Book describes how pirates used MP3 to revolutionise music industry
MP3 technology enabled wholesale piracy of songs and, as Steven Poole explains, brought the music industry to its knees
The humble MP3 is one of the most momentous inventions of modern history. By shrinking musical data to a 12th of the size of an ordinary CD, it enabled songs and albums to be distributed over the limited bandwidth of internet connections in the 1990s and 2000s. It made possible the culture of downloading commercial music without paying that brought the global music industry to its knees.
Yet this vehicle of mass copyright infringement would never have been invented itself without the guarantee of strong copyright protection. It took a decade of research funded by the German government for the engineers behind it to figure out the "psychoacoustic" principles according to which most of the information in recorded music is in fact inaudible to the human listener and can be thrown away. And it was those same engineers who enabled the piracy revolution by releasing for free on the web the first ever MP3-encoding software, with which the user could "rip" MP3s from CDs onto a computer.
In most histories of these developments, the users who began swapping MP3s on the internet are presented as ordinary folk: college students on Napster and then pretty much everyone on BitTorrent. This gives the story a democratic feel, with the music-loving people rising up against the venal idiocies of the corporate music world. But, as Stephen Witt shows with a kind of gonzo glee in his closely reported and brilliantly written book How Music Got Free, it was not ordinary people who were doing most of the "ripping". There was in fact an organised criminal conspiracy to steal music.
Defenders of downloading stuff without paying, of course, don't like the verb "to steal". They point out that downloading an MP3 of a commercial album doesn't deprive anyone else of a copy, whereas if I steal your cigarettes then you no longer have any cigarettes. So downloaders prefer the term "sharing", which sounds positively virtuous. (Isn't it good to share?) Yet you can't really be said to "share" what was never yours in the first place. As it happens, the MP3s that everyone began "sharing" were originally made available by a network of people who literally stole discs of forthcoming albums from CD pressing plants.
Partisans of “sharing” sometimes liked to say that they were hitting back against fat-cat music executives. In fact, all they were doing was hurting musicians
This book tells the story, based on extensive interviews with one such pilferer, an entrepreneurial and eccentrically likable dude called Dell Glover, who worked at a record company manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Witt draws an amusingly sympathetic portrait. (At one early crisis point, he writes of Glover: "His girlfriend was unhappy, his tattoos were stupid and he was driving himself into debt.") With accomplices in the plant, Glover smuggled out copies of new albums, and uploaded them to a secretive group on the internet that was part of the "Scene": a network of people trading music, commercial software, video games and movies. Members of the Scene went by pseudonyms and used encrypted communications; they cultivated sources inside CD plants, radio stations and anywhere else that pre-release material could be found. It was an efficient and knowing conspiracy: Glover's own group leaked an amazing 20,000 albums over a decade. As Witt relates in fascinating detail, their tradecraft would have done justice to a network of terrorist operatives: top Scene cells eluded the FBI for years.