Piracy and downloading — How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt
Stephen Witt’s exploration of the mp3 file is a must-read for any music fan.
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.
Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist and author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs (UQP, 2014).
How Music Got Free: What Happens When An Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime?
By Stephen Witt
Bodley Head, 304pp, $35
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