How Music Got Free (27 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

CHAPTER 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

like a detour around a car crash
See, for example, Karlheinz Brandenburg, “MP3 and AAC Explained,” paper presented at the AES 17th International Conference on High Quality Audio Coding, Signa, Italy, September 2–5, 1999.

voted to abandon the mp3 forever
The final official decision of the European Digital Audio Broadcasting standard was filed May 1995.

CHAPTER 2

PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina
The property lot of the plant is technically in Grover, North Carolina. However, all of the former plant employees I spoke with referred to it only as the Kings Mountain plant.

first ever automobile factory outside of Germany
BMW had manufactured parts outside of Germany before, but the Spartanburg plant was the first complete production line.

property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of racial segregation
Author’s impressions, confirmed by real estate website Zillow.

CHAPTER 3

company car, a personal chauffeur
 . . . ten million dollars
Mark Landler,
“The Perks of a Music Man,”
New York Times
, July 10, 1995.

more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan
Chuck Philips, “Universal Music Chief’s Winding Comeback Trail,”
Los Angeles Times
,
May 12, 1999. Morris’ quote reads: “Yeah. I was like a cross between Neil Sedaka and Bobby Darin. It sounds pretty wimpish now, but that’s what was happening in 1962.”

Ertegun was a legend
For the classic treatment of Ertegun, see George W. S. Trow, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse,”
New Yorker
, May 29 and June 5, 1978.

a bonus of a million dollars
Robert Greenfield,
The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 313.

long-standing ties to organized crime
For more on this, see Fredric Dannen,
Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business
(New York: Vintage, 1990).

“We’re going to make more hits.”
Morris interview. He has been telling this anecdote for years. See also Greenfield,
Last Sultan
, 313.

his appointment was regarded with skepticism
See, for example, James Bates, “Music Maven: Doug Morris Has Set the Tone for the Dinosaur-to-Diva Rise of Atlantic,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 8, 1994. Morris is described as “someone who cooled his heels for years before finally getting his chance.”

a daring corporate insurrection inside Time Warner
For the full story, see Fredric Dannen, “Showdown at the Hit Factory,”
New Yorker
, November 21, 1994.

“Morris was like an old country lawyer.”
Larry Kenswil, author interview.

all of Warner’s A&R men had passed on them
From Marc Nathan, interviewed by Michael Laskow on the website of Taxi, an independent A&R company: “A&R had essentially passed on Hootie and the Blowfish, dismissing them really as just a bar band. But a research assistant . . . kept coming up with this band named Hootie and the Blowfish that was selling 50 to 100 pieces in virtually every store in the Carolinas. When the retail sheets were brought to Doug Morris, and Doug said, ‘What is this band Hootie and the Blowfish?’ A&R said, ‘Oh, it’s a bar band, and we passed on them.’ Doug essentially said, ‘Well, get someone to un-pass right away because this is the real deal.’”

“Yeah, but to us, you’re the Michael Jordan of baseball.”
Fred Goodman,
Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 79. Goodman has Danny Goldberg originally making the crack as a quiet aside, then Iovine repeating it aloud. He cites Iovine as a source.

Henry Luce III
 . . . was seen applauding
Steve Knopper,
Appetite for Self-Destruction:
The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
(New York: Free Press, 2009), 61.

“I would ask the executives of Time Warner a question
 . . .”
Bob Dole, “Dole Campaign Speech,” C-SPAN video, May 31, 1995.

a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop
Morris still has this picture. It now rests on his coffee table at Sony.

CHAPTER 4

a guy named Steve Church
Church passed away after a battle with brain cancer in 2012. He was 56 years old. In a tribute page on Telos’ website, he was warmly remembered by friends, family, and colleagues.

L3Enc
 . . . consumers would create their own mp3 files
L3Enc used a DOS-based command line interface. A typical command from 1995 might read:

l3enc track_10.wav ironic.mp3 -br 128000 

This tells Brandenburg’s algorithm to compress Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” to 128,000 bits per second.

12 compact discs
 . . . to one
It didn’t have to be a CD. Brandenburg’s algorithm could handle any audio source.

Thomson SA
Today known as Technicolor SA.

an engineer to jerry-rig
 . . . the world’s first handheld mp3 player
Robert Friedrich, a Fraunhofer hardware expert, built the device.

in late 1995
 . . . a spiky red starburst shouted,
NEU
!
The earliest snapshot of this website on the Internet Archive is dated to August 1996. Grill believes that earlier pages looked similar.

please send 85 deutsche marks
From the readme.txt file accompanying early versions of L3Enc.

CHAPTER 5

Hughes Network Systems
Today known as Hughes Communications.

a cluttered blue-on-white color scheme
This description is based on the Internet Archive’s earliest Yahoo! snapshot, from October 17, 1996.

“AFT: Please tell us about this new concept in releasing . . .”
These quotes are copied verbatim from
Affinity #3,
“Spot Light.” “NetFraCk” is interviewed by “Mr. Mister” and the interview is dated August 19, 1996. The executable file may be retrieved from Textfiles.com, but you will need a DOS emulator to view it. My thanks to Johnny Ryan at University College Dublin for the original pointer.

CHAPTER 6

the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World”
This formulation comes from Peter C. Newman’s
The Bronfman Dynasty
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978).

Bronfman had pushed for reorganization
For details, see Connie Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,”
New Yorker
, May 11, 1998.

Time Warner had countersued
Goodman,
Fortune’s Fool,
81. Time Warner and Morris eventually agreed to a confidential settlement, and the countersuit was dropped.

The initial credit line Junior offered
 . . . was only $100 million
Ibid., 81.

Bronfman promoted Morris to run all of MCA
Morris replaced Al Teller, who resigned due to “philosophical differences.” That same day, Michael Fuchs, the man who had fired Morris at Warner, was coincidentally also let go. Including Ertegun at Atlantic and Robert Morgado at Warner, Morris had now outlasted his four previous bosses. For details, see Chuck Philips, “Company Town: Music Industry Shake-Up,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 17, 1995.

a New Orleans rap conglomerate by the name of Cash Money Records
Morris’ A&R team, consisting of Jocelyn Cooper, Marc Nathan, and Dino Delvaille, first brought Cash Money to his attention. For details, see Dan Charnas,
The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 574.

a trancelike state of total concentration
My impressions of watching Morris preview a new artist in his offices at Sony.

a piñata for the press
The exact quote regarding Bronfman, from an anonymous entertainment executive, is, “He’s like a piñata! Hit him and money comes out.” Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,” 77.

the term “pirate” was more than 300 years old
In 1709, writing for
The Tatler
, the British columnist Joseph Addison complained of “a set of wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any book, poem or sermon as soon as it appears in the world, in a smaller volume; and sell it, as all other thieves do stolen goods, at a cheaper rate.”

CHAPTER 7

a bundled package
The simultaneous distribution of L3Enc and WinPlay3 was a boon to early adoption. By contrast, a 14-year gap separated the debut of the home CD player and the home CD burner.

direct links to Fraunhofer’s FTP server
See, for example, Digital Audio Crew’s first Scene mp3 releasing tutorial, dated August 30, 1996.

The RIAA would later offer various explanations
Specifically Hilary Rosen, corroborated by Kenswil, Brandenburg, and Grill.

transparency
 . . . achieve it in 99 percent of all cases
Even today, certain cherry-picked samples can cause the mp3’s psychoacoustic encoder problems. Castanets are particularly difficult.

Neil Young
 . . . a losing battle to preserve audio quality
Young by his own admission is half deaf from decades of guitar feedback. He is on a quixotic mission here.