers on three main stories- the struggles and eventual fortune-making victory of a team of German researchers, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, who created the MP3 format, the success and missteps of Doug Morris, a powerful record exec making an easy ten million dollars a year, and the misadventures of Dell Glover, a CD packing plant employee who linked in with a group of fanatical online pirates and leaked hundreds of albums online.
Witt makes the story of the German researchers and their MP3 struggle both engaging and illuminating. I’m not much of a tech head but the research around what the human ear can and cannot hear, and the ways this information was used to compress massive audio files into MP3s is fascinating.
Equally entertaining is Morris’ story, a man whose stellar career tracks the successes of the recording industry itself. Morris was a big player, and a genius at picking acts, finding talent, and selling product. In the CD era Morris’ companies kicked ass, using methods legal and not-so-legal (paying off radio DJs, arranging fake call-in requests to stations, etc.) to push albums like Lindsay Lohan’s Speak (currently sitting at a lofty 47/100 on Metacritic) to platinum.
Through Morris, Witt presents the record industry’s response to the threat of MP3s, or more accurately, their lack of a response. Like so many businesses that have been disrupted by technology (Taxi industry, I’m looking at you from the front seat of an Uber) Universal, Warners and the rest went with a classic head in the sand strategy. The recording industry ignored all the signs, portents and even direct warnings of the looming MP3 apocalypse, hoping that the private jets, 10-million-a-year salaries and complete market dominance they enjoyed would last forever. They didn't, and the industry's revenue plummeted.
The third narrative follows Glover, the emperor of music pirates, an average Carolinan working in a CD pressing factory and making in a year what Morris made in a day. Glover’s very human desires for wealth and toys ($4000 rims, baby!) lead to him stealing CDs from the plant and uploading them while running a lucrative movie bootlegging operation on the side. His rise, fall and involvement in the online scene makes for a compelling, ground level look at music piracy.
How Music got free is a sterling piece of journalistic work, an engrossing look at the end of one era in the music business and the beginning of another.
This book gave me a lot to think about. I know piracy is a problem. But the rampant profiteering of the record industry during the good times doesn’t sit right with me. Witt details that the complete cost of producing an album in the late 90s got down to less than two US dollars, yet the record companies colluded with each other to keep the retail price of CDs in the US market at seven times that amount. I personally paid thirty New Zealand Dollars a piece for albums in the late nineties and I have trouble mustering any sympathy for an industry that so greedily fleeced its customers.
How Music got free centers on three main stories- the struggles and eventual fortune-making victory of a team of German researchers, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, who created the MP3 format, the success and missteps of Doug Morris, a powerful record exec making an easy ten million dollars a year, and the misadventures of Dell Glover, a CD packing plant employee who linked in with a group of fanatical online pirates and leaked hundreds of albums online.
Witt makes the story of the German researchers and their MP3 struggle both engaging and illuminating. I’m not much of a tech head but the research around what the human ear can and cannot hear, and the ways this information was used to compress massive audio files into MP3s is fascinating.
Equally entertaining is Morris’ story, a man whose stellar career tracks the successes of the recording industry itself. Morris was a big player, and a genius at picking acts, finding talent, and selling product. In the CD era Morris’ companies kicked ass, using methods legal and not-so-legal (paying off radio DJs, arranging fake call-in requests to stations, etc.) to push albums like Lindsay Lohan’s Speak (currently sitting at a lofty 47/100 on Metacritic) to platinum.
Through Morris, Witt presents the record industry’s response to the threat of MP3s, or more accurately, their lack of a response. Like so many businesses that have been disrupted by technology (Taxi industry, I’m looking at you from the front seat of an Uber) Universal, Warners and the rest went with a classic head in the sand strategy. The recording industry ignored all the signs, portents and even direct warnings of the looming MP3 apocalypse, hoping that the private jets, 10-million-a-year salaries and complete market dominance they enjoyed would last forever. They didn't, and the industry's revenue plummeted.
The third narrative follows Glover, the emperor of music pirates, an average Carolinan working in a CD pressing factory and making in a year what Morris made in a day. Glover’s very human desires for wealth and toys ($4000 rims, baby!) lead to him stealing CDs from the plant and uploading them while running a lucrative movie bootlegging operation on the side. His rise, fall and involvement in the online scene makes for a compelling, ground level look at music piracy.
How Music got free is a sterling piece of journalistic work, an engrossing look at the end of one era in the music business and the beginning of another.
This book gave me a lot to think about. I know piracy is a problem. But the rampant profiteering of the record industry during the good times doesn’t sit right with me. Witt details that the complete cost of producing an album in the late 90s got down to less than two US dollars, yet the record companies colluded with each other to keep the retail price of CDs in the US market at seven times that amount. I personally paid thirty New Zealand Dollars a piece for albums in the late nineties and I have trouble mustering any sympathy for an industry that so greedily fleeced its customers.
July 28, 2015
I first learned about this book from an article I read back in April, titled The Man Who Broke the Music Business. The article is a selection of material which would eventually appear in the published book, and gives a good image of its style and content - if you read and enjoyed it, there is a good chance that you'll enjoy the full book as well.
Basically, How Music Got Free takes a complex and fascinating subject - the development of digital audio compression, and its subsequent impact on music industry - and aims to present it by simultaneously narrating the same period in the lives of several different people, each of whom played a part in the process. These people are Karlheinz Brandenburg, a German audio engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute, whose research helped to create the breakthrough format of compressed audio - the MP3; the other character is Dell Glover, a worker at Polygram compact disc manufacturing plant in North Carolina by day and an album leaker by night, whose leaks fueled the rising MP3 scene; and Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music who tried to guide his company and adapt the business to these quickly changing times.
If you have read the article linked in the beginning, or at least looked at it, you'll see that the text consists mostly of reporting a personal story of Dell Glover in a way which is purposefully engaging and suspenseful, rather than a more broad history of album leaking and its impact on music industry, which would be supported by several examples rather than one. This is true for most of the book - every aspect gets a representative character, whose individual story serves as an example to illustrate broader change and impact of the events discussed. This is both a good and a bad thing - the book is easy to read and rarely boring, but at the same time this very format severely restricts the amount of information that the author is able to present. The result is a rather sensational book written in a colloquial style, which is more of a dramatization and introduction to the issues that it discusses rather than a detailed study and analysis of the subject.
Consider just the aspect presented in the linked article - the rise and development of the MP3 Scene, where individuals from all over the world former various release groups and raced to release the best content as quickly as possible. MP3 releasing groups are just a part of the larger Warez scene, where different groups compete among themselves in releasing books, movies, computer software, and pretty much everything which can be shared digitally. Each of these groups had a clearly defined structure and tasks for its members - suppliers supplied content to be released, often making personal risks to obtain advance leaks. In the case of computer software such as video games, crackers would work to remove copy protection and "crack" the game, while rippers would "rip" content from the game to reduce the size of their end file, as to make it possible to download on an average internet connection in the 1990's - motion picture sequences, music soundtrack, speech files, etc. For example: a game would be released in a playable form, but those who played the ripped version would not hear its background music or see filmed cutscenes - but the rip would be just dozens of megabytes is in size, instead of several hundred. Such rip would be often compressed into a ZIP or RAR archive and parceled into smaller files (usually the size of a standard floppy disk - 1,44 MB, which at the time was often still the only way to transport files between computers) and uploaded by couriers to a Topsite - a private web server accessible only to privileged users, from where they would eventually make their way out to the whole world. Release groups would adhere to strict standards in encoding, naming and packaging their files - often attaching a special NFO file with information regarding precisely that, with shout-outs to other groups, sometimes actively searching for new members for various positions. This is digital underworld, very different from the traditional one - groups compete among themselves for status, and not for turf, with the quality and time of their releases, not violence and murder. Profiting from these activities is not the ultimate goal, and is usually openly discouraged if not prosecuted - many groups specifically ask people who download their releases to buy the legal product and support its creators. To put it simply, to people involved it's a form of sport - a competition to see who can do it better.
By focusing on a single group - RNS, aka Rabid Neurosis - the author is able to provide an insider's view of how a group operates, but misses out on an opportunity to present the large and intricate network of different music groups and the even larger and even more intricate network of the Warez scene in general. But what's more important is the lack of discussion on the development of culture of music distribution on the internet - with the increasing availability of cheap broadband internet access and free hosting sites to store ever larger files, regular internet users started to create their own music blogs. Such blogs were often topical - people would share albums from a specific genre, label or time period, often ripping and encoding them themselves and posting rare and out of print releases, doing it just for the fun of it, without the need to belong to any group. The book describes the case of Oink's Pink Palace - a private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to sharing high quality music releases, with very strict standards and a vibrant community of music lovers who contributed generously and created what Trent Reznor - the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails and a regular user - described as "the world's greatest record store". Napster, the first program to popularize sharing MP3s is discussed, but there is little mention of its successors - programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, WinMX, Audiogalaxy or Soulseek.
Inexplicably, amidst stories of people who encode music, leak it and oversee its global distribution and marketing an important figure was lost - that of the artist. How has the MP3 and the internet changed life for people who actually create music? Surprisingly, you will not find much of an answer here. Discussion of legal distribution of digital music files consists basically of mentioning iTunes in passing; there is no mention of various services which offer artists the availability to sell and market their own music and not be dependent on a record label - such as Bandcamp or Soundcloud.
There is also no discussion of any kind on how music compression gave rise to a culture of free and legal music. Sites such as Jamendo or Ektoplazm gather artists who publish their music under the Creative Commons license - artists retain the rights to their work, but it allow for their music to be downloaded, distributed and used in a non-commercial way.
There is no mention of the Netlabels - record labels which distribute music exclusively on the internet through digital audio formats, such as the MP3. Netlabels are almost exclusively non-commercial, and distribute their music for download free of charge under the Creative Commons license. Netlabels have their own standards of admission, and usually focus on independent musicians and specific genres - from drone Ambient to abstract Jazz. Archaic Horizon is a perfect example of a Netlabel, releasing quality music which focuses "primarily on thoughtful, melancholic and nostalgic themes". It's a record label administered by just two men from the U.S. and England, featuring music from all over the world - and none of this would be possible if not for the advent of digital audio compression.
(I'd recommend listening to Orange Crush and the album "Autumn Reflections" - hazy, nostalgic downtempo with rich and beautiful sound reminiscent of Boards of Canada, which you can listen to and download for free here:
http://www.archaichorizon.com/release...)
In the end, as enthusiastic about the book I was in the beginning, I was ultimately disappointed in it, as it tells only a part of the larger story. I certainly don't regret reading it and I respect the author's research into the lives of the characters he presents in it, but it's not the top of my 2015 reading that I hoped it to be. Again, the author does a great job at showing the quality and content of his work - if you find the article linked in the beginning of my review interesting, then by all means seek out the book - if not, then you can safely skip it and instead listen to a favorite song of your own choice.
Basically, How Music Got Free takes a complex and fascinating subject - the development of digital audio compression, and its subsequent impact on music industry - and aims to present it by simultaneously narrating the same period in the lives of several different people, each of whom played a part in the process. These people are Karlheinz Brandenburg, a German audio engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute, whose research helped to create the breakthrough format of compressed audio - the MP3; the other character is Dell Glover, a worker at Polygram compact disc manufacturing plant in North Carolina by day and an album leaker by night, whose leaks fueled the rising MP3 scene; and Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music who tried to guide his company and adapt the business to these quickly changing times.
If you have read the article linked in the beginning, or at least looked at it, you'll see that the text consists mostly of reporting a personal story of Dell Glover in a way which is purposefully engaging and suspenseful, rather than a more broad history of album leaking and its impact on music industry, which would be supported by several examples rather than one. This is true for most of the book - every aspect gets a representative character, whose individual story serves as an example to illustrate broader change and impact of the events discussed. This is both a good and a bad thing - the book is easy to read and rarely boring, but at the same time this very format severely restricts the amount of information that the author is able to present. The result is a rather sensational book written in a colloquial style, which is more of a dramatization and introduction to the issues that it discusses rather than a detailed study and analysis of the subject.
Consider just the aspect presented in the linked article - the rise and development of the MP3 Scene, where individuals from all over the world former various release groups and raced to release the best content as quickly as possible. MP3 releasing groups are just a part of the larger Warez scene, where different groups compete among themselves in releasing books, movies, computer software, and pretty much everything which can be shared digitally. Each of these groups had a clearly defined structure and tasks for its members - suppliers supplied content to be released, often making personal risks to obtain advance leaks. In the case of computer software such as video games, crackers would work to remove copy protection and "crack" the game, while rippers would "rip" content from the game to reduce the size of their end file, as to make it possible to download on an average internet connection in the 1990's - motion picture sequences, music soundtrack, speech files, etc. For example: a game would be released in a playable form, but those who played the ripped version would not hear its background music or see filmed cutscenes - but the rip would be just dozens of megabytes is in size, instead of several hundred. Such rip would be often compressed into a ZIP or RAR archive and parceled into smaller files (usually the size of a standard floppy disk - 1,44 MB, which at the time was often still the only way to transport files between computers) and uploaded by couriers to a Topsite - a private web server accessible only to privileged users, from where they would eventually make their way out to the whole world. Release groups would adhere to strict standards in encoding, naming and packaging their files - often attaching a special NFO file with information regarding precisely that, with shout-outs to other groups, sometimes actively searching for new members for various positions. This is digital underworld, very different from the traditional one - groups compete among themselves for status, and not for turf, with the quality and time of their releases, not violence and murder. Profiting from these activities is not the ultimate goal, and is usually openly discouraged if not prosecuted - many groups specifically ask people who download their releases to buy the legal product and support its creators. To put it simply, to people involved it's a form of sport - a competition to see who can do it better.
By focusing on a single group - RNS, aka Rabid Neurosis - the author is able to provide an insider's view of how a group operates, but misses out on an opportunity to present the large and intricate network of different music groups and the even larger and even more intricate network of the Warez scene in general. But what's more important is the lack of discussion on the development of culture of music distribution on the internet - with the increasing availability of cheap broadband internet access and free hosting sites to store ever larger files, regular internet users started to create their own music blogs. Such blogs were often topical - people would share albums from a specific genre, label or time period, often ripping and encoding them themselves and posting rare and out of print releases, doing it just for the fun of it, without the need to belong to any group. The book describes the case of Oink's Pink Palace - a private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to sharing high quality music releases, with very strict standards and a vibrant community of music lovers who contributed generously and created what Trent Reznor - the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails and a regular user - described as "the world's greatest record store". Napster, the first program to popularize sharing MP3s is discussed, but there is little mention of its successors - programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, WinMX, Audiogalaxy or Soulseek.
Inexplicably, amidst stories of people who encode music, leak it and oversee its global distribution and marketing an important figure was lost - that of the artist. How has the MP3 and the internet changed life for people who actually create music? Surprisingly, you will not find much of an answer here. Discussion of legal distribution of digital music files consists basically of mentioning iTunes in passing; there is no mention of various services which offer artists the availability to sell and market their own music and not be dependent on a record label - such as Bandcamp or Soundcloud.
There is also no discussion of any kind on how music compression gave rise to a culture of free and legal music. Sites such as Jamendo or Ektoplazm gather artists who publish their music under the Creative Commons license - artists retain the rights to their work, but it allow for their music to be downloaded, distributed and used in a non-commercial way.
There is no mention of the Netlabels - record labels which distribute music exclusively on the internet through digital audio formats, such as the MP3. Netlabels are almost exclusively non-commercial, and distribute their music for download free of charge under the Creative Commons license. Netlabels have their own standards of admission, and usually focus on independent musicians and specific genres - from drone Ambient to abstract Jazz. Archaic Horizon is a perfect example of a Netlabel, releasing quality music which focuses "primarily on thoughtful, melancholic and nostalgic themes". It's a record label administered by just two men from the U.S. and England, featuring music from all over the world - and none of this would be possible if not for the advent of digital audio compression.
(I'd recommend listening to Orange Crush and the album "Autumn Reflections" - hazy, nostalgic downtempo with rich and beautiful sound reminiscent of Boards of Canada, which you can listen to and download for free here:
http://www.archaichorizon.com/release...)
In the end, as enthusiastic about the book I was in the beginning, I was ultimately disappointed in it, as it tells only a part of the larger story. I certainly don't regret reading it and I respect the author's research into the lives of the characters he presents in it, but it's not the top of my 2015 reading that I hoped it to be. Again, the author does a great job at showing the quality and content of his work - if you find the article linked in the beginning of my review interesting, then by all means seek out the book - if not, then you can safely skip it and instead listen to a favorite song of your own choice.
April 13, 2015
Subtitled, “What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?” this is an examination of how digital music piracy became widespread from the mid-1990’s. The author looks at three different viewpoints in depth: firstly, there is Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team, who were the driving force behind the technology of the mp3, secondly, there is Doug Morris, who, at the time when this book is set, was a middle aged businessman, head of first Warner Music Group and then MCA Music Entertainment and, lastly, we have the amazing story of Dell Glover and Tony Dockery, two, rather lowly, employees at the PolyGram packing plant. The author freely admits that he was a member of this digital generation and he discovered that the vast majority of pirated music, at that time, came from just a few people – indeed, in some cases, he even managed to discover the very men smuggling the CD’s out of the primary organisation and making the music available online.
For those of us interested in the history of popular music, and old enough to recall life when the internet was just beginning, you will recall how quickly music was changing in the 1990’s. This story begins in 1995, when an entire generation of music lovers were upgrading their vinyl collection to compact discs. The music industry was not interested in streaming and were slow to make use of the technology – and resistant towards it. There was more profit in CD’s and they could be more controlled. However, the first mp3 website went live in late 1995 and music was available digitally, for those who knew where to look.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book involves Dell Glover and Tony Dockery – two workers at the PolyGram plant with a friendship and a fascination with the new digital frontier of the internet. With this new growing channel for pirated music, Glover downloaded the mp3 player and had a small library of songs on his hard drive for the first time. If the songs could be downloaded for free on the internet, he wondered what was the point of CD’s? An online encounter with a man known only as ‘Kali’ led to the two employees smuggling CD’s out of the plant and transmitting them to Kali’s server. By 2004, Glover had leaked nearly 2000 CD’s and it almost became a compulsion that the two friends were unable to stop.
This book takes us through the beginnings of ITunes and the unexpected success of the iPod, an online community of music lovers who were sharing music without paying for it, of amateur’s who loved the music and technology, to those who simply wanted to make money… By 2004 the future of the recording industry looked bleak, with CD sales down and pirate sites like ‘Oink’ four times bigger than iTunes by 2006. This is the story of greed, of risk taking, of real economic damage to the music industry and of how the power of the internet took everyone by surprise. Most of this book relates to rap music – which I personally do not like and know nothing about – but, as a journalistic story of pirated music, it is a riveting read. For anyone with any interest in the history of music, this will be a fascinating read.
For those of us interested in the history of popular music, and old enough to recall life when the internet was just beginning, you will recall how quickly music was changing in the 1990’s. This story begins in 1995, when an entire generation of music lovers were upgrading their vinyl collection to compact discs. The music industry was not interested in streaming and were slow to make use of the technology – and resistant towards it. There was more profit in CD’s and they could be more controlled. However, the first mp3 website went live in late 1995 and music was available digitally, for those who knew where to look.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book involves Dell Glover and Tony Dockery – two workers at the PolyGram plant with a friendship and a fascination with the new digital frontier of the internet. With this new growing channel for pirated music, Glover downloaded the mp3 player and had a small library of songs on his hard drive for the first time. If the songs could be downloaded for free on the internet, he wondered what was the point of CD’s? An online encounter with a man known only as ‘Kali’ led to the two employees smuggling CD’s out of the plant and transmitting them to Kali’s server. By 2004, Glover had leaked nearly 2000 CD’s and it almost became a compulsion that the two friends were unable to stop.
This book takes us through the beginnings of ITunes and the unexpected success of the iPod, an online community of music lovers who were sharing music without paying for it, of amateur’s who loved the music and technology, to those who simply wanted to make money… By 2004 the future of the recording industry looked bleak, with CD sales down and pirate sites like ‘Oink’ four times bigger than iTunes by 2006. This is the story of greed, of risk taking, of real economic damage to the music industry and of how the power of the internet took everyone by surprise. Most of this book relates to rap music – which I personally do not like and know nothing about – but, as a journalistic story of pirated music, it is a riveting read. For anyone with any interest in the history of music, this will be a fascinating read.
September 15, 2015
This is another of those reviews that I would give 2.5 stars if possible, but instead of rounding up to three, I'm lowering it to two.
The story here is indeed captivating -- and tragic, although it's not presented as a tragedy. I think it's smart to come at the erosion of the record industry's business model in the Internet age from three directions (the people who invented mp3 technology; the people who helped themselves to file-sharing without a nanosecond's thought about the fact that they were stealing; and the stalwart record executive who was helpless to stop it). There's a strong narrative here and good reporting to back it up. I learned a lot.
But the writing, though. Only when you get to the acknowledgments does it become clear, when Stephen Witt brags that he's never been published before. It shows. You can sense of lot of grunting and straining. There are many sentences here that read straight out of someone's "Magazine Feature Writing 101" course: description for description's sake, clunky expositions, transitions, overstatement. Someone can't just have a name and a background. Instead, the author writes: "There was this hard-ass attorney general in New York by the name of Eliot Spitzer..." (p. 196); "In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning ..." (p. 114). The overwritten jacket copy sort of warns you that you're going to hear the author's spurs clanking as he walks you through this tale ("in the tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright" -- um, no), but I still found it distracting and in need of one more good, tight edit. The voice was all over the place. It took me too long to read this book, which should have been a breeze.
Anyhow, back to content, instead of form: I kept waiting for a moral examination in this book that never came. The author speaks of his own vast collection of pirated music and he talks at length to the thief at the CD pressing plant who stole more music than anyone, who never has an explanation for why he had to do it. Nor does the author really talk about why he and an entire generation felt entitled to have a stolen product. This is a book about how everyone helped themselves to free music online. Everyone except those of us who didn't; those of us who, according to Witt, were over 30; we employed the same central ethic that keeps us from walking out of a 7-Eleven with candy bars we haven't paid for. Why? What changed in our philosophical/ethical core? Witt does provide some stray thoughts about how the cloud is the final end to this personal notion of "owning" a "music collection," but the book really lacks a final declarative point of view on what really happened on a moral or psychological or cultural plane.
What happened to the music industry is really no different than what's happening to everything else in medialand. I bought "How Music Got Free" at Book Soup in Los Angeles, one of my favorite independent bookstores. It took Stephen Witt five years to write it. It cost me $27.95 plus tax to buy it and read it. In a karmic sense, though, I should have stolen it or found a free copy of it online.
The story here is indeed captivating -- and tragic, although it's not presented as a tragedy. I think it's smart to come at the erosion of the record industry's business model in the Internet age from three directions (the people who invented mp3 technology; the people who helped themselves to file-sharing without a nanosecond's thought about the fact that they were stealing; and the stalwart record executive who was helpless to stop it). There's a strong narrative here and good reporting to back it up. I learned a lot.
But the writing, though. Only when you get to the acknowledgments does it become clear, when Stephen Witt brags that he's never been published before. It shows. You can sense of lot of grunting and straining. There are many sentences here that read straight out of someone's "Magazine Feature Writing 101" course: description for description's sake, clunky expositions, transitions, overstatement. Someone can't just have a name and a background. Instead, the author writes: "There was this hard-ass attorney general in New York by the name of Eliot Spitzer..." (p. 196); "In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning ..." (p. 114). The overwritten jacket copy sort of warns you that you're going to hear the author's spurs clanking as he walks you through this tale ("in the tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright" -- um, no), but I still found it distracting and in need of one more good, tight edit. The voice was all over the place. It took me too long to read this book, which should have been a breeze.
Anyhow, back to content, instead of form: I kept waiting for a moral examination in this book that never came. The author speaks of his own vast collection of pirated music and he talks at length to the thief at the CD pressing plant who stole more music than anyone, who never has an explanation for why he had to do it. Nor does the author really talk about why he and an entire generation felt entitled to have a stolen product. This is a book about how everyone helped themselves to free music online. Everyone except those of us who didn't; those of us who, according to Witt, were over 30; we employed the same central ethic that keeps us from walking out of a 7-Eleven with candy bars we haven't paid for. Why? What changed in our philosophical/ethical core? Witt does provide some stray thoughts about how the cloud is the final end to this personal notion of "owning" a "music collection," but the book really lacks a final declarative point of view on what really happened on a moral or psychological or cultural plane.
What happened to the music industry is really no different than what's happening to everything else in medialand. I bought "How Music Got Free" at Book Soup in Los Angeles, one of my favorite independent bookstores. It took Stephen Witt five years to write it. It cost me $27.95 plus tax to buy it and read it. In a karmic sense, though, I should have stolen it or found a free copy of it online.
May 10, 2019
How Music Got Free is a look at basically mp3, file-sharing, online piracy and what that did to the music industry between the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s. It is also a story of obsession, music, crime and money. It’s also a great picture of how we and our companies change. If you have ever looked at your music library on your PC or an mp3 player and asked yourself a question how all these recordings got here, here is a book which helps you to understand the whole process. Stephen Witt, the author of How Music Got Free, once stated the same question I began to investigate this. Surprisingly, he discovered that all the files that he had on his PC could be traced back to just three people.
Anyway, one of the men was named Karlheinz Brandenburg a brilliant German inventor who had spent his life investigating the properties of the human ear and how to delete frequencies that were invisible to it. He had spent decades investigating in human anatomy and what the ear could hear. So, when we hear noise what’s actually happening is it like vibrations in the air are coming and hitting our eardrum that’s transferred through something called the bony labyrinth to a small little organ inside your skull and your inner ear. It is called the cochlear which shaped like a snail’s shell. Inside the cochlear, there are these little hairs that vibrate and if you get enough for them vibrating they transfer a neuron in the brain.
Karlheinz Brandenburg during his studies, suddenly, came up with something that we now call the mp3 encoder which had the ability to take the information on a compact disc and shrink it by about 90% with very little loss in audio quality and, eventually, became the major medium for online piracy . Unfortunately, he was totally unable to monetise this invention and in desperation in 1995 he posted it for free public download to his website. Within a couple years the Pirates got a hold of it and he ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars from intellectual property.
The second person was Doug Morris, a powerful music executive at Warner Music Group in the mid-90s. He started to realise that the future of pop music was really bad so he started working with big names, major rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg. It seems that their audience has found the concept of online piracy resonating and boosted the market.
The third person, Dell Glover, was the most fascinating one and the core story of this book. He was a compact disc manufacturing facility worker at the Kings Mountain CD pressing plant in North Carolina. As he worked at the packaging line and all of this music was literally at his fingertips he figured out how to sneak out all unpublished discs. He contacted similar leakers and joined online pirate groups. There are some estimations that throughout his activity, over the course of seven years, he might smuggle approximately 2,000 discs out of the plant and ripped them to mp3.
Within hours this music would be found in peer-to-peer servers like Kazaa, Napster or LimeWire torrents. Anyway, Dell’s pirate group, Rabid Neurosis (RNS), become the premier music piracy group in the world and they by recruiting music journalists, radio DJs and people who worked in music stores, but Dell was their key inside man. For example, he leaked Nickelback, The Eminem Show, Jay-z, Kanye West, U2 and many others.
Because the music industry was losing tons of money they did an analysis which showed that the only way to stop piracy is to make it costly and expensive by throwing the pirates in jail and that is the approach that they took. So next part of the book discusses a campaign that was launched by the record companies to crack down... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/how-mu...)
Anyway, one of the men was named Karlheinz Brandenburg a brilliant German inventor who had spent his life investigating the properties of the human ear and how to delete frequencies that were invisible to it. He had spent decades investigating in human anatomy and what the ear could hear. So, when we hear noise what’s actually happening is it like vibrations in the air are coming and hitting our eardrum that’s transferred through something called the bony labyrinth to a small little organ inside your skull and your inner ear. It is called the cochlear which shaped like a snail’s shell. Inside the cochlear, there are these little hairs that vibrate and if you get enough for them vibrating they transfer a neuron in the brain.
Karlheinz Brandenburg during his studies, suddenly, came up with something that we now call the mp3 encoder which had the ability to take the information on a compact disc and shrink it by about 90% with very little loss in audio quality and, eventually, became the major medium for online piracy . Unfortunately, he was totally unable to monetise this invention and in desperation in 1995 he posted it for free public download to his website. Within a couple years the Pirates got a hold of it and he ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars from intellectual property.
The second person was Doug Morris, a powerful music executive at Warner Music Group in the mid-90s. He started to realise that the future of pop music was really bad so he started working with big names, major rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg. It seems that their audience has found the concept of online piracy resonating and boosted the market.
The third person, Dell Glover, was the most fascinating one and the core story of this book. He was a compact disc manufacturing facility worker at the Kings Mountain CD pressing plant in North Carolina. As he worked at the packaging line and all of this music was literally at his fingertips he figured out how to sneak out all unpublished discs. He contacted similar leakers and joined online pirate groups. There are some estimations that throughout his activity, over the course of seven years, he might smuggle approximately 2,000 discs out of the plant and ripped them to mp3.
Within hours this music would be found in peer-to-peer servers like Kazaa, Napster or LimeWire torrents. Anyway, Dell’s pirate group, Rabid Neurosis (RNS), become the premier music piracy group in the world and they by recruiting music journalists, radio DJs and people who worked in music stores, but Dell was their key inside man. For example, he leaked Nickelback, The Eminem Show, Jay-z, Kanye West, U2 and many others.
Because the music industry was losing tons of money they did an analysis which showed that the only way to stop piracy is to make it costly and expensive by throwing the pirates in jail and that is the approach that they took. So next part of the book discusses a campaign that was launched by the record companies to crack down... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/how-mu...)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 23, 2016
Lately, I've been having the novel experience of reading about history I remember. I remember the events of this book -- I remember my own perspective, as a very minor I-hate-the-music-industry downloader, of basically everything that happens in this book after the invention of the mp3. This is a fascinating parallax view of history, and I absolutely recommend this for anyone who remembers the heyday of music piracy.
I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested in either how we ended up with the music industry the way it is, or massive, total failures to adapt. This book covers both those topics in ample, fascinating detail, and I learned a lot of things I had absolutely no clue about at when they were happening. A small sample of the things I learned from this book:
1. The NHL was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution. Without hockey, we might not be using mp3s today.
2. I should not have disliked Hilary Rosen as much as I did in 2000; she was the dove arguing behind the scenes for making peace with electronic music and pirates.
3. Most pirated music files can be traced back to one of a limited number of groups of rippers; my image of the early days of piracy, which was random people uploading their music collections and downloading other people's, was almost totally incorrect.
4. Metallica's "Until It Sleeps" was the first "officially" pirated song, which seems especially just considering their hysterical opposition to piracy years later.
The book is also -- well, somewhat quirky. Normally non-fiction lives or dies on its narrative voice, and to be honest, Witt doesn't have much of one. Instead, he has weird moments of personal bias. These can be funny, like his truly massive hateboner for Linkin Park, which was so extreme that in reaction I found myself nostalgically wanting to listen to them for the first time since I lived down the street from -- this is true -- a Linkin Park cover garage band made up of teenagers who were just learning to play their instruments. (Three years of that, and yet I hate Linkin Park less than Witt.) But his bias is also unfortunately visible when it comes to describing the life of Dell Glover, the main CD leaker -- like, Witt at one point says Glover, who is black, was born after the era of discrimination. He is, uh, definitely wrong about that, since babies born tomorrow will still be born in the era of discrimination. In general, Witt has a very easy time relating to people who are pretty much like him, and flounders a lot when he's asked to empathize with or understand people who aren't. And his style is clear but not exactly exciting.
However, the story he's telling -- that is exciting. It's interesting watching an entire industry engage in what might best be termed malignant denial. It's interesting learning who got rich off the piracy era and who didn't. It's interesting finding out what happens when pirates grow up.
Basically, it's interesting to learn more about how music got free.
I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested in either how we ended up with the music industry the way it is, or massive, total failures to adapt. This book covers both those topics in ample, fascinating detail, and I learned a lot of things I had absolutely no clue about at when they were happening. A small sample of the things I learned from this book:
1. The NHL was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution. Without hockey, we might not be using mp3s today.
2. I should not have disliked Hilary Rosen as much as I did in 2000; she was the dove arguing behind the scenes for making peace with electronic music and pirates.
3. Most pirated music files can be traced back to one of a limited number of groups of rippers; my image of the early days of piracy, which was random people uploading their music collections and downloading other people's, was almost totally incorrect.
4. Metallica's "Until It Sleeps" was the first "officially" pirated song, which seems especially just considering their hysterical opposition to piracy years later.
The book is also -- well, somewhat quirky. Normally non-fiction lives or dies on its narrative voice, and to be honest, Witt doesn't have much of one. Instead, he has weird moments of personal bias. These can be funny, like his truly massive hateboner for Linkin Park, which was so extreme that in reaction I found myself nostalgically wanting to listen to them for the first time since I lived down the street from -- this is true -- a Linkin Park cover garage band made up of teenagers who were just learning to play their instruments. (Three years of that, and yet I hate Linkin Park less than Witt.) But his bias is also unfortunately visible when it comes to describing the life of Dell Glover, the main CD leaker -- like, Witt at one point says Glover, who is black, was born after the era of discrimination. He is, uh, definitely wrong about that, since babies born tomorrow will still be born in the era of discrimination. In general, Witt has a very easy time relating to people who are pretty much like him, and flounders a lot when he's asked to empathize with or understand people who aren't. And his style is clear but not exactly exciting.
However, the story he's telling -- that is exciting. It's interesting watching an entire industry engage in what might best be termed malignant denial. It's interesting learning who got rich off the piracy era and who didn't. It's interesting finding out what happens when pirates grow up.
Basically, it's interesting to learn more about how music got free.
August 13, 2015
As a middle school teacher I often find myself obsessing about the era when I was a middle schooler. To live this horror and nostalgia over and over again, I often seek out nonfiction that covers the years 1999-2002/3 ish. I demolished this book in two days, and I would have finished it sooner had I not stopped to coo at my new nephew for a few hours.
The digital music revolution is the story of my middle school years ... my friends and I quickly went from mix tapes to Napster, we were pretty sure what we were doing wasn't exactly kosher, but hey, that's what early adolescence is for anyway ... and this book is the story of how digital music became intertwined with illegal file-sharing and brought a once-thriving record industry to its knees.
Stephen Witt has a knack for reporting rigorously and with lush factual detail, bringing new stories to light, and a knack for wordplay, all of which I found missing from my other big nonfiction read this summer, John Krakauer's Missoula.
His reporting goes from the megalomaniacs of the record industry to a "black redneck" in rural North Carolina to working-class blokes in England and academics in Germany. All of these characters are compelling in their own ways, and share surprising personality traits in common. At the end of the day, what the record executive and the pirate stealing millions of dollars from him have in common is a blinding dedication to their cause and a guiding populist vision, even though one is making millions of dollars a year and the other is dependent on overtime shifts to pay off credit card debt.
I can't begin to explain how much I loved this book, and I hope it's not just me who finds that just hearing artist names like Limp Bizkit, Sixpence None the Richer, and Juvenile scattered throughout this book is enough to bring me back to those good ol' days.
The digital music revolution is the story of my middle school years ... my friends and I quickly went from mix tapes to Napster, we were pretty sure what we were doing wasn't exactly kosher, but hey, that's what early adolescence is for anyway ... and this book is the story of how digital music became intertwined with illegal file-sharing and brought a once-thriving record industry to its knees.
Stephen Witt has a knack for reporting rigorously and with lush factual detail, bringing new stories to light, and a knack for wordplay, all of which I found missing from my other big nonfiction read this summer, John Krakauer's Missoula.
His reporting goes from the megalomaniacs of the record industry to a "black redneck" in rural North Carolina to working-class blokes in England and academics in Germany. All of these characters are compelling in their own ways, and share surprising personality traits in common. At the end of the day, what the record executive and the pirate stealing millions of dollars from him have in common is a blinding dedication to their cause and a guiding populist vision, even though one is making millions of dollars a year and the other is dependent on overtime shifts to pay off credit card debt.
I can't begin to explain how much I loved this book, and I hope it's not just me who finds that just hearing artist names like Limp Bizkit, Sixpence None the Richer, and Juvenile scattered throughout this book is enough to bring me back to those good ol' days.
May 27, 2023
These days I find I'm really struggling to connect to reading. It seems more like a chore than a piece of my heart, like it used to be -- even the books I do like often feel like I've forced myself to read 'em, and sort of wash away when they're done. My connection to music, on the other hand, has amped up intensely -- and so, I figured, why not hack reading....by reading about music?
So, like Stephen Witt does in his early-music-pirate-confession intro, I'm disclosing my bias: almost anything about music is gonna hit hard with me right now. The fact that this book records, primarily, the industry revolution around the turn of the millennium is the cherry: 1998-2010 were my teenage years and early 20s, and the nostalgic pleasure of recognition every time a piece of software or a particular album release is referenced just hit all my serotonin receptors. I genuinely believe this is a book anyone can enjoy, but if you started listening to your own music right when Napster appeared, you'll get something totally else out of it. That is: it's your history, too, and with our constant whirling changes in technology, there's something very grounding about remembering downloading countless Winamp skins and debating the benefits of Kazaa vs Limewire between periods. Tech nostalgia: it's a real thing, my dudes.
But while I'd love to read a book about Y2K internet and reminisce about MSN Messenger and Windows XP, and please recommend me one, that's not really the point of this book. Rather, How Music Got Free tells peoples' stories: the German psychoacoustic engineers who invented and licensed the mp3 file type; Doug Morris, the most successful music industry executive in history -- who also preceded over that same industry's mudslide decline; Dell Glover, the totally endearing CD-plant factory line worker who leaked the majority of (correctly-labeled, ahem) albums you snagged from your P2P software of choice; and a rotating crew of key players in the Y2K online piracy scene.
Told through alternating, cliff-hangered chapters, these stories gain flesh and colour with Witt's compelling prose, suspense, and attention to little details. We see the inner workings of the big labels, learn how CDs were smuggled out of high-security metal-detecting plants, go from millennial-teenager basement piracy crew disruption to Gen-X-adult garages stacked with DVD burners, find out outcomes of court cases that completely changed how hardware interacts with software, and how we interact with media, and explore an underbelly you probably had only the slightest idea existed. Through it all, our lodestar characters grow older: some retire, some go to prison, some invent Vevo. All of them are only cursorily aware, at the time, that they were instigating and living through the start of one of the wildest revolutions in capitalist media consumption history: the shift to the subscription model.
Witt doesn't get too much into this, but I think we're due for a sequel: I don't think it spoils much to say that this book ends with Witt confidently wiping all his hard drives of his mp3 collection. It's a nice, perhaps too convenient, bookend to the narrative -- which is, ultimately and fundamentally, the story of the mp3 -- but as an actual act, it's shockingly shortsighted. Cause here's the thing about streaming subscriptions: Spotify's great (well, it's evil, but we get all our tunes in one convenient place, right?). But none of that music, none of your painstakingly crafted playlists, are yours. If you stop paying, or if Spotify's business model fails (and in 2023, tech company models are looking a liiiiiittle shakier than they did when this was published in 2015) -- that's it. Bye bye. It was never yours to keep in the first place -- you paid for the privilege of using their service. This goes for all the streamers, and it's such a brilliantly profitable model that it honestly shocks me that individual copies of media are still available to purchase at all.
But, they are -- and, they're still available to pirate. And like, listen, I get it: most people just like listening to music. I won't even get into how Gen Z listens to music, but it ain't files or discs -- and it's based in the more ephemeral digital landscape in which they've grown up. However -- for those of us who have, oh I dunno: seasonal playlists going back over two decades, songs that can trigger time travel, an emotional connection between their music and their mood -- the thought of wiping our hard drives might seem a little scarier, in the face of corporate greed and economic uncertainty. One thing, I can tell you for certain: if the apocalypse is coming, I want to be listening to music until the last possible second.
So the pirates and the music-collectors live on, in pockets, less prevalent and vocal than before, with a smaller audience. This book, in many ways is for them -- for us -- those of us who grew up enchanted that we could have so much music on demand at our fingertips, who carried it from hard drive to hard drive, who may subscribe to Tidal or Apple Music, but who secretly make sure we have the files -- or the hard copies -- of the stuff we really love. Because if How Music Got Free tells us anything, it's that the music industry is absolutely wild -- and you might want to think twice before tossing out the mp3 with the bathwater.
So, like Stephen Witt does in his early-music-pirate-confession intro, I'm disclosing my bias: almost anything about music is gonna hit hard with me right now. The fact that this book records, primarily, the industry revolution around the turn of the millennium is the cherry: 1998-2010 were my teenage years and early 20s, and the nostalgic pleasure of recognition every time a piece of software or a particular album release is referenced just hit all my serotonin receptors. I genuinely believe this is a book anyone can enjoy, but if you started listening to your own music right when Napster appeared, you'll get something totally else out of it. That is: it's your history, too, and with our constant whirling changes in technology, there's something very grounding about remembering downloading countless Winamp skins and debating the benefits of Kazaa vs Limewire between periods. Tech nostalgia: it's a real thing, my dudes.
But while I'd love to read a book about Y2K internet and reminisce about MSN Messenger and Windows XP, and please recommend me one, that's not really the point of this book. Rather, How Music Got Free tells peoples' stories: the German psychoacoustic engineers who invented and licensed the mp3 file type; Doug Morris, the most successful music industry executive in history -- who also preceded over that same industry's mudslide decline; Dell Glover, the totally endearing CD-plant factory line worker who leaked the majority of (correctly-labeled, ahem) albums you snagged from your P2P software of choice; and a rotating crew of key players in the Y2K online piracy scene.
Told through alternating, cliff-hangered chapters, these stories gain flesh and colour with Witt's compelling prose, suspense, and attention to little details. We see the inner workings of the big labels, learn how CDs were smuggled out of high-security metal-detecting plants, go from millennial-teenager basement piracy crew disruption to Gen-X-adult garages stacked with DVD burners, find out outcomes of court cases that completely changed how hardware interacts with software, and how we interact with media, and explore an underbelly you probably had only the slightest idea existed. Through it all, our lodestar characters grow older: some retire, some go to prison, some invent Vevo. All of them are only cursorily aware, at the time, that they were instigating and living through the start of one of the wildest revolutions in capitalist media consumption history: the shift to the subscription model.
Witt doesn't get too much into this, but I think we're due for a sequel: I don't think it spoils much to say that this book ends with Witt confidently wiping all his hard drives of his mp3 collection. It's a nice, perhaps too convenient, bookend to the narrative -- which is, ultimately and fundamentally, the story of the mp3 -- but as an actual act, it's shockingly shortsighted. Cause here's the thing about streaming subscriptions: Spotify's great (well, it's evil, but we get all our tunes in one convenient place, right?). But none of that music, none of your painstakingly crafted playlists, are yours. If you stop paying, or if Spotify's business model fails (and in 2023, tech company models are looking a liiiiiittle shakier than they did when this was published in 2015) -- that's it. Bye bye. It was never yours to keep in the first place -- you paid for the privilege of using their service. This goes for all the streamers, and it's such a brilliantly profitable model that it honestly shocks me that individual copies of media are still available to purchase at all.
But, they are -- and, they're still available to pirate. And like, listen, I get it: most people just like listening to music. I won't even get into how Gen Z listens to music, but it ain't files or discs -- and it's based in the more ephemeral digital landscape in which they've grown up. However -- for those of us who have, oh I dunno: seasonal playlists going back over two decades, songs that can trigger time travel, an emotional connection between their music and their mood -- the thought of wiping our hard drives might seem a little scarier, in the face of corporate greed and economic uncertainty. One thing, I can tell you for certain: if the apocalypse is coming, I want to be listening to music until the last possible second.
So the pirates and the music-collectors live on, in pockets, less prevalent and vocal than before, with a smaller audience. This book, in many ways is for them -- for us -- those of us who grew up enchanted that we could have so much music on demand at our fingertips, who carried it from hard drive to hard drive, who may subscribe to Tidal or Apple Music, but who secretly make sure we have the files -- or the hard copies -- of the stuff we really love. Because if How Music Got Free tells us anything, it's that the music industry is absolutely wild -- and you might want to think twice before tossing out the mp3 with the bathwater.
April 9, 2021
Книжка просто фантастична. Навіть не збагнеш описати в двох словах, про що саме вона - про технології, бізнес, історію інтернет-піратства, чи музичну індустрію. Все це тут є, концентровано і з численними подробицями завдяки великій кількості інтерв'ю з дуже різними учасниками подій, які Стівен Вітт взяв для написання книжки.
Тут і багаторічна історія створення мп3 формату (плюс довга боротьба за його впровадження і поширення) та форматів-конкурентів, історія появи вінампа і торентів. І корпоративна музична культура, показана з самого верху. І історія підпільних груп зливачів ще невиданих альбомів у мережу (включно з людиною, яка спіратила найбільшу їхню кількість). Від зеніту популярності компакт-дисків то піку популярності торентів і запуску iTunes i Vevo.
Загальні враження такі, що якщо ставити цій книжці п'ять зірок, то більшості книжок, яким я поставив найвищий бал, треба зменшити його принаймні до четвірки.
Тут і багаторічна історія створення мп3 формату (плюс довга боротьба за його впровадження і поширення) та форматів-конкурентів, історія появи вінампа і торентів. І корпоративна музична культура, показана з самого верху. І історія підпільних груп зливачів ще невиданих альбомів у мережу (включно з людиною, яка спіратила найбільшу їхню кількість). Від зеніту популярності компакт-дисків то піку популярності торентів і запуску iTunes i Vevo.
Загальні враження такі, що якщо ставити цій книжці п'ять зірок, то більшості книжок, яким я поставив найвищий бал, треба зменшити його принаймні до четвірки.
September 26, 2018
How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This is the type of non-fiction I like: full of facts and figures, but organized in such a way that it tells a compelling story while you’re reading.
Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.
I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.
I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.
By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.
I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.
And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.
There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.
None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!
Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.
I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.
I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.
By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.
I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.
And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.
There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.
None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!
September 28, 2015
Fascinating read for anyone who’s been a music enthusiast for any time at all, or spent more than a few bucks at Tower or Virgin over the years. Stephen Witt’s book attempts to mesh the inside-the-biz story with the developments afforded by an evolving technological curve-- and how the human factor contributes or throws it all off.
First up is how music got ABBREVIATED.
Researchers around the world, emboldened with the understanding that now that a full, luxurious musical waveform could be quantified, coded, expressed by numbers, set about finding realworld applications for this conversion. Once something natural can be ‘equated’ to numerical equations, it is vulnerable to processing along algorithmic lines.
Which is to say that your full twenty minute live take of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘Close To The Edge’ –popular pre-digital tracks that were too long for mixtapes, radioplay, or easy copying to a short, standard cassette-- could be subject to something much, much more powerful than simple editorial measures. It wouldn't reduce the playing time-- but it would reduce the storage space necessary to house the music itself.
What the researchers would find was much more than seamless fade-outs, dissolves, or clever cut & paste. Under the microscope of big science, music and human hearing have characteristics that make them accessible to manipulation (once the music end is rendered as raw data, that is). First, above or below the tonal range of the human voice— to which we have a pre-conditioned sensitivity—the contents of a musical signal need not be digitized at such a meticulous rate. So the highs like cymbal or fret clicks, and the lows like double-bass or kettle drum-- do not need such a high bit-rate to render them legible to the largely vocals-centered hearing of humans. And therefore, “that meant that you could assign fewer bits to the extreme ends of the spectrum”.
There were further places where the researchers found they could save bits. Tones in the same moment of the music that were close in pitch tended to either cancel out or override each other in the ears of the beholder, so that meant less individual bit use. Or in the author’s words “lower tones overrode higher ones, so if you were digitizing music with overlapping instrumentation—say a violin and a cello at the same time—you could assign fewer bits to the violin”.
Additionally, before or after a strong beat, the human auditory system routinely cancelled or de-emphasized the very next, adjacent sound, possibly as a safety mechanism. The science showed you could therefore “assign fewer bits to the first few milliseconds following the beat.”
As an added enticement to the digital algorithmists, old research from MIT in the fifties had shown that what saves bits is pattern recognition, something in the material that repeats, and something at which high powered computers excelled; with music, there are all sorts of patterns, repeating in layered, synched-up beauty, from the counterpoint of Bach to the formulaic repeats of Taylor Swift:
“.. which meant that rather than assigning bits to the pattern every time it occurred, you just had to do it once, then refer back to those bits as needed. And from the perspective of information theory, that was all a violin solo was: a vibrating string, cutting predictable, repetitive patterns of sound in the air.”
For the scientists, this was all business as usual, extrapolating insights from theoretical research into practical real-world use. Their new codes could render information smaller, more portable and more modular, just overall less-encumbered. And the gear to process “less” and reproduce it --could inhabit less space, volume, weight, and go places it could never go before. For the music businessmen, the advances would seem to lead to obvious point-of-sale gains, as it was immediately obvious that “less” could more easily be produced and delivered to market --for less.
What science and business didn’t exactly count on, as author Witt describes carefully, is that this portable, modular, lightweight unit of sound-- the Mp3 soundfile, it would be called – could also be uploaded to the newly emerged Internet. And in the new parlance of the practice, shared, peer-to-peer.
Parents around the world in developed countries were now—mid 90s—sending their clever offspring away to colleges with a new aid to study and research, a new desktop computer. Universities competed with each other in offering high-bandwidth internet connections on campus, and eventually in the dormitories. Somewhat of a surprise to that well intentioned effort was the fact that the newly geared up students were learning how to pull music, motion pictures, software, computer games and all sorts of material from the net. And they uploaded what they had to offer, in the spirit of giving to receive. Transforming their new, study-&-research-aid computers into multifunctional electronic recreation centers. And with stolen (shared) software and media, an endless supply of media files.
For this reader, it is a nearly classical greek-tragic sort of fated outcome, that the teenager and college student of the era where popular culture (media) got adulterated, foreshortened and made into powdered Instant Tuneage – went on to destroy the very industry that did the adulterating, and destroy it from the ground up. The file-sharers compiled libraries, collections that the author compares to the scale and scope of the Smithsonian’s. The industry went into the red, the Cd format and the entire popular music Album concept were destroyed, the large manufacturing and distribution chains were shut down. The old, highly profitable record-biz game was really over. Tower, Borders and Virgin went from Megastore to invisible.
For me the conclusion that music or the business of music would now be mostly free, limited to giveaway tracks and promotional downloads that only support live acts or touring ones (for access to which they charge at the door in cold, reliable cash), doesn’t tell the whole story. I think the history here lends itself to the conclusion—not forwarded by the biz-and-growth-oriented author—that in the future the best of all eras of music can now be preserved under ‘conservation’ terms. Protecting an enormous collection of up-till-now works that need to be carefully guarded & transcribed—into whatever the next platform requires, without damage or abbreviation.
The downside of mass digitization is real, the fact is that in the case of the Mp3, the original material is reduced by a factor of 12 to 1. Twelve parts removed to one remaining, disguised by the best psycho-acoustic masking the late 8o’s had to offer. But the upside is that high resolution digitizing is not just feasible but happening everyday, though certainly not for most dumbed-down ‘consumer’ product. Ultra high-rez is limited to satellite mapping and the like, but very high-rez is available for music & films now. That high resolution files can be created and moved losslessly into the future is a great thing, and something we should try to have available for normal people, not just scientists, museums or corporate interests.
“How Music Got Free” doesn’t dwell unnecessarily, or delve any deeper than it needs to do to get the story across. In fact, the anecdotal, character-driven frame that Witt uses helps the story fly by, to its current, non-conclusive status today. Recommended.
First up is how music got ABBREVIATED.
Researchers around the world, emboldened with the understanding that now that a full, luxurious musical waveform could be quantified, coded, expressed by numbers, set about finding realworld applications for this conversion. Once something natural can be ‘equated’ to numerical equations, it is vulnerable to processing along algorithmic lines.
Which is to say that your full twenty minute live take of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘Close To The Edge’ –popular pre-digital tracks that were too long for mixtapes, radioplay, or easy copying to a short, standard cassette-- could be subject to something much, much more powerful than simple editorial measures. It wouldn't reduce the playing time-- but it would reduce the storage space necessary to house the music itself.
What the researchers would find was much more than seamless fade-outs, dissolves, or clever cut & paste. Under the microscope of big science, music and human hearing have characteristics that make them accessible to manipulation (once the music end is rendered as raw data, that is). First, above or below the tonal range of the human voice— to which we have a pre-conditioned sensitivity—the contents of a musical signal need not be digitized at such a meticulous rate. So the highs like cymbal or fret clicks, and the lows like double-bass or kettle drum-- do not need such a high bit-rate to render them legible to the largely vocals-centered hearing of humans. And therefore, “that meant that you could assign fewer bits to the extreme ends of the spectrum”.
There were further places where the researchers found they could save bits. Tones in the same moment of the music that were close in pitch tended to either cancel out or override each other in the ears of the beholder, so that meant less individual bit use. Or in the author’s words “lower tones overrode higher ones, so if you were digitizing music with overlapping instrumentation—say a violin and a cello at the same time—you could assign fewer bits to the violin”.
Additionally, before or after a strong beat, the human auditory system routinely cancelled or de-emphasized the very next, adjacent sound, possibly as a safety mechanism. The science showed you could therefore “assign fewer bits to the first few milliseconds following the beat.”
As an added enticement to the digital algorithmists, old research from MIT in the fifties had shown that what saves bits is pattern recognition, something in the material that repeats, and something at which high powered computers excelled; with music, there are all sorts of patterns, repeating in layered, synched-up beauty, from the counterpoint of Bach to the formulaic repeats of Taylor Swift:
“.. which meant that rather than assigning bits to the pattern every time it occurred, you just had to do it once, then refer back to those bits as needed. And from the perspective of information theory, that was all a violin solo was: a vibrating string, cutting predictable, repetitive patterns of sound in the air.”
For the scientists, this was all business as usual, extrapolating insights from theoretical research into practical real-world use. Their new codes could render information smaller, more portable and more modular, just overall less-encumbered. And the gear to process “less” and reproduce it --could inhabit less space, volume, weight, and go places it could never go before. For the music businessmen, the advances would seem to lead to obvious point-of-sale gains, as it was immediately obvious that “less” could more easily be produced and delivered to market --for less.
What science and business didn’t exactly count on, as author Witt describes carefully, is that this portable, modular, lightweight unit of sound-- the Mp3 soundfile, it would be called – could also be uploaded to the newly emerged Internet. And in the new parlance of the practice, shared, peer-to-peer.
Parents around the world in developed countries were now—mid 90s—sending their clever offspring away to colleges with a new aid to study and research, a new desktop computer. Universities competed with each other in offering high-bandwidth internet connections on campus, and eventually in the dormitories. Somewhat of a surprise to that well intentioned effort was the fact that the newly geared up students were learning how to pull music, motion pictures, software, computer games and all sorts of material from the net. And they uploaded what they had to offer, in the spirit of giving to receive. Transforming their new, study-&-research-aid computers into multifunctional electronic recreation centers. And with stolen (shared) software and media, an endless supply of media files.
For this reader, it is a nearly classical greek-tragic sort of fated outcome, that the teenager and college student of the era where popular culture (media) got adulterated, foreshortened and made into powdered Instant Tuneage – went on to destroy the very industry that did the adulterating, and destroy it from the ground up. The file-sharers compiled libraries, collections that the author compares to the scale and scope of the Smithsonian’s. The industry went into the red, the Cd format and the entire popular music Album concept were destroyed, the large manufacturing and distribution chains were shut down. The old, highly profitable record-biz game was really over. Tower, Borders and Virgin went from Megastore to invisible.
For me the conclusion that music or the business of music would now be mostly free, limited to giveaway tracks and promotional downloads that only support live acts or touring ones (for access to which they charge at the door in cold, reliable cash), doesn’t tell the whole story. I think the history here lends itself to the conclusion—not forwarded by the biz-and-growth-oriented author—that in the future the best of all eras of music can now be preserved under ‘conservation’ terms. Protecting an enormous collection of up-till-now works that need to be carefully guarded & transcribed—into whatever the next platform requires, without damage or abbreviation.
The downside of mass digitization is real, the fact is that in the case of the Mp3, the original material is reduced by a factor of 12 to 1. Twelve parts removed to one remaining, disguised by the best psycho-acoustic masking the late 8o’s had to offer. But the upside is that high resolution digitizing is not just feasible but happening everyday, though certainly not for most dumbed-down ‘consumer’ product. Ultra high-rez is limited to satellite mapping and the like, but very high-rez is available for music & films now. That high resolution files can be created and moved losslessly into the future is a great thing, and something we should try to have available for normal people, not just scientists, museums or corporate interests.
“How Music Got Free” doesn’t dwell unnecessarily, or delve any deeper than it needs to do to get the story across. In fact, the anecdotal, character-driven frame that Witt uses helps the story fly by, to its current, non-conclusive status today. Recommended.
December 28, 2022
One of my reading highlights of the year. I was excited to learn about the business of big music labels, all the science behind mp3, format wars and of course an incredible world of internet piracy, different cohorts of pirates and leaks competition. Surprisingly, the book keeps you in suspense until the very end. Much recommended
August 27, 2015
“Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve killed the music industry.”
Witt's investigative journalism reports how technology and society shifted beneath the music industry's feet, a trend continuing today as Big Music's hunt for revenue moves to streaming and live performances.
The 30-year tale interleaves music moguls and companies (Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine, Universal, others), the most popular and profitable acts of the last 20 years (Dr. Dre, Ice Tea, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and many, many others), the technologists (Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill, Harald Popp, et al) at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute who spent a decade perfecting a "good enough" psychoacoustic music compression format (MP3), and the file-sharing underground ("The Scene", "Oink's Pink Palace", others). The whirlwind sucks in tech giants and midgets such as Steve Jobs/Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, Shawn Fanning/Napster as well as the FBI, the German government, the RIAA, and even the NHL.
In the beginning, it wasn't clear whether Fraunhofer's MP3 would succeed as a technology at all. MP3 won the late 1990s "MPEG format wars" in part by relying on the ripper/file sharing underground, and the underground in turn relied heavily on one person, Benny Glover, a key employee at a Polygram/Universal's North Carolina CD pressing plant. Glover smuggled music discs weeks before commercial release -- a point of pride was to release the MP3 tracks weeks before the CD hit store shelves. Smugglers fed rippers, rippers fed communities, communities made markets, and iPods took those markets' revenue from Big Music.
This book's cautionary tale applies directly to those in entertainment and entertainment technology: music, film/television, gaming, publishing. The music industry's strategic blindness, collusion, and adversarial relationships with their customers and their governments helped destroy billions in value: when Big Music insisted RIAA head Hilary Rosen persecute consumers, she refused and resigned. Clearly, the moguls would not and could not get the message.
Similar Schumpeterian "creative destruction" is eating alive Hollywood's and the cable television companies' business models in 2015. Those in the business of supplying a fancy bitstream to consumers at a rent need to be looking over their shoulders and thinking harder about how to satisfy that demand in a world glutted with art and technology, where downward pressure on the entertainment dollar is constant, and where many would rather just Facebook, YouTube, or Vevo for free than watch pay TV or buy music and books.
Last: never, ever underestimate the power of the disaffected computer-savvy, especially those with fast Internet connections, multi-terabyte storage systems, and more time on their hands than money in their pockets.
Witt's investigative journalism reports how technology and society shifted beneath the music industry's feet, a trend continuing today as Big Music's hunt for revenue moves to streaming and live performances.
The 30-year tale interleaves music moguls and companies (Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine, Universal, others), the most popular and profitable acts of the last 20 years (Dr. Dre, Ice Tea, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and many, many others), the technologists (Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill, Harald Popp, et al) at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute who spent a decade perfecting a "good enough" psychoacoustic music compression format (MP3), and the file-sharing underground ("The Scene", "Oink's Pink Palace", others). The whirlwind sucks in tech giants and midgets such as Steve Jobs/Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, Shawn Fanning/Napster as well as the FBI, the German government, the RIAA, and even the NHL.
In the beginning, it wasn't clear whether Fraunhofer's MP3 would succeed as a technology at all. MP3 won the late 1990s "MPEG format wars" in part by relying on the ripper/file sharing underground, and the underground in turn relied heavily on one person, Benny Glover, a key employee at a Polygram/Universal's North Carolina CD pressing plant. Glover smuggled music discs weeks before commercial release -- a point of pride was to release the MP3 tracks weeks before the CD hit store shelves. Smugglers fed rippers, rippers fed communities, communities made markets, and iPods took those markets' revenue from Big Music.
This book's cautionary tale applies directly to those in entertainment and entertainment technology: music, film/television, gaming, publishing. The music industry's strategic blindness, collusion, and adversarial relationships with their customers and their governments helped destroy billions in value: when Big Music insisted RIAA head Hilary Rosen persecute consumers, she refused and resigned. Clearly, the moguls would not and could not get the message.
Similar Schumpeterian "creative destruction" is eating alive Hollywood's and the cable television companies' business models in 2015. Those in the business of supplying a fancy bitstream to consumers at a rent need to be looking over their shoulders and thinking harder about how to satisfy that demand in a world glutted with art and technology, where downward pressure on the entertainment dollar is constant, and where many would rather just Facebook, YouTube, or Vevo for free than watch pay TV or buy music and books.
Last: never, ever underestimate the power of the disaffected computer-savvy, especially those with fast Internet connections, multi-terabyte storage systems, and more time on their hands than money in their pockets.
May 17, 2015
A fascinating exploration into how the way we consume music was revolutionised by the age of the internet. While skillfully avoiding patronising his readers, Witt guides us through the origins of the mp3, the early internet piracy warez scene, the introduction of peer-to-peer technology, and the ups and downs of both the Record Industry and the lives of those responsible for stealing, ripping, uploading, and sharing its products for free. As a member of "Generation Pirate", it was almost like an insightful walk down memory lane at times, the "brands" in question - Napster, Kazaa, eDonkey, LimeWire, Bearshare, BitTorrent, Oink, Pirate Bay - reading like a list of forgotten ex-girlfriends (some of whom are more fondly remembered than others...)
"How Music Got Free" is an intelligently written and often thrilling investigation into the hidden world that allowed an entire generation to engage in one of the world's most pervasive and "normalised" illegal activities.
(Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a fair review)
"How Music Got Free" is an intelligently written and often thrilling investigation into the hidden world that allowed an entire generation to engage in one of the world's most pervasive and "normalised" illegal activities.
(Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a fair review)
February 18, 2016
Отличная, отличная книга. Рекомендую всем, кто имеет дело с созданием контента, его распространением, управлением творческим коллективом.
Автор рассказывает историю создания цифровых аудио и видео-форматов и "войну форматов", зарождение и развитие пиратского движения, развитие музыкальной индустрии, борьбу с пиратством и попытки угнаться за технологиями. И рассказывает все это через жизненные линии нескольких персонажей, которые переплетаются и влияют друг на друга: ученый-изобретатель формата mp3, директор звукозаписывающей компании, упаковщик компакт-дисков на заводе, организатор подпольной пиратской ассоциации, создатель Napster, администраторы торрент-сайтов, следователь ФБР.
Автор рассказывает историю создания цифровых аудио и видео-форматов и "войну форматов", зарождение и развитие пиратского движения, развитие музыкальной индустрии, борьбу с пиратством и попытки угнаться за технологиями. И рассказывает все это через жизненные линии нескольких персонажей, которые переплетаются и влияют друг на друга: ученый-изобретатель формата mp3, директор звукозаписывающей компании, упаковщик компакт-дисков на заводе, организатор подпольной пиратской ассоциации, создатель Napster, администраторы торрент-сайтов, следователь ФБР.
January 24, 2025
My favorite genre: origin story of stuff that made my childhood.
A well researched, well written piece of journalism, following the rise of the mp3 format through 3 different perspectives: scientists that developed it, pirates who embraced it, and record executives that survived it. Some fascinating tidbits on relations between law, economy and art.
On why there is an FBI warning at the start of every DVD, but not on a CD:
The book ends on a fairly optimistic note, showing how juries can choose to disregard laws they deem unfair. But it also ends 10 years ago, and it only hints at the streaming present in which we have quite easily forfeited the "won" freedom for some convenience.
A well researched, well written piece of journalism, following the rise of the mp3 format through 3 different perspectives: scientists that developed it, pirates who embraced it, and record executives that survived it. Some fascinating tidbits on relations between law, economy and art.
(...) In 1982, the analysis blamed tape bootlegging for declining revenues, then considered various pricing strategies the industry might employ to counteract the trend. It found nether raising nor lowering album prices was likely to work. Instead, the only way to reserve the sales slump was through an aggresive campaign of law enforcement against the bootleggers. In other words, the success of capitalism required vigorous intervention from the state.
On why there is an FBI warning at the start of every DVD, but not on a CD:
The film industry bowed to the demands of the culture police and instituted a self-regulatory rating system for movies. To its everlasting credit, the recording industry refused to make this compromise. But for their principles they would have to suffer. Congress had failed to protect the teenager from the moral depredations of the music industry; now it was disinclined to protect the movie industry from the file-sharing of the teenager.
The book ends on a fairly optimistic note, showing how juries can choose to disregard laws they deem unfair. But it also ends 10 years ago, and it only hints at the streaming present in which we have quite easily forfeited the "won" freedom for some convenience.
August 11, 2021
I don't know enough about piracy and computers and digitalized music and movies to truly "get" this story. Regardless of my ignorance, I enjoyed taking this fast ride about the ins and outs, the drama, triumph, and tragedy of the guys who lived in their mothers' basements smoking pot, and managed to upset and entire industry (not to mention The Feds) and gave us all, for a brief moment, free music.
March 20, 2022
Did you know mp3 is not a successor of mp2? Both were competitors and were given naming convention based on global standard of music. There were a lot of parallels to Silicon Valley fiction and rise of mp3. Further, the book provides history of rise and fall of music industry that has witnessed multiple shocks from technology. History of torrent sites like piratebay and commencement of bittorrent was the fun part of the book. It seems that I have been an end user of multiple music products - cassettes, CDs, mp3 players, mobile music apps. This book covered the entire history that led to these changes over past 20 years.
April 29, 2024
⚠️NEW FAVOURITE BOOK ALERT⚠️
July 18, 2020
'How Music Got Free' is a must-read for any music fan. Stephen Witt’s book is an exhaustive and engaging history of how an innocuous computer audio file type named mp3 irrevocably changed the global recording industry.
The American author opens provocatively: “I am a member of the pirate generation.” On arriving at college in 1997, he hadn’t heard of a single mp3; by graduation, he owned six 20-gigabyte hard drives full of digital singles, EPs and albums, none of which he had paid for.
“The files were procured in chat channels, and through Napster and BitTorrent,” he writes. “I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium.”
Such admissions may raise the eyebrows of older readers who fondly remember visiting record stores and flipping through new release vinyl. But Witt’s point is not to interrogate his pirate behaviour, which he accepts as fact of life. Instead, he considers the copyright-apathetic generation via three key players: the creators of the mp3, the chief executive of the world’s biggest record label and the man most responsible for uploading sought-after mp3s to the internet.
It’s this third narrative thread that is most compelling. From a journalistic perspective, Dell Glover is a once-in-a-lifetime source: in his eight-year career at a compact disc packaging plant in North Carolina, he acquired almost 2000 prerelease albums and encoded them as mp3s, which then were freely distributed worldwide. In the process, Glover caused enormous headaches for the industry’s entrenched powers while also bringing satisfaction to millions of listeners, who — after installing the correct software and downloading the right files — could hear their favourite artists’ creations weeks ahead of release without paying a cent.
Witt describes Glover as “the man who destroyed the music industry to put rims on his car”, a nod to the flashy lifestyle he pursued while earning much more from bootlegged music than he did at his day job. His methods of evading security to smuggle the discs out of the factory were ingenious. Glover has never told his story before. It’s explosive, sketched out in detail with style and skill by Witt.
After Witt’s introduction, 'How Music Got Free' starts slowly, exploring the history of the mp3 file type, which was created by German research organisation Fraunhofer. For years, the mp3 was dismissed by Fraunhofer’s industry peers. It ultimately succeeded because of its high quality and low file size, a result of painstaking work on proprietary compression technology. Mp3 won the format war because an entire album was compressed to about 40 megabytes in size yet was highly listenable.
In the late 1990s-era of dial-up internet, every megabyte counted; it was on American college campuses that the file type — powered by high-speed broadband connections — truly flourished. Witt writes: “Music piracy became to the late 90s what drug experimentation was to the late 60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences.”
Told in tandem with the stories of the world’s dominant audio file type and its biggest pirate is the story of Doug Morris, head of Universal Music Group, which was among the hardest hit by declining revenue in the face of free music supplied by the likes of Glover.
Morris has been derided as a Luddite by younger generations; one headline in 2007 described him as the “world’s stupidest recording executive”. Witt is much kinder, however, and it is helpful to view the rapidly shifting industry landscape through the eyes of such an experienced practitioner.
For example, Morris realised YouTube had become a primary music source for millions. He removed all of Universal’s audio and videos from the site until he’d negotiated a deal for the label to be paid for the advertisements that ran alongside its artists’ creative work.
Witt delivers an immersive story written with verve and panache. He is not above putting the boot into artists he despises — American ‘‘nu metal’’ band Limp Bizkit is a regular target — but he largely steers clear of editorialising in favour of an authoritative narrative voice.
Happily, 'How Music Got Free' has a remarkable origin story, too: the manuscript was plucked from a literary slush pile on the author’s 34th birthday. At the time he was unknown, attempting a career change with “no platform, no name recognition, and no published work”. This book, then, announces Witt to the world as a serious talent.
(Review originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 8 2015: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...)
The American author opens provocatively: “I am a member of the pirate generation.” On arriving at college in 1997, he hadn’t heard of a single mp3; by graduation, he owned six 20-gigabyte hard drives full of digital singles, EPs and albums, none of which he had paid for.
“The files were procured in chat channels, and through Napster and BitTorrent,” he writes. “I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium.”
Such admissions may raise the eyebrows of older readers who fondly remember visiting record stores and flipping through new release vinyl. But Witt’s point is not to interrogate his pirate behaviour, which he accepts as fact of life. Instead, he considers the copyright-apathetic generation via three key players: the creators of the mp3, the chief executive of the world’s biggest record label and the man most responsible for uploading sought-after mp3s to the internet.
It’s this third narrative thread that is most compelling. From a journalistic perspective, Dell Glover is a once-in-a-lifetime source: in his eight-year career at a compact disc packaging plant in North Carolina, he acquired almost 2000 prerelease albums and encoded them as mp3s, which then were freely distributed worldwide. In the process, Glover caused enormous headaches for the industry’s entrenched powers while also bringing satisfaction to millions of listeners, who — after installing the correct software and downloading the right files — could hear their favourite artists’ creations weeks ahead of release without paying a cent.
Witt describes Glover as “the man who destroyed the music industry to put rims on his car”, a nod to the flashy lifestyle he pursued while earning much more from bootlegged music than he did at his day job. His methods of evading security to smuggle the discs out of the factory were ingenious. Glover has never told his story before. It’s explosive, sketched out in detail with style and skill by Witt.
After Witt’s introduction, 'How Music Got Free' starts slowly, exploring the history of the mp3 file type, which was created by German research organisation Fraunhofer. For years, the mp3 was dismissed by Fraunhofer’s industry peers. It ultimately succeeded because of its high quality and low file size, a result of painstaking work on proprietary compression technology. Mp3 won the format war because an entire album was compressed to about 40 megabytes in size yet was highly listenable.
In the late 1990s-era of dial-up internet, every megabyte counted; it was on American college campuses that the file type — powered by high-speed broadband connections — truly flourished. Witt writes: “Music piracy became to the late 90s what drug experimentation was to the late 60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences.”
Told in tandem with the stories of the world’s dominant audio file type and its biggest pirate is the story of Doug Morris, head of Universal Music Group, which was among the hardest hit by declining revenue in the face of free music supplied by the likes of Glover.
Morris has been derided as a Luddite by younger generations; one headline in 2007 described him as the “world’s stupidest recording executive”. Witt is much kinder, however, and it is helpful to view the rapidly shifting industry landscape through the eyes of such an experienced practitioner.
For example, Morris realised YouTube had become a primary music source for millions. He removed all of Universal’s audio and videos from the site until he’d negotiated a deal for the label to be paid for the advertisements that ran alongside its artists’ creative work.
Witt delivers an immersive story written with verve and panache. He is not above putting the boot into artists he despises — American ‘‘nu metal’’ band Limp Bizkit is a regular target — but he largely steers clear of editorialising in favour of an authoritative narrative voice.
Happily, 'How Music Got Free' has a remarkable origin story, too: the manuscript was plucked from a literary slush pile on the author’s 34th birthday. At the time he was unknown, attempting a career change with “no platform, no name recognition, and no published work”. This book, then, announces Witt to the world as a serious talent.
(Review originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 8 2015: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...)
February 11, 2016
A fascinating story and highly recommended for anyone who loves music, technology, or has loaded their iPod up with their favorite songs and albums through iTunes, Napster, or other, more questionable sources the last 15 years. For a first-time author, Stephen Witt is an exceptional storyteller and he thrillingly alternates between multiple narratives, moving chronologically from the early MPEG format wars, the emergence of underground Scene Topsites, to the widespread use of BitTorrent as a means to acquire a massive (and morally ambiguous) digital music library.
The background on Doug Morris and Universal Music is especially interesting, and an added bonus is Witt's mico-history of Death Row and Cash Money Records, and the role 90-2000's-era hip-hop played fueling leaks and the pre-release frenzy. No technology story is complete without Steve Jobs stirring the pot, and it was fascinating to see the evolution of the iPod coupled with Jobs's race to introduce iTunes as a means to counteract piracy and "cleanse the world of the sin."
While Shawn Fanning and the development of Napster is certainly a huge milestone and duly covered here, in many ways that story has been exhausted, so it was great to see at least three full chapters dedicated instead to Alan Ellis and the rise and fall of the once mighty Oink's Pink Palace. Ellis and the OPP community were game changers in the way that music was ripped, distributed, and archived, and Witt provides a captivating character study, finally bringing a little known, but crucial story into the light.
If there is a 'scene-stealer' in this book(sorry, couldn't resist!) without a doubt it's Dell Glover, a savvy disk-manufacturing plant employee, who rose through the ranks of the scene group "RNS" in the mid-2000's and leaked literally thousands of the biggest releases of the last decade, essentially revolutionizing the way music is distributed, and dismantling the old order and business model of the music industry. Taken as a whole, the stories of How Music Got Free are absolutely mind-boggling and a must-read for music fans.
The background on Doug Morris and Universal Music is especially interesting, and an added bonus is Witt's mico-history of Death Row and Cash Money Records, and the role 90-2000's-era hip-hop played fueling leaks and the pre-release frenzy. No technology story is complete without Steve Jobs stirring the pot, and it was fascinating to see the evolution of the iPod coupled with Jobs's race to introduce iTunes as a means to counteract piracy and "cleanse the world of the sin."
While Shawn Fanning and the development of Napster is certainly a huge milestone and duly covered here, in many ways that story has been exhausted, so it was great to see at least three full chapters dedicated instead to Alan Ellis and the rise and fall of the once mighty Oink's Pink Palace. Ellis and the OPP community were game changers in the way that music was ripped, distributed, and archived, and Witt provides a captivating character study, finally bringing a little known, but crucial story into the light.
If there is a 'scene-stealer' in this book(sorry, couldn't resist!) without a doubt it's Dell Glover, a savvy disk-manufacturing plant employee, who rose through the ranks of the scene group "RNS" in the mid-2000's and leaked literally thousands of the biggest releases of the last decade, essentially revolutionizing the way music is distributed, and dismantling the old order and business model of the music industry. Taken as a whole, the stories of How Music Got Free are absolutely mind-boggling and a must-read for music fans.
March 15, 2016
Unless the book demands a lot of concentration, I prefer reading a book while listening to music. That has always been the scenario because when I was a kid, grandmother kept the radio on, all day along, sometimes even at night(she still does that, thanks to the earplugs). I got used to being attentive to the radio so much I would not study unless the radio crackled in the background. Since this book deals with music, I read it while listening to music.
Make no mistake: Don't judge the book because I read it while listening to music. This is a good book and the writer has done a good job. This book is an approach to humanity in a very musical way because there are very few people who are living the dream and look cool doing it, musicians are one of those. Piracy is a bit like terrorism to the music industry and Stephen Richard has done a modest observation to compare natural 'purity' with the corrupt and brutality of man-made technology.
Now, considering the book is related to music, here's something for fun. This kick-ass song started playing when I was close to the ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBbj.... And this beautiful song(one of my favorites) started playing when I logged into Goodreads to rate the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBoRN...
Make no mistake: Don't judge the book because I read it while listening to music. This is a good book and the writer has done a good job. This book is an approach to humanity in a very musical way because there are very few people who are living the dream and look cool doing it, musicians are one of those. Piracy is a bit like terrorism to the music industry and Stephen Richard has done a modest observation to compare natural 'purity' with the corrupt and brutality of man-made technology.
Now, considering the book is related to music, here's something for fun. This kick-ass song started playing when I was close to the ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBbj.... And this beautiful song(one of my favorites) started playing when I logged into Goodreads to rate the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBoRN...
November 16, 2017
Це крутезно написаний нон-фікшн, який читається як художка. Ще коли український переклад книжки Стівена Вітта тільки анонсувався, мені подумалось, що тематика така вузька...Як журналістці, мені здалося, що це тема радше для статті-лонгріду: як помер формат CD-диска, виник mp3 і розквітло музичне піратство, яке враз змінило закони музичної індустрії. Книжка саме про це, але автор розповідає про цей процес в таких деталях, і настільки захопливо, що аж важко повірити, що так можна. Виявляється, можна. Звісно, Стівен Вітт же пише для мого улюбленого The New Yorker. Це ще та школа! Прочитала за вихідні - дізналася купу нового. Словом, раджу усім, не лише тим, кому цікава історія нових технологій, піратство, реп чи те, як музичні таланти шукає компанія Universal. Цікаво буде всім! І обережно: захочеться переслухати багато музики.
November 15, 2015
A better book than John Seabrook's the Song Machine, or whatever it's called, which i also recently read, this tells the story of how Internets piracy fucked the music industry in much greater detail than anything else I've ever read. It starts with the invention of the mp3, beginning way back in the mid '80s (surprisingly, they already had the idea for Spotify back then), and continues up through the explosion of piracy on college campuses in the late '90s (as KRS-One would say, I was there), and when the bottom fell out of the major labels in the '00s. The main draw is the story of the "patient zero" of Internets piracy, some of which was excerpted in the New Yorker, but there's a lot of other shit I didn't know and found fascinating.
March 22, 2018
Συναρπαστικό. Ίσως κάπως εξειδικευμένο. Θέλω να πω, μπορεί και να μη σε ενδιαφέρει η ιστορία του mp3, της μουσικής πειρατείας και της μουσικής βιομηχανίας των τελευταίων 20+ ετών. Εμένα όμως πάντα με ενδιέφερε, και το βιβλίο αυτό μου έλυσε πολλές απορίες, η κυριότερη των οποίων ήταν η εξής: ποιοι διάολο είναι αυτοί οι άνθρωποι που πρωτοδιαρρέουν έναν δίσκο στο διαδίκτυο για κατέβασμα και πώς το διάολο το καταφέρνουν πριν καν ο δίσκος φτάσει στα δισκάδικα;
(εναλλακτικά, αντί του βιβλίου, μπορείς να διαβάσεις αυτό https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)
(εναλλακτικά, αντί του βιβλίου, μπορείς να διαβάσεις αυτό https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)
May 1, 2018
Die Musikbranche hat sich mit der digitalen Evolution für immer verändert – zum Guten, wie auch zum Schlechten. Doch wie konnte es passieren, dass all diese Alben plötzlich als raubkopierte Mp3-Dateien im Netz vorzufinden waren? Dieser Frage geht Stephen Richard Witt in "How Music Got Free" auf unterhaltsame Weise nach. Nicht nur werden die technischen Hintergründe und Entwicklungen beleuchtet, auch die Machenschaften der Labels und der verantwortlichen "Einzelkriminellen" erhalten ihre Bühne.
So wird einem als Aussenstehenden nicht nur vor Augen geführt, was hinter den Kulissen alles so passierte, während wir seelenruhig unsere Alben durch die Telefonleitung gesogen haben, sondern es werden auch gewisse falsche Fakten aufgedeckt. So bietet das Buch Witts keine Lösungsansätze oder Modelle um die Musikindustrie zu retten, aber einen erfrischend unparteiischen Einblick in die letzten paar Jahrzehnte hinter den Songs.
So wird einem als Aussenstehenden nicht nur vor Augen geführt, was hinter den Kulissen alles so passierte, während wir seelenruhig unsere Alben durch die Telefonleitung gesogen haben, sondern es werden auch gewisse falsche Fakten aufgedeckt. So bietet das Buch Witts keine Lösungsansätze oder Modelle um die Musikindustrie zu retten, aber einen erfrischend unparteiischen Einblick in die letzten paar Jahrzehnte hinter den Songs.
February 6, 2017
When I grew up, I was a part of this. I remember the 1st time I installed Winamp and played a .mp3 song on my computer. When Limewire and Kazaa were all we spoke about and then we started seeing bootlegged CDs and DVDs peddled on the streets of CST. The way we consumed music changed throughout our childhood.
To learn about the people who brought about this revolution of sorts was absolutely fascinating. My favorite is how .mp3 went mainstream. In fact, I'm surprised these stories haven't received their due in today's pop culture.
If you were a 90's kid meddling with a computer, you want to read this book!
To learn about the people who brought about this revolution of sorts was absolutely fascinating. My favorite is how .mp3 went mainstream. In fact, I'm surprised these stories haven't received their due in today's pop culture.
If you were a 90's kid meddling with a computer, you want to read this book!
August 5, 2021
This book answered a lot of questions I had around the music I heard growing up and where it came from. Internet had globalized the Music World way before youtube and spotify did.
Suggested read for all music fans who have downloaded and enjoyed a .mp3 format file but never knew how it got here and how it worked.
Suggested read for all music fans who have downloaded and enjoyed a .mp3 format file but never knew how it got here and how it worked.
March 18, 2018
Now this is how you write a damn book!! Within the first three chapters, I have thrilled in the unexpected drama of a team of unfunny German engineers writing an algorithm, started to put puzzle pieces together about how piracy began, and been convinced to care about the feelings of a wealthy record company executive who signed Snoop Dogg. I am in awe of the author's writing abilities.
December 23, 2022
What made this so good is that, despite the fact that it’s nonfiction, I genuinely felt like I was reading a story. The characters are well described and interesting and there were so many different narratives. Overall, such a page turner. I loved this.
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