How Music Got Free (14 page)

They had been so smart; they had known so little; the list of errors was long. The MPEG compromise; the Erlangen debacle; the incredible failure to patent the handheld mp3 player, a decision that left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. The canny operator who stood in front of the shop in Hong Kong would not have made those same mistakes. Not to say he was a shark—by all accounts Brandenburg was an honest person, and he conducted his professional dealings with integrity. Only to suggest he’d learned some things along the way, and that he no longer believed a binder full of superior engineering data was all you needed in this world to succeed.

A
lthough he was one of their best customers, for the longest time Dell Glover couldn’t figure out how the smugglers were getting the compact discs out of the plant. Under Van Buren, Universal’s security regime was watertight. In addition to the randomized search gauntlet, employees were now required to pass their bags on a conveyor belt through an X-ray machine. The plant had no windows and the emergency exits set off a loud alarm. Laptop computers were forbidden anywhere on the premises, as were stereos, portable players, boom boxes, or anything else that might accept and read a compact disc.

On the production line, the pressing machines were digitally controlled, and they generated error-proof records of their input and output. The finished shrink-wrapped discs were immediately logged into inventory with an automated bar code scanner. Management generated an automated report for every run, tracking what had been printed and what had actually shipped, and any difference had to be accounted for. For a popular album, the plant might now press over a half million copies in a single 24-hour period, but advanced digital record keeping permitted the bosses to track their inventory at the level of the individual disc.

Once a wrapped disc exited the production line, it was not touched again by human hands until it made it to the store. The boxed discs were glued shut, then put on shipping pallets by robots. Automated laser-guided vehicles then drove those pallets to the warehouse,
where employee access was strictly controlled. Only the loading dock workers were permitted to handle the boxes past this point.

And then there was the gauntlet. On an average shift, one out of every five employees was selected, and Van Buren’s randomized search regime had already nabbed several would-be thieves. Occasionally even this was not enough. Every once in a while a marquee release would come through the plant—
The Eminem Show
, say, or
Country Grammar
. These desiderata arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. After the glass production mold was sourced from the master, the courier put the tape back in the briefcase and left as mysteriously as he had arrived. When one of these anticipated albums was pressed, Van Buren would order wandings for every employee in the plant, from the plant manager on down.

And yet somehow even the high-value discs were making their way out. Glover could usually have them in his hands within a couple of days. What was going on? Had someone bribed a guard? Had someone disabled the alarm on an emergency exit, or managed to slip the discs through a crack in the doors? Was someone perhaps standing outside in a blind spot between the cameras and tossing the discs like Frisbees over the fence?

Glover began to think about how he would do it. First, he would have to get the discs out of inventory control. In this respect his position on the packaging line was perfect. Further down the line and the discs would be bar-coded and shrink-wrapped and logged in inventory. Further up and he wouldn’t have access to the final product. The packaging line was the only place in the entire plant where employees made physical contact with the finished discs.

Even better, work on the packaging line was becoming time-consuming and complex. This was one of the early side effects of the mp3, which was sonically equivalent to the compact disc but in any number of other ways superior. The files weren’t just smaller and
cheaper than compact disc audio, they were also infinitely reproducible and utterly indestructible. Compact discs got scratched and cracked and stolen at parties, but an mp3 was forever. The only advantage the compact disc offered, therefore, was the tactile satisfaction of physical ownership. At Universal, packaging was all they were really selling.

When Glover had started in 1994, the job had been mindless. All he’d had to do was put on his surgical gloves and run the jewel case through the shrink-wrapper—that was it. Now album art was becoming ornate. The discs themselves were gold or fluorescent, the jewel cases were colorized in opaque blue or purple, and the album sleeves were thick booklets printed on high-quality paper stock with complex folding instructions. At every step along the way, the increased complexity introduced opportunities for error, and there were now dozens, sometimes hundreds, of extra discs printed for every run. These discs were deliberate overstock, to be used as replacements in case anything was damaged or smudged during the packaging process.

At the end of each shift, protocol instructed that Glover bring the overstock discs to a plastics grinder, where they were destroyed. The grinder was a simple device: a refrigerator-sized machine painted Heavy Industry Blue with a feed slot in the front leading to a serrated metal cylinder. The discs were dumped in the slot, and the cylinder crushed them to shards. For years, Glover had stood and watched as thousands of perfectly good compact discs were destroyed in the gears of the machine. And, over time, he came to realize that he was staring into a black hole in the Universal security regime. The grinder was efficient, but it was far too simple. The machine had no memory and generated no records. It existed outside of the plant’s digital inventory management process. If you were instructed to destroy 24 overstock discs and only 23 actually made it into the feed slot, no one in accounting would ever know.

So what Glover could do was take off his surgical glove while holding an overstock disc on his way from the conveyor belt to the
grinder. Then, in one surreptitious motion, he could wrap the glove around the disc and tie it off. Then, pretending to prime the grinder, he could open up its control panel or its waste repository or its fuse box. Following a quick look around to make sure he was alone, he could secrete the gloved disc into a cranny in the machine, and grind everything else. At the end of his shift he could return to the machine and, while shutting it down for the day, grab the disc from its hiding spot.

That still left the security guards and their wands. Glover didn’t dare play the odds; although Universal calmly ensured him that the screenings were random, he knew that packaging line employees were especially likely to be targeted. He himself had been selected for “random” screenings hundreds of times. But as the guards had been watching Glover, he had been watching them too, and one day, almost by accident, he learned something interesting. Glover typically wore sneakers to work, but on this day he was wearing steel-toed work boots. When he was tapped for a screening, the guard scanned his feet and the wand let off a querulous whine. The guard asked Glover if the boots had steel toes, and Glover confirmed that they did. And then, without further inspection, the guard just waved him through.

They hadn’t made him take off his boots
. They hadn’t patted him down or asked him any difficult questions. He had set off the wand, and there were no consequences. At that moment, Glover realized that the wandings were performatory. This wasn’t security, but security theater, a pantomime intended to intimidate would-be thieves rather than catch actual smugglers. And the low-wage security guards who ran the daily showings were just as bored of them as everybody else. If Glover could somehow fit the compact discs inside of his boots, he could finally get them out on his own.

But they wouldn’t fit. The discs were just a little bit too big. Still, the seed of the idea was planted, and over the next few months, as he patiently waited in line each day to leave the plant at the end of his shift, he gradually came to see it: belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Everyone at
the plant wore them. The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys wore gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “
BOSS
.” The Hispanic guys wore Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and ornate gold trim. Even the women wore them. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards never asked you to take them off.

Hide the disc inside the glove; hide the glove inside the grinder; retrieve the glove and tuck it in your waistband; cinch your belt so tight it hurt your bladder; position your oversized belt buckle just in front of the disc; cross your fingers as you shuffle toward the turnstile; and, if you get flagged, play it very cool when you set off the wand. Glover finally saw it. This was how the smuggling was done.

From 2000 onward Glover was the world’s leading leaker of prerelease music. At Universal he was well positioned—the orgy of consolidation in the corporate boardroom had led to an astonishing stream of hits on the factory floor. Weeks before anyone else, Glover had the hottest albums of the year literally at his fingertips. Kali acted as his controller, spending hours each week online tracking the confusing schedule of signings, acquisitions, divestitures, and pressing agreements that determined what disc would be pressed where, when. When Kali saw something that he wanted under the Universal umbrella, he tipped Glover, and the two had weekly phone calls to schedule the timing of the leaks.

At arranged handovers at locations far from the plant, Glover bought the discs from the smugglers. After work, he returned home and digitally cloned these albums on his PC with software Kali had provided him. Then he converted them to mp3s and sent them off to Kali.

This conversion process was exacting. The Scene was well organized, and the standards for what constituted an “officially” pirated file were strict.
The document that outlined the methodology for encoding and distributing Scene mp3s was over 5,000 words long and
had been written by a supreme high council of Internet piracy, which had cheekily termed itself the “other RIAA.” The document specified quality standards, outlined naming conventions, prevented against duplicate leaks, and more. It was the underground version of the MPEG standards, a veritable pirate’s code.

Glover left the technical part to Kali. Unlike many Scene participants,
he wasn’t interested in mind-numbing discussions about the relative merits of constant and variable bit rates. He just provided the discs, and after he’d ripped them and transmitted the data, he would usually listen to a smuggled disc only once or twice before growing bored. When he was done with a disc, he stashed it in a black duffel bag he had hidden away in his bedroom closet.

By 2002, the duffel bag contained more than 500 discs, representing nearly every major release to have come through the Kings Mountain plant. Glover leaked Lil Wayne’s
500 Degreez
, Dr. Dre’s
Chronic 2001,
and Jay-Z’s
The Blueprint
. He leaked Queens of the Stone Age’s
Rated R
and 3 Doors Down’s
Away from the Sun
. He leaked Björk. He leaked Ashanti. He leaked Ja Rule. He leaked Nelly. He leaked
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
.

Glover’s leaks weren’t always chart-toppers—he didn’t have access to big-tent mom-rock artists like Celine Dion and Cher. But they tended to be the most sought after among the demographic that mattered: generation Eminem. The archetypal Scene participant was a computer-obsessed male, age 15 to 30, irresponsible and hormonal and flirting online with low-grade criminality. Kali—whose favorite artists were Ludacris, Jay-Z, and Dr. Dre—was the perfect example. The high point of Kali’s year came in May 2002, when Glover leaked
The Eminem Show
25 days early. Even though it would go on to become the year’s bestselling album, the rapper was forced to reschedule his tour.

Every Scene release was accompanied by an “NFO” (pronounced “info”), an ASCII-art text file that served as the releasing group’s
signature tag. NFO files were a way for Scene groups to brag about their scores, shout out important associates, and advertise to potential recruits. They also contained technical specs and were used by Scene archivists to avoid duplicating releases. A sample Rabid Neurosis NFO contained the following information, framed by psychedelic smoke trails emanating from a marijuana leaf at the bottom:

Team Rns Presents

Artist: Eminem

Title: The Eminem Show

Label: Aftermath

Ripper: Team RNS

Genre: Rap

Bit rate: 192 kbps

Play time: 1hr 17min

Size: 111.6 mb

Release Date:
2002-06-04

Rip Date:
2002-05-10

The most important line was the rip date, establishing the primacy of the RNS leak. Kali drafted many of these release notes himself, and his tone was sarcastic and inflammatory, taunting both the rival releasing groups and the artists themselves. For
The Eminem Show
, he ended with a question: “Who else did you think would get this?”

When Kali saw an album he really wanted, he would start calling Glover incessantly. He became impatient and impulsive, and sometimes even a little pissy. If he got too lippy, Glover would delay leaking the album out of spite. He knew that Kali needed him, and that it would be next to impossible for him to find someone else this far up the supply chain.

Who
was
Kali anyway? Glover wasn’t sure, but as their relationship evolved he created a hypothetical profile from sundry details.
First off, there was the 818 area code from his cell phone number: that was California, specifically the Los Angeles area. Then there was the voice in the background Glover sometimes heard on the calls: Kali’s mother, he suspected. There was also the ASCII-art marijuana leaf that acted as RNS’ official emblem: Glover could tell when Kali was calling him high. Most striking of all was the exaggerated hip-hop swagger Kali affected: Kali only ever called Glover “D” and complained to him about how he didn’t like white people. No one else called him that. The voice on the other end of the phone was trying to be cool, trying to be hard, but Glover wasn’t buying it.

In fact, he found it patronizing. Glover might have been black, and he might have been a pirate, but that didn’t make him a thug. He was playing it straight these days. He spoke in a friendly basso profundo with a rural Southern accent. He lived in a small town, he liked to fish, and he attended church regularly. On weekends, he raced quad bikes through the Appalachian mud. Sure, he liked Tupac—who didn’t?—but he also liked Nickelback, and he had grown up driving a tractor. His friends called him a “
black redneck.”